Mechwarrior: Dark Age

Overall score:

Mechwarrior: Dark Age has a lot to live up to: it’s a clix game with two established and excellent games to compete with, and it’s a Battletech game with an enormous legacy to live up to. People will be attracted to it for various reason through these two channels and more, and most of those people are likely to be very pleased.

Let’s get the messy stuff out of the way right up front—this does not feel or play like any previous Battletech miniatures game. If you look at it as a new edition of a loved game, you’re going to be disappointed. Gone are the hallmarks of Battletech—complexity, detail, and ‘realism’—and the focus of the game has shifted from giant killer robots to a combined force of infantry, tanks, and giant killer robots. The only real holdover from Battletech to Mechwarrior is the world itself, and I’ve heard both praise and complaint from a number of Battletech fans regarding that world’s continued authenticity. Not being an enormous Battletech fan myself, I don’t know what to tell you. Suffice it to say this: the new game is not a replacement for the old one, just an addition to the Battletech universe. View it as a new opportunity full of new challenges, and you’re sure to love it.

What Mechwarrior gives up in detail it gains in approachability and ease. The clix system, pioneered in Mage Knight and Heroclix, is one of the simplest tabletop systems in the world while simultaneously being one of the deepest. Mechwarrior refines the rules a little bit, allowing for tiny infantry squads to share the battlefield with ten-story mechs, and should be fairly easy to learn—it’s much more complicated than previous clix games, but still a bit simpler than something like Warhammer. The key lies in the combat dial, which makes up the base of each figure and covers all the necessary information: points value, army statistics, special powers, facing, etc. It even keeps track of battle damage (for each point of damage you take, you click the dial once; thus you get weaker and may lose some of your special equipment during the course of the battle). Once you’ve read the rulebook (a tiny pamphlet that you can download for free), all you need is a tape measure, some dice, the special equipment card, and some figures—no rulebooks, no charts, no piles of note paper, and nothing to look up or cross-reference. If it were any simpler it would be chess.

The special equipment covers things like extra armor, special weapons, camouflage, and jump jets, all of which are represented by little squares of color on the combat dial. If your Defense number has a black square around it, for example, you just look at the special equipment card to see what the black Defense equipment is—hardened armor, which reduces all damage that the model receives. The Damage special equipment is split up into three categories, marked by an icon on the dial: ballistic, energy, and melee. Speed is also split into categories, though this has little effect on the equipment and profound effects on speed mode: hover vehicles, for example, can fly over water but can’t enter hindering terrain.

The most intriguing aspect of the dial is the concept of single use equipment—a new idea for clix games. If the special equipment is marked by a colored circle instead of a square, you have to take a click of damage when you use it. This puts you closer to death but rarely hurts your stats, and often improves them—a dune buggy slinking around under cover becomes much faster once it drops its camouflage, and an infantry squad can gets better all around after firing its armor piercing missiles. In some cases the choices get very intriguing—a number of tanks have single-shot infiltration, a power that lets them start further onto the board than normal. Do you want to start the game with a better board position or an extra click of life? The concept of single use equipment is interesting, fun, and well-implemented.

A more noticeable change to the combat dial, and arguably a bigger one, is the heat dial on the mechs. When most units move they can only take an action every other turn—if they take an action two turns in a row they get a click of damage, and have to spend the following turn doing nothing. This is called pushing. Mechs, however, are different—they can take as many actions in a row as they like, but each successive action causes heat to build up in their weapons and internal systems, making it possible for them to overheat and shut down. When you push a mech you give it a click of heat on a little tumbler attached to the dial; these heat effects can slow you down and decrease your weapon damage. The heat dial also has little colored squares, just like the combat dial, which can force you to deal with heat sink overloads, ammunition explosions, and automatic shutdowns.

On any turn where you do nothing you take a click of cooling (you turn the heat dial backward), though a better option is usually to use an action to vent—you do nothing, but you take two or even three clicks of cooling. If your mech shuts down you can spend successive turns venting it in an attempt to start it up again, though you’re more vulnerable to attack in the meantime. The overall effect of the heat dial is that mechs are far more active on the battlefield than any other unit, which seems fitting for a Battletech game—your tanks and your infantry are definitely useful, but your mechs still do most of the work.

The game is balanced well between mechs and other units, though the collecting side is not—after all, it’s good to have some infantry but only to fill in the cracks, and spending hard earned money on a pack full of infantry is nobody’s idea of a good time. The Mechwarrior starter packs, for some evil reason, include only one mech, two vehicles, and five infantry; for the same price you can buy two boosters and get two mechs, two vehicles, and four infantry. Trading an infantry for a mech seems like a pretty good deal. Since the rules and the special equipment card are available for free at Wizkids’ website, and since dice and tape measures and easy to come by almost anywhere—and since starter packs don’t have any unique figures—I strongly recommend that nobody ever buy a Mechwarrior starter pack, ever. There’s just no worthwhile reason to do so, and it boggles my mind that they even sell them. Go to the website, download the pdfs, and buy booster packs.

Once you’ve got an established force, stop buying boosters and just buy singles. In most game stores you can get a mech and a tank for less than ten dollars between them—you don’t get the infantry, but you’ve already got plenty, and this way you get to pick which mechs and tanks you want.

The models themselves are great—much more detailed than Mage Knight or Heroclix, though some of them are pretty fragile (I’ve had arms fall off of most of my mechs, but a bit of superglue fixes that without any fuss). The painting, rather than the standard Mage Knight blobs of color, is intricate and complex—apparently the assembly line workers have figured out how to shade, highlight, drybrush, and do ink washes, and the results look wonderful. Experienced miniature painters could still probably do a better job, but these come pre-painted and ready to play right out of the box. When convenience comes with this kind of quality, you’ll hear no complaining from me.

Who should buy this game? The rules are certainly more complex than Mage Knight and Heroclix, so beginners might want to stick with those, but on the other hand Mechwarrior might be a little more accessible—small games tend to revolve around your one or two mechs instead of an entire force, which makes it easier on inexperienced strategists. Even so, Mechwarrior is obviously designed as an older game for more mature players, and its high cost of collection will make it easier for adults with jobs than kids with allowances.

Fans of the original Battletech are likely to stay away from Mechwarrior just because it’s so different—this is fine, because the original was a great game, but I encourage these people to take the plunge and try Mechwarrior anyway. It’s an excellent game that’s simple to learn and provides a deep level of strategy. The cost is prohibitive, but still cheaper than most other wargames—a mech-sized model from Games Workshop would cost you at least $24, and here you can get it for less than $10. If all else fails, go with the old plan B and try it out in your local game store. Odds are, you’ll buy a few packs on the spot—just make sure to buy boosters instead of a starter, because I still think that's insane.

Written by Fellfrosch on October 10th, 2002