Alpha strike

This past weekend I was invited to P's house to play a game of Alpha strike.  Alpha strike is a quicker variant of Battletech, which instead of hexes has more of a traditional miniatures game feel.  Models have free movement in inches, and line of sight is closer to "real" from the model's point of view.  The basic game play is much like battletech where you determine a target number and then want to meet or exceed it to hit, and you are often fishing for criticals.  It also reduces the complexity of a battle 'mech from a full sheet of information down to a card, where a single mech has just a few stats.

Here is a Griffin (model GRF-1N) as a point of comparison.  The Alpha Strike card has five lines of information, and then a little critical hit chart.  Movement is a fixed 10 inches and is marked "j" to indicate that it can be jumping. Shooting is reduced to a Short/Medium/Long range output of 1/2/2. (and all range bands are the same for all mechs)

Simple

By comparison, the Battletech record sheet for that same unit has three modes of movement, and each of two weapons has heat/damage/Minimum/short/medium/long range stat.  (and most mechs have a lot more weapons than this Griffin)  Damage is not  limited to five little bubbles, but has a whole mech body to bubble in before you start getting to the good stuff on the inside. 

Detailed

In any case the main allure of Alpha Strike vs. Battletech is that in the same amount of time you can play games which are more than four times larger, more easily incorporate combined arms, and since they are not hex based, you can use more common terrain, so it looks a lot more "real" than Battletech can.  

In preparation for the game, I read the quick start rules, put together a small army from some existing figures, and gave some more details to some partly painted figures which were going to be a couple of mercenary lances.  I went mech only, and had this Marik Militia unit supported by two mixed lances of mercenaries. 

The real heroes of the day (mercenary scum not shown)

P has a LOT of battletech stuff from the kickstarters, so he had a more combined arms force, with power armored infantry, LRM carriers, tanks, and then a number of heavy mechs.  His were not painted, so we joked that they were the "Grey Death" (an in universe unit).  In the pictures that follow, his forces are predominantly on the left, and mine are on the right.  In the mission we selected, the attacker (me) had to scan each of the buildings to find six that were targets, and then escape with the information. 

Turn 1

Grey Death to the left, Marik to the right screened by the ridge, Mercenaries top right in the forest.  I ended up deploying the heavies on the bottom and top of the map, with mediums and lights in the middle, with the idea that they would zip in and scan the buildings. 

Turn 2

During the first turn, the forces engaged in long range speculative fire (mostly indirect), and the attackers were pressing in a bit.  Little fast mechs zoomed around the board and missed each other. Some damage was dealt, and the helicopter was shot down. 

Turn 3

By the start of the third turn, the Grey Death tanks and heavy units shuffled around to get more cover, the lighter units and infantry skirmished with the mercenaries, and the Marik heavies advanced to get into medium range for more damage. (potentially, you have to hit stuff for that to work)

Turn 4

At the start of turn 4, we tried some close combat... light mechs do more damage shooting than they do stomping on infantry (2 instead of 1, since close combat is based on size), and stomping on a tank seems to do a lot less than you would imagine.  None of the Grey Death heavies got killed, but a couple of them were pretty close, where as the Marik heavies had the damage spread out more evenly. 

We ended up playing through four complete turns, which took around an hour each.  Further play would be somewhat faster, as we did spend a lot of time looking things up.  The basic rules themselves were very easy to grasp, but there were some unusual interactions and a few areas that were not very clear.  The game would also have been a lot faster if we did not roll like crap for most of the game!  "Looks like I need to roll an 8 here, <rolls a 7>".  Mechs only go boom IF you hit them...

P was an excellent host, and after we finished the game we discussed playing again... maybe a game with Stew, if he can get away from the family for an afternoon.  I do after all have two companies of painted mechs, and a lot of random figures that could become mercenaries...