[Mechaton] Mech reference sheet

[Anna Kreider]

So my husband and I have played through three games of Mechaton now with varying groups of people, and each time I found myself wishing that I had some kind of sheet to track attachments and such for my mechs. I imagine it's not so much a problem for people who buy all new parts for their mechs from Bricklink, but we just raided Kit's old lego collection. As such, our collection of attachments is somewhat haphazard and mismatched and very not standardized - which can make it confusing to figure out at a glance which mechs have what attachments.

We also ran into situations once or twice where we got into arguments about how many white dice a mech had after all of it's attachments had been blown off, and never really figured out a good way to designate how many white dice a mech had that had no more attachments.

So I made up some reference sheets to help keep everything organized. The sheets are small, just because it's been our experience that table space is usually at a premium between the mechs, cover, and dice.

The reference sheets can be found here: http://browserbeware.com/dump/mechaton.pdf

I hope that people find this useful.

~Anna

[Nathan P.]

I was using index cards. But those are awesome! Thanks!

[cdr]

Those are nifty, thanks!  Do you use them by drawing a diagonal slash to indicate what you have,
then X'ing it out when it's blown off?  The color coding is awesome.

Using the base hull we showed the loss of the first white die by removing a foot (the sloping brick), but
if your mechs don't have those kind of feet perhaps you could steal an idea from miniature wargamers and keep some cotton balls handy.  When a mech is down to its last white die put a cotton ball on it to indicate smoke from the imminent explosion.

What's the line after the Mech# for?  Do you name your Mechs?  That'd be cool.

If you don't mind some suggestions: Perhaps "shield" could be called "armor" (and moved to the top of the column)?  And I don't notice any place to indicate multiple Initiative dice or rockets?  (Maybe rockets don't need to be written since they should be visually distinctive attachments).  If you removed the range line or moved it down one, you could have two rows of Weapon boxes, so you could show weapons that use the optional rules to give 1 die at two ranges. Using X to indicate a box with a slash in it and O to indicate an empty box, that'd work like this:

Just one Melee Weapon:
XOO
XOO

The example fighter mech with two of the optional style guns:
XXX
OXO

That won't work if you can still have two weapons giving two dice at the same range (that only gives you 2 red dice, but means you can lose one weapon and still attack at that range), but my current understanding is that that's no longer valid.

Thanks again for posting the sheet!

---Carl

[Anna Kreider]

For marking boxes, I put an X through the box to mark if I have the attachment and then black the box out completely when it gets lost. And yes, we've been naming our mechs. Nothing terribly intellectual - just to help us keep track. My army in our last game consisted of "Tiny Bot", "Fatso", "Weirdo", and "Artillery Dude".

I didn't put rocket attachments on there just because I didn't really have room - and it is supposed to be very visually distinctive anyhow.

And as for initiative, I've just been writing +whatever next to the mech's name.

Thanks for the feedback.

~Anna

[Nathan P.]

Using the base hull we showed the loss of the first white die by removing a foot (the sloping brick), but
if your mechs don't have those kind of feet perhaps you could steal an idea from miniature wargamers and keep some cotton balls handy.  When a mech is down to its last white die put a cotton ball on it to indicate smoke from the imminent explosion.

Oh man. The best thing ever is using the little lego fire things, like you get with medieval castle sets, and putting those on the Mech when he gets down to his last white dice. It shows that he is ON FIRE!

[lumpley]

I included some parts for being on fire in the GenCon kit, because yeah, being on FIRE!

-Vincent

[Anna Kreider]

That's just too cool! Maybe I'll have to bricklink me some fire lego pieces...

~Anna

[Zeek]

Anyone still have a copy of this record sheet?  The link no longer works.

Thanks

Darrin in Kent, Ohio

zeek@neo.rr.com