I have a somewhat fraught relationship with competition. I love games, but I am also an anxious wreck of a human being whose brain is wired to constantly compare myself to everyone around me in the most unflattering terms possible. I have to thread a careful balance if I want to give myself challenges without wrecking my self-esteem in the process. Classic BattleTech fits as well as anything within the delicate framework of my competitive psyche. Its player base is small and relatively “casual,” typically gracious in both defeat and victory (something I’m still working on emulating). The game allows for skill expression everywhere from list construction through to moment-to-moment gameplay, and those challenges tickle my brain, but almost any sequence of die rolls in this game could possibly, if improbably, destroy almost any unit in this game: no plan is ever entirely safe from the whims of the bell curve. Whether you’re winning or losing a game of BattleTech, the dice inevitably generate funny stories and dramatic turns along the way.

With that in mind, let me tell you a few of the stories which emerged from my five games at WarZone: Atlanta over the weekend of February 8-9th.

Apologies to anyone who reads event reports as travelogues: I live in the Atlanta metro area, and our infamous traffic is actually pretty quiet when you’re driving in at 9 AM on the weekend, so the “travel” component of my tournament experience was entirely uneventful.

WarZone considers itself a “premium event,” and the scale of its Warhammer events is remarkable (I had to fight to not gawk like an idiot when I spotted Noted 40k Celebrity Player John Lennon while walking past the big hall), but the field for BattleTech was small: Space constraints capped us at a 20-player maximum, and even with the event organizers introducing a cheaper ticket for our skinflint player base, omitting the expensive catered lunch that’s a signature feature of