Tuesday, March 31, 2015

A Tasty Little Evening

The bartender was absent from the local joint last night, so I was able to instruct and supervise Melisa in the proper construction of a delicious dry gin martini. "Ooo...it's so blanco!" she said. By which she meant "clear" (instead of yellow or pink or brownish which has been their last few attempts). Very, very nice...I'm going to have to get her to make me a couple-four more of those over the next week so that she can solidify the instructions in her brain (Melisa's our regular waitress at the place).

By the time we got home, I was pleasantly (i.e. mildly) shnockered, and it was time to get my game on. Turns out, teaching a four-year old to play streamlined BattleTech (which is what War of the Mecha is) isn't all that tough, and the kid loved it. He would have played all night, but my loose sense of parental responsibility required me to get him to bed by eleven. Besides he had gotten to play a good long time in the afternoon prior to his siesta ("I'm too excited to sleep, papi!").

An archer is caught in the kill zone between two mountains while seeking to avoid a "swamp" of baby toys.
This was actually my child's first toe-dip into wargaming...we don't have hex maps here, so we were using actual measuring sticks, turning squares, and "terrain." It worked well, and I was pleased with the restructuring of the rules for D6-only play. Some folks might be a little confused as to why I would bother...isn't BattleTech already a D6-based game? Yes it is, but one that requires entirely too many random tables and chart consultation (I have a little more patience than a four-year old, but not much...for a war-game, I want my rules constrained to a single page). Anyway, it worked well and Diego was surprisingly good at managing his heat accumulation while coordinating two mechs simultaneously.

My Warhammer lost an arm to a critical hit. D's favorite mech was the Yu Huang, but he decided to rename it "Dino-Nex."

[Diego had wanted to play with a four-mech squad, but I put my foot down...plus we were running out of Legos since he insisted on building the mechs so big. To be fair, he was using an assault-class mech, so it was supposed to be big. I guess my old age makes me inclined to be pragmatic (save some blocks for the other robots!) about such things. *sigh*]

I will try to get the Crowns of Blood thing posted before I leave town, but it's going to be tough. Diego really prefers playing with papa (today it's Star Wars), which leaves me little time for writing, what with the other stuff I've got to do to prepare. Later, gators.
: )

2 comments:

  1. Wow, I've never heard of War of the Mecha! I bought the new(ish) Battletech introductory set last year, with the hope (silly man that I am) that I would somehow magically find more time to game with, you know, adults. That hasn't panned out (I'm as much to blame as my friends). So I've tried several times to do a boiled down Battletech thing with my six-year-old son. It hasn't gone very well. He spends a lot of time asking me if he can keep some of the miniatures, then spends the rest of the time telling me he's getting bored. But this War of the Mecha thing...looks like a solution! What's the details on that?

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  2. @ Anthony:

    I'm actually revising it a step further, so that it's even more user friendly. My four year old can do SOME arithmetic, but not much, so I'm doing some stuff to cut that down...plus I'm simplifying heat and discarding "non-fun" stuff (like piloting rolls). Diego says his favorite part is "shooting" so its important to emphasize that without over-complicating it.

    It helps that there are plenty of mech pictures on-line that we can print and color.

    A downloadable PDF will be made available.

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