Wednesday 21 January 2015

Battletech (Collectible Card Game)

10 meters high, and armed with lasers. What's not to love?

This one will be a quick entry, as the actual game is long gone into the dust of being a non-Magic The Gathering-card game. I enter it here, for the simple reason that it was the first card game I ever played, the one that got me hooked, and into what and where I am today. It was a good and exciting game, albeit flawed. It was:

a) Too complex (big learning curve)
b) If there wasn't a huge push in each turn towards a fight, both sides could get huge armies and sit there in a stalemate
c) If you didn't know/didn't love the Battletech Universe, nothing would make any sense to you. Ok, I hear you say, but Magic has dragons. Fine, says I, I can imagine what a dragon looks like, can YOU imagine what a Hatchetman with a Large Pulse Laser conversion, painted in the colours of ComStar looks like? Exactly.

The Battletech franchise struggled from the start. From its RPG origins, to PC games, to miniature games. It finally died about 10 years ago, and I do find it a pity.

In a way, I am thankful to this game for being so complex. For years after, whenever I picked up another game and I looked at the rules, I was like.... Is this... It? Wow. 

Alas, Battletech, we hardly knew ye. 

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