As you may well be aware, the current makers of Battletech and Shadowrun (IMR LLC under their imprint "Catalyst Game Labs") have bankruptcy proceedings against them. The primary shareholder appears to have embezzled about a million dollars from the company, and the company is falling apart. The license comes up in late May, and since IMR has apparently been underreporting their royalties to Topps, they are unlikely to get either license renewed. Licenses belonging to smaller and more agile companies such as Eclipse Phase and Cthulhutech have already been pulled. That's the bad news.

The good news is... the licenses come up in late May. How does Fantasy Flight Battletech sound to you? It sounds pretty awesome to me.

-Frank

From what Catalyst showed at GenCon, I guess BT is still firmly within their grasp. But what about FFG's Dust Tactics? That looks pretty amazing to me...

Frank said:

To me it sounds:

(in a good way!)

Frank said:

I second this!

I'd love to see what awesome maps and hex overlays FFG would come out with. Putting all their creative resources towards a project of this scale would probably yield a wealth of brand new quality game books and accessories like we've never seen before. The FFG crew always produce the best looking games in the industry. An old school franchise with such a rich detailed history could really use their touch. A partnership with Iron Wind on Battletech could also end up giving us cool metal minis for other games like Runebound.

Or they could go with a card based game.Players could cotrol lances of mechs or have a multi player version were each player controls one mech.Different houses would provide different card decks ( house specific mechs ) as well as generic mechs for all players.Spice it up with infantry and tanks and voila , an unreal game for beer and pretzel night.

Mr Squiggle said:

My snark meter is off, so I can't tell if you actually do or don't know about the old Battletech CCG that was out around 1996 from Wizards of the Coast. You could have as many mechs in play as you could build, usually up to five or so, along with tanks, infantry, artillery, air support. It was my favorite CCG, and I played quite a few.