[Mechaton] Typographical Tweaks, and simpler builds

[azeilstra]

Dear Vincent,

Time for some feedback. I've played the game against myself, slowly, and taking notes. I used the army you described in the manual as one side, and some home brew as the other. (Your mechs won.) Here are some things I noticed:

1) In the next iteration of the manual, on page 4, please make this a bigger font, because it is the most important rule:
ANY GIVEN MECH CAN HAVE UP TO 4 ATTACHMENTS.
Dunderheads like me get confused when they are told that their mech can have two movement attachments, and two spot ones, and two armor ones, and three shooty ones. That's 9 attachments in total, right? Not right.

2) On page 7, where you refer to a "9-long ruler", can you copy the figure from page 25, or refer to it? That way, players can see right away what a great invention the 9-long ruler is: it measures movement around corners!

3) My creativity is even more limiting than my small Lego collection. I want to play the game, not make pretty action figures. So I abstracted a fearsome mech with armor, sleds, a laser pointer and a chain saw into a stack of 2x2 blocks: 1 blue, 1 green, 1 yellow,  2 red, and 2 white. For Direct Range guns I used a 3x2 red block, for artillery a 4x2 red block.
That way, if the mech gets pummeled you can remove the relevant brick. You can stick stiff cardboard in between rows of bricks, to act as flags.

4) The second optional rule (page 5), which lets you use a red d8 for a second weapon at the same range creates a monster. Roll a d8 against a blue armor die (with the roll result subtracted by 1 - see page 9), and of the 48 possible combinations, 33 will be hits for the bruiser. You even have a chance of rolling 8 damage dice. Unless you can give a behemoth like that an Achilles heel, munchkin players will exclusively field artillery bruisers to fight the battle of the big berthas. The Achilles heel could be that mechs were not designed for weapons that heavy and overpowered: if your red d8 scores a 1 or a 2, it shoots you instead, and you lose an attachment.

5) Would this make for more fun? Attachments that get shot off stay on the playing field, and can be scavenged by others (unless they are brought to a friendly station). "Remember that war club you dropped? I pick it up and I swing it!"

That's what struck me most about this game: there is room to make lots of house rules. Unlike "realistic" mech games, where everything is proscribed, you can make this up as you go along: "If your mech has wings, it can fly to the top of Mount Ketchup Bottle, and you can only get cover from its artillery if you hide behind the Radio."

Nice job, Vincent. Now I need to find a way to play this by email ...

Thanks!

(Mr.) Anne