Mechwarrior dark ages was bad I'm a big battletech fan and I tried it but they took the focus from the mechs and put it on vehicles which felt wrong.

Then you have the fact it was random packs...

I'm glad catalyst have come in and brought classic back as well as made alpha strike which lets you do big scale battles without losing the feel of mech combat.

Hawkstrike, on 29 Jul 2015 - 5:43 PM, said:

I wish we had a non-collectible pre-painted minis version of BattleTech.

Yes to this.

Note with Battletech you can play it with the MWDA pre-painted miniatures. You can often find lots of them online for cheap or stuck in a back room of a FLGS. If you want a faster play run it with the Alpha Strike rules which is played out on terrain and not the Total Warfare rules which is setup for hex maps.

Alpha Strike allows for much larger battles to be played out faster (12 v 12 in 2-4hrs) Also outside of the rules and minis the reference cards you can print off for free from http://www.masterunitlist.info/

And dont forget Battletech IS NOT WYSIWYG.

Also, don't rule out other great board games such as Talisman.A great game with minimal start up cost or painting time. I'm sure the lads and lasses of these forums could recommend a plethora of other board games which are great.

If you liked older games like Hero Quest and Space Crusade, Imperial Assault might be a good game for you.

There are simply so many good games out there .. and so little time to play them.

Ok yeah, I can't help it and second Talisman.

Its a really good boardgame, easy to learn and fairly quick to play.

The reaper expansion is highly recommended.

The miniatures are unpainted but don't need the paint.

I haven't played it yet but Arena of the Planeswalkers looks decent. It's $30 on Amazon.

It's basically a Heroscape reboot with the addition of spell cards. It uses the same tiles, the same dice, and the same base sizes that Heroscape did. If you are looking for a beer and pretzels squad combat game that you can teach to someone in 5 minutes, this should be a good choice.

I'd say the most obvious choice is the WW1 or WW2 version of "Wings of Glory". It is sort of like a simpler version of X-Wing...kinda.

There is no concept of pilot skill, nor 'actions', and you plot your maneuvers using cards (which also execute the maneuver) rather than dials+templates. Also, you have to plot your maneuvers several turns in advance (the cards make a 'maneuver queue' easy to use). Oh, and no dice.

So...not really much like X-Wing at all, but they have as vaguely similar feel to the play, more or less.

And, yeah, both versions come with pre-painted models.

(There is also a more complex naval game "Sails of Glory" by the same designer as "Wings of Glory". Pre-painted minis, there, too.)

Wings of Glory is a renamed newer version of the discontinued Wings of War game. If I'm not mistaken, Wings of War and Glory are both compatible with one another, albeit you can't really mix the WW2 games with the WW1 ones of course.

Wings of War's basic game is less complex than X-wings, but you have the option to play with altitude rules and there are various observation balloon expansions and anti-aircraft artillery rules and whatnot, so you have the option of playing somethign less or even more deep than X-Wing if you desire.

Wings of War can be cheaper to obtain a lot of because the miniatures aren't neccesary to play the game, the game comes with cards that represent the planes. Maybe Wings of Glory also comes with those plane cards. The cards look good and while they're no pre-painted miniature, they do a better job of looking nice than flying around X Wing ship tokens and bases with no miniatures. SInce you play with cards, planes bumping is simply a matter of overlapping the cards.

Sails of glory is made by the same company, it's pretty much wings of war/glory but with ~late 18th century warships. It's much more complex- however - all the rules are very intuitive. So for example, if you sail into the wind for more than a turn it pushes your ship back, grape shot takes out more crew than regular shot, more crew members allow you to bring more guns to bear, enfilade fire is much more damaging than defilade, you can raise and lower sails to gain or lose speed, when you take damage to your sails you can't sail as fast, etc. Surprisingly easy to learn despite it being more of a mess token-wise than X-Wing. It's pretty sweet.

And of course, Star Trek Attack Wing and D&D Attack Wing. Those, "other' games.

Wings of War can be cheaper to obtain a lot of because the miniatures aren't neccesary to play the game, the game comes with cards that represent the planes. Maybe Wings of Glory also comes with those plane cards. The cards look good and while they're no pre-painted miniature, they do a better job of looking nice than flying around X Wing ship tokens and bases with no miniatures. SInce you play with cards, planes bumping is simply a matter of overlapping the cards.

Wings of Glory focuses on miniatures. While it is true the original Wings of War game was designed around cards, everything published under the Wings of Glory line is miniatures-based. You still get the above-view card for each plane, but it is intended to be used as a marker in place of the mini in those multi-plane furballs, or during overlapping situations.

At this point some of the old Wings of War boxed sets are hard to find, as are some of the planes. Brumoski's D.III usually goes for outrageous prices on ebay. And the same was once the case for Fokker Triplanes and D.VIIs, but they have since been reprinted, so the prices on those are back to normal.

As a thought if you really wanted to try 40K you could look at ebay and pick up a pre-built army, there are plenty of people that are jumping ship.

