Battletech 2nd Edition

At the Museum of Science and Industry1 in Chicago there is a massive train diorama called The Great Train Story. It represents over 2,000 miles between Chicago and Seattle painstakingly modeled for our eyes to feast on. As a kid, it was my second favorite exhibit at MSI…

The Henry Crown Center will always take first place in my heart…

That said, my point of entry for miniatures and eventually war games was that sprawling train model at MSI. The delightful details. The scale of it. The way it opened up your imagination to craft your own stories.

That’s the juice.

That’s also why Battletech didn’t immediately grab me when my friend Kevin pulled it out. The paper minis. The folded out hex map. To my untutored eyes at the time, it looked like a shitty board game.

I mean, this is the late eighties? Early nineties at most. Board games weren’t pretty like they are now, with their fancy ass models and a thousand tokens…

But never the right token when you are playing. Always have to dig through to find it. Form over function moves product, though. Am I right?

Battletech didn’t have any of that curb appeal at that time. It didn’t hook me out the gate. I remember that first game being mildly fun, but that is about it.

Then we played it again when the whole crew couldn’t get together.

Then I borrowed one of the technical readout books.

Then we played again. This time we each used more than one mech.

Then we played in a big game at the Adventure Games Club2 in school and someone brought miniatures.

What sweet magic is this? Miniature mechs? Not paper stands that you always are missing the right one for the mech you want to use? Made of metal and painted? You can pose these fucking things!?!?

And so I went and built myself a shit ton of terrain. When I was younger I used to do that all the time for my GIJOES…

I was a lonely kid when we moved from Chicago, so in those first few years I honed my skills of storytelling and model making with Snake-eyes and the rest of the crew. Those skills served me well.

Once I made all that terrain, Battletech took on a new affectation. It became a creative catalyst. Line of sight became something you put your face down near the mech to determine.

Was that the glint of chrome I saw through the trees to my left?

You could practically smell the jellied petroleum burning on the wind in my parent’s basement. Listen hard enough and you could hear the sizzle of ozone. Feel the rumble in your chest as the drop ship landed, disgorging your enemy just over the horizon.

I was hooked. We were creating stories. Inventing campaign rules. Used a risk board to track lances as they fought for supremacy across the world.

We had the core book and one or two technical read outs. Once we added the terrain and models, the creativity flowed. Battletech, more than anything, made us game designers. Made us modelers. Made us scenery designers.

It made us storytellers.