Private session: 2-player Mechwarrior: Dark Age
Players were Paul and myself. We both played for the first time.
I bought a starter box and two boosters. (I thought it odd that Danger Planet kept the boosters behind the counter. But then I noticed a debate in which players might be able to guess which boosters have unique mechs by feeling the box's weight.)
This is a WizKids game about mech warriors, which are huge armored walking machines. There are also vehicles and soldiers. The miniatures are nice enough, coming fully painted. The mech warriors even have a bit of articulation to them. The novelty of this game (as with all the other WizKids games) is that the statistics for each unit is displayed on the miniature's rotating base. When a unit is damaged, the base is rotated to show reduced abilities. The mechs have an additional dial representing reduced abilities due to over-heating.
We spent an hour going over the rules for this collectible miniatures game. With a starter and two boosters, there's enough for a 300 point game. (Maybe even a 400 point game if we used the expensive, unique mech in one of the boosters.) The rules are fairly straight-forward, but it took time to go over all of it and let it sink in.
Paul picked these units for 186 points (value in parens):
I picked out these units for 196 points:
My mech in movement formation with two troop units closed for battle. My vehicle and other two units hung back; with their longer ranged weapons, I would pick at one of Paul's vehicles. All of Paul's units closed for battle, each vehicle in movement formation with two troop units each.
Re-creation of our initial formations after two rounds.
Paul focused his formation combat on the mech. I pushed it to fight back, but it over-heated and shut down. My long distance formation attacked a vehicle and took it out. I went in with my vehicle to close and keep him from charging, and attack the adjoining troops. Paul was able to take out the troops that accompanied the mech with his vehicle, which kept distributing its fire between them.
We decided to call off the game an hour into it because Paul had an advantage, and I knew he was better at wargames than I was.
Interesting about our approaches to gaming. Paul plays to win and calculates the odds of success for every action during the game. At times, I like to feel out a game (especially the first time I play) and see what happens with a variety of actions. There are more interesting ways to lose than to win ;-)
[One rule we got wrong: Mech's can't be a part of a movement formation, so my initial movement to get my mech and infantry in place should have taken two moves, instead of one. I could have done that anyway because I passed my second action when I did that.]
The Spider mech, looming menacingly