Ask around your local groups, you may (hopefully) find that some of them still use the older rule editions (3rd, 4th) it's up to 7th I think and it's a mess now, GW just keep pushing people to getting bigger and bigger armies and it really bogs the game down with some many units on the table.

If you do see a game system you like the look of you could always get someone else to paint em for you.

My wife and I got battletech. It comes with 27 miniatures in the box,( know there unpainted but they are fully assembled) it is a little more advanced then X-wing but is amazing.

http://www.miniaturemarket.com/catalog/product/view/id/36241/s/cat3500b/

Also BUY Armada the game is amazing

Man, all misty eyed for mechwarrior; I don't think it was a bad system, but I think the blind buys hurt it, and the fact they did they all of a sudden said you can't use x when a new set came out bugged me.

If they redid it like x-wing where you buy expansions that aren't blind I'd be all in.

You can pick them up last time I saw at 5 below here in the US.

As much as Battletech was the game when I was a kid, I find the though of playing it intolerable now. So many rolls. So many tables. So much record-keeping.

As much as Battletech was the game when I was a kid, I find the though of playing it intolerable now. So many rolls. So many tables. So much record-keeping.

I like the look of Alpha Strike; it looks like battletech light; it's supposed to be more like a company level game from what I've read.

There are a few D&D-themed boardgames (Wrath of Ashardalon, The Legend of Drizzt, & Castle Ravenloft) from WotC. They come with decent single-color minis, which you can certainly play with as-is or repaint, and everything you need is in the box. As a nice bonus, the player characters (and monsters!) from one box can certainly be used with another set.

Gameplay is fairly ingenious, as it does away with the need for a DM to run the monsters. Players roll for the monsters and follow the simple attack/movement instructions on each monster's card. Aside from that, it's like D&D 4E light, with daily, at-will, & encounter powers and plenty of loot that can be picked up & used. Much like the oft-recommended Imperial Assault, each set contains a ton of map tiles which can be combined in a variety of ways, and a folio of missions to run with your PCs either separately or as a mini-campaign.

The first couple of times, it'll take you a couple of hours to get through a mission, but once you get the hang of it the mechanics are pretty simple and you can get a game done in about an hour, depending on the mission.

Sails of glory is made by the same company, it's pretty much wings of war/glory but with ~late 18th century warships. It's much more complex- however - all the rules are very intuitive. So for example, if you sail into the wind for more than a turn it pushes your ship back, grape shot takes out more crew than regular shot, more crew members allow you to bring more guns to bear, enfilade fire is much more damaging than defilade, you can raise and lower sails to gain or lose speed, when you take damage to your sails you can't sail as fast, etc. Surprisingly easy to learn despite it being more of a mess token-wise than X-Wing. It's pretty sweet.

**** you. I do not need another game.

Man, all misty eyed for mechwarrior; I don't think it was a bad system, but I think the blind buys hurt it, and the fact they did they all of a sudden said you can't use x when a new set came out bugged me.

If they redid it like x-wing where you buy expansions that aren't blind I'd be all in.

You can pick them up last time I saw at 5 below here in the US.

Bah that thing wasn't Mechwarrior, Dark Age was just Inner Sphere tank and infantry combat with a few Mechs.

Mechwarrior was the clans invading the Inner Sphere with Mechs as the main weapon of war with a few tanks and aircraft in support.

Actually, I just want to followup and say that Battletech should not be recommended to anyone looking for a system similar to X-Wing. I think everyone's familiar with X-Wing's mechanics, so I'll not outline the basics of combat. But here are the basics of combat in Battletech:

-Pick a target.

-Pick a weapon (yes, you have more than one. Figure half a dozen is standard, but it varies).

-Roll 2d6 and check a chart to determine whether you hit. The difficulty of the roll is modified by: your gunnery skill, range, your speed, your target's speed, intervening terrain, your mech's heat, and other factors I'm forgetting.

-Did you fire a missile or one of a couple other weapons? If so, roll 2d6 and check a chart to determine how many missiles or shotgun pellets hit

-If the shot hit, roll 2d6 to determine which part of the mech it hits. But wait! If you fired a missile launcher (there a lot of varieties), or shotgun autocannon, you need to make multiple location rolls. If you fired a short range missile, for example, you make an -individual roll for each missile that hit. SRMs are fired in groups of 2, 4, or 6. If you fired a shotgun, you make a roll per pellet that hit. Shotguns fire 2, 5, 10, or 20 pellets.

-Shade in the appropriate number of damage bubbles on the record sheet in the location the weapon hit. If you hit internal structure, roll a 2d6 to determine whether there was a critical hit. If there was a critical hit, roll again to determine which internal component was hit.

Repeat until you've fired all the weapons you intend to fire. Now calculate how much heat your attack generated, and adjust your heat scale accordingly. Your heat scale may also require you to roll 2d6 to see if, for example, your ammunition explodes.

If that's your thing, great; I'm certainly not suggesting people don't or shouldn't like the game. However, it's vastly more complex and fiddly than X-Wing, and if someone is looking for a system similar to X-Wing, Battletech is not that system. Alpha Strike might be; I'm not at all familiar with those rules.