Robot Warfare

I have just published a little set of wargame rules for miniatures. Not published in the "going to a publisher" sense of the word but rather in the "posting the details on my web site" sense.

I've had a hankering to play Battletech with my son for a long while, but have been afraid that the rules would proove a little too slow for him. Also the cardboard stand ups I have for the game are a little uninspiring.

So I spent a few weeks keeping my eyes open for some minis to use in a game I would devise that would give me my Battling Robots fix.

EBay came up trumps. A seller specialising in all of the cheap tat, that passes for toys at the cheap end of the market was selling a set of plastic robots. These are not Battletech minis which I had found to be too expensive even second hand. These are unbranded low quality plastic. Just what I needed.

They are about the right size and just fit into a Battletech hex. However following suggestion from a BGG user I broke out my Heroscape : Rise of the Valkyrie set and built up some interesting terrain. The robot minis actually fit better onto these hexes.

Then I had to come up with some rules.

I wanted only D6's. I like games that use simple dice, A throwback to my Traveller RPG days I guess. So 2D6 was going to be my "To Hit" mechanism. That decided I built a quick table giving to-hit numbers based on range. Then I threw in modifiers for a couple of circumstance.

Looking at the collection of Robots I realised that many had no ranged weapons at all, and relied upon a simple sword. So I needed close combat rules as well. 2D6 opposed rolls came to the rescue!

I specifically wanted to use these rules with my son and I remembered the crestfallen look on his face once when we played risk. I went first in the first turn and launched a whole bunch of attacks. He was totally depressed by the wave of success I had. I didnt want that effect to happen in this game.

So I started having a game where players took turns to activate one robot to move or fight. Incidentally, I was using action points, 3 action points for the robot to use when activated.

I test played these rules myself and realised that there was a problem. With only being able to activate one robot at a time there would be a tendancy to only use one robot until it died and then move onto the next robot. That would give me no tactics to mention.

I revised the rules to allow a player to activate two robots on a turn and I also gave the robots an additional action point because the test play had revealed that turns were very very limited.

So then I was ready. I called my son in he got excited at the look-of-the-thing and we set to.

Or rather he set to. I limped slowly into the general region of "to". With six robots each he hammered me 6-1

Take a look at the rules