Giving Alpha Strike 'Stompy Robots' a Try

    My smaller Mech unsuccessfully plays 'Hide and Seek' with Jenny's bigger one in Alpha Strike

I've been remiss in documenting our gaming sessions, lately. It seems all of my blog posts are about painting miniatures or creating terrain. However, we do game weekly on Sunday evenings. I'd estimate one out of every four sessions is miniatures, though lately we've been doing minis more often. Our host is ambivalent about miniatures and prefers board games, but humors us. Here are some pictures from last Sunday's learning game of "Alpha Strike" -- the latest iteration of BattleTech, I believe.

    Not sure if the game is designed for 8 players, but Andy and Mike S gave it their best shot

Andy S and Mike S both wanted to play it. Keith also had a handful of mechs, which he has run the Wiley Games version (Alpha Suit). However, we used all of Andy's stuff this time. He tried to explain the whole "lore background" or history of the BattleTech universe, but we probably weren't as interested in that. We were more focused on learning the rules. Andy set up a city center amidst a wooded and hilly area, and then proceeded to put all his mechs out on the table for us to choose from.

    My force of 3 Mechs moves towards the cover of the center of town that Andy had set up

We were instructed to take 100 points worth, but not mix "Clan" and "non-Clan." He had a term for the non-Clan mechs, but I can't remember it at this point. I chose three -- a Guillotine, Wolverine, and Commando. The rules were pretty easy to pick up, though Andy had some modifications. He and Mike S went back and forth on deciding how to do the sequence of play. Alpha Strike appears to be a two-player (or at least two-sided) game, and our group doing an 8-player free-for-all probably was going to call for some changes. As usually seems to happen lately, the Wiley Games card activation system was inserted. Since all mechs move before any firing, it was actually an advantage to draw lower value cards and go last (which explains my Ace-King-Queen draw on Turn 1 or 2...ha, ha!

    Once in town, my Mechs go in all around defense try not to expose their vulnerable rear (???)

Andy and Mike made some changes on the fly, including scrapping a weird provision which allows the last moving mech to fire first and then returning to movement order. They said it doesn't matter since all firing is simultaneous, which made me wonder why we bothered to even use the cards to determine order of shooting. It got really weird when one mech wanted to charge another one and enter hand-to-hand combat. Apparently, big stompy robots (or "pilots" in mech suits) still do that far in the future. They ruled that if you charged an enemy mech who hadn't moved it could simply move away and avoid melee on its turn. Hunh?? They searched the rulebook and couldn't find a solution to this conundrum, so that was the way we played it.

    Two of my mechs fire at Jenny's force advancing - our 'cover' proved essentially worthless

All in all, the rules worked. Beginning with your skill value, adding cover and range modifiers, and the enemy's target modifier produced the score you needed on 2d6 to exceed for a hit. Once you hit, Andy's other change was that you roll 1d6 for each damage you would normally score on the enemy. If you rolled a 1-2, it was a miss. Guess what I rolled a lot of that evening? My dice rolling is usually pretty streaky, and tonight it was definitely on a bad streak. By the end of the game, I think I had scored only five total damage points on Jenny or Allen's mechs. Some mechs were doing more than that on just one hit!

I've never really been a fan of big stompy robots, aka Mech games. I will play the game again if they run it, of course. However, it didn't inspire me to go out and purchase the rules or begin buying and painting mechs. Instead of Mechs, it was more "Meh"....ha, ha!

Miniature Painting & Purchasing Tally for 2024

• Miniatures acquired in 2024: 226
  
• Miniatures painted in 2024: 200 (see next update)