I made some changes to the Archive pages which are nowhere near exciting enough for most of you to go look at. Though I seem to have done something weird to the strip navigation buttons. I'll deal with them later.

So I just spent a couple hours playing my first game of MechWarrior: Dark Age the best way possible; with someone else's pieces. For those of you who've never heard of it, it's a "collectable miniatures" game which means you spend your money on little plastic toys that you can't conveniently store in the same numerous cardboard boxes your collectible card games ended up in. Most important features are directly on the minis, including a built-in mechanic for tracking damage.

And so after only one game of rather dubious rules enforcement ("Oh wait.. 4 is it's minimum range, not the number of units I can attack. Oops"), I am prepared to announce my initial assessment. And that is: pretty nifty. The downside of the game would seem to be in the "build your army" phase, as there's a *whole* lot of information for you to keep in mind when recruiting minis. You don't just deal with stats, you deal with stats that change every time your mech/vehicle/juice cart/whatever takes damage. And different units can take differing amount of damage before becoming heaps of previously damaged rubbish.

There were very few times when we weren't sure what the exact rules should be, which is a great thing for a "new" game (wizkids has other collectable minis games using some of the same basic ideas, or so I'm told). Miniature gaming isn't my main thing, but I have some experience mostly with Great Rail Wars and Doomtown: Range Wars (go Deadlands!), and this seemed on par with those experiences. Hardcore mini wargammers might feel put off that most units only have about 6 or 7 stats instead of 300+, and games between competent players may only run a few hours, depending on game size.

If you're looking for an infinite black hole into which to sink your money, and either mini wargamming in general or Battletech in specific floats your dinghy, pick up a starter or two and give it a shot. If you end up on the other side of the table from a couple of large infiltrating, armored, evading 4-firepower tanks, my heart goes out to you.