The Case For The Skirmish Wargame – Battletech

In case you may all be wondering, yes, the “no plan survives contact with the enemy” adage is a brutally applicable one in all areas of one’s life. In my case, after a pandemic-delayed, top-to-bottom home refurbishing project finally saw me put the finishing touches on a dedicated entertainment/hobby/gym area I’d been dreaming of since childhood, my wife and I decided to have a baby.

As you do when your casual, carefree existence simply becomes too much of a good thing.

Needless to say, my long term hobby plans suffered a swift kick to the nads, turned tail and pretty much vanished for a good few months. And I’m still a bit sore.

But, things started making sense again about one year on from the happy event, and I once again turned my attention towards abandoned projects, unopened Kickstarters, and work in progress paintjobs… only to realize I didn’t really have the drive, let alone the time anymore, to really do them all justice.

While I’d spent most of the time from early 2018 to 2022 scheming and dreaming about sprawling, hours long battles featuring hundreds of miniatures as lavishly and carefully painted as the terrain they were duking it out over, I found myself in a slump in terms of actually bringing all of those dreams to fruition. A big part of it was obviously the acute lack of time to get into something like that anymore, but soon enough another realisation came: why should I spend dozens of hours effectively toiling away without gaming, when I could get to the latter point much faster, enjoy it much more often, and end up with a much better experience on the other end of it?

Enter: the skirmish wargame.

Reduced model count? Check.

Reduced rulebook page count? Check.

Low time investment on both prepping and playing? Check-check.

Battletech is only one of many such examples that I hope to tackle in future articles (Frostgrave, Forbidden Psalm, and the upcoming Verrotwood would be just a few I’d like to touch upon), and it seems there are more of these popping up every year.

The big name brands as much as the indies have been pushing in this direction for a while now, with anything from the behemoth Games Workshop (Warcry, Kill Team, Underworlds, and more recently Boarding Actions), their cunning bastard son Mantic (trimming the entry point to their Kings of War series with the Ambush boxes), to the FFG/AMGs of the world (X-Wing, which is, for the most part, a skirmish in my estimation) featuring games with a low model count, low barrier to entry, and quick-to-play modes or overall design doctrines.

Catalyst Game Labs has done exactly that, and how! The longtime-defunct-now-ever-present Battletech IP is found pretty much anywhere from Barnes and Noble to the digestive tract of Nile Crocodiles as far as I can tell. And with another Kickstarter coming right up after a (drawn out, but still) successful first outing, which I own a sizeable quantity of and will be diving into, it’s safe to say Battletech is a winner in the skirmish arena.

I won’t get into the lore of the whole thing at this point. Nor ever, since I’m still not as up to date as I’d like to be on the absolute metric gigatons of content there is to this futuristic mech combat game in its many incarnations over the decades. I would like to say that what I’ve managed to read and digest via other means, namely the BlackPantsLegion Youtube channel, has been music to my jaded ears, and I loathe not having discovered the IP as a kid, when I would’ve had the time and thirst to dive headlong into it, possibly bankrupting my parents in the process.
Ah, what could’ve been…

In any case, the focus I’d like for this series to have deals mainly with what I believe make these games not only successful, but also what should make them primarily desirable to those of us that have less than copious amounts of time to divert between multiple leisurely activities.

So, with that gargantuan preamble out of the way, let’s expand upon the things I feel push skirmish games in general, and Battletech in particular, towards the top in terms of what could be your one wargame of choice. Hey, maybe even two wargames of choice if you can shove them in between diaper changing and flashing back to traumas from your own childhood.

First and foremost, let’s talk about cost.

There are a couple very bare-bones beginner boxes available for Battletech at the moment, featuring the absolute minimum you need to get a taste of the head-to-head mech combat on offer. And they’re dirt cheap. You can get the one I first owned right here on Frontline Gaming, for an absolute steal, in fact.

With these boxes you get 2 minis, a two sided map, map overlay tokens, a rulebook, some standees, mech sheets, a short novella, mechwarrior cards, and some all-important d6s to math it all up with another friend. Unless you like to go at it from both ends, and I won’t judge if you do swing that way.

Now, while it’s true that this doesn’t seem like much in terms of tangible content, I can vouch for my first every Battletech game (all the way back in 2019) using nothing but the contents of the then-only starter box to play and ending up being an amazing, event-filled, condensed wargaming experience the likes of which not many others have managed to offer on an intro level before or since. And the standees you get mean you can try out larger combats before plunging into getting more minis, which is a plus in my book.

Expandability is a next logical step for wargames, and the availability of items is also a big thing to take into account, and like I said, you can’t shake a sweaty clanner’s tank top around without hitting a starter set, beginner box, clan starter, salvage box, or technical readout. The stuff is EVERYWHERE – yes, including Frontline Gaming – and for good value, with books, maps, and boxes hovering in the $20-50 range, and offering beaucoup bang for your buck as far as I’m concerned.

Then, there’s the matter of time you actually spend with the game, both at and away from the gaming table. We’ll call this the prep-and-play.

Now, I love me a kitbash, but there’s really not much you can do with these beautiful minis to make them unique other than conjuring up a cool paint scheme, thematic to the lore or not. The mechs are one solid hunk of plastic, come fully assembled and (firmly) attached to their bases, and are pretty much a prime, speedpaint, and highlight away from taking the field in grand fashion. Multiply that by four or five, which is the regular number of minis you’ll be fielding in most of your games (that four-to-six models is a sweet spot for skirmishes, in my opinion), and you’ll see there’s really not that much you need to put into the prep of this, at all.

Once the play starts, the level of involvement in wargaming may slant in favour of those who’ve done this once or twice before. It’s not necessarily that Battletech is an inherently difficult system to wrap your head around, it’s just that there are a lot of modifiers to keep track of when first playing, so those with a bit more experience at it may benefit. I may have some pointers here once I start delving into it proper.

In the end, the game is modular enough that you can start off with a lighter rules variant and then add stuff on (like weapons heating, critical hits, etc) as you please and as you gain more experience, which is also a staple of what I think makes a good skirmish.

To jump off that last point, and to contrast with other skirmishes or indeed wargames, Battletech offers A TON to bite into even at its simplest, which was awesome for me to see when first trying to get the hang of it.

Overall, I’d say your initial confrontations will run north of three hours, with more variance depending on your chosen model count (you level things out here by mech tonnage, which I think is a really fun concept) or Battle Value, era, etc.. But once you get a couple games in I’m fairly confident a game can be played in around two hours or so if both players have their heads and hearts into it and remember their GATOR (more on that at a later date). This is still a good chunk of time, but not that bad, all things considered.

Further, you can try playing objective-based scenarios which generously cut down on playtime by calling a game finished whenever something specific happens, and which give you more direction than an outright destruction derby focus.

It’s also worth hammering home that prep time is seriously sped up here by the availability of pre-printed hex maps that you can just throw onto the table and start playing on. For those of you that lean that way, think how great the pre-printed Memoir ‘44 scenarios were for majorly cutting down on setup and letting you get to the gameplay faster. Battletech does that right out of the box

Bear in mind that I’m speaking of 1v1 games here, as I’ve never really managed to move past this count and into the 2v2s or 4v4s that many people are raving about online. That raving means the game also scales well, which is another plus, but I generally think of skirmishes as a purely one on one endeavor, so that’s how I’ll approach this all.

Finally, let’s talk about visual impact for a bit.

Let’s face it, we’re all in this hobby partly because we like looking at pretty plastic things surrounded by other pretty plastic, wood, and possible sand things. It’s a given.

Well, Battletech has that in spades with its sprawling hex based mapping that takes up half a dining room table (or more if you combine multiple maps), along with the little, mechy plastic beauties that unabashedly stomp all over it.

The maps are all (obviously) 2d, but you can add various 3d elements to them to make them pop even more and bring to the fore Battletech’s multi-level setups which have a bearing on Line of Sight and cover and the like. And with the rise of 3d printing you can elevate your battlefields’ looks to soaring heights with relative ease.

Then, the mechs themselves paint up amazingly, the detail is there for you to either go crazy freehanding on the multiple armor panels (or have somebody do it for you and focus solely on the gaming side) or just, as previously mentioned, slap-chop out a quick paint job and just let your little dudes have at it in blazing colours. There’s really no wrong way to go about it and you can be as invested or casual as you like because mechs will never not look good on a hex grid.

Putting it simply, I think Battletech is a shining example of accessibility, modularity, low model count, and high reward that characterises many current skirmish wargames out there today.

Even if you’re into the grand strategies and pitting hundreds of models against one another, it’d be a shame not to give it a right go and see how you feel about the whole experience, start to finish.

I’m planning on going further into the nuts and bolts of this mechanised mayhem in future entries, so watch this space if it sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, as I’m relearning a lot of it myself.

Thanks for reading, and have as nice a day as you deserve!

Written by Costin Becheanu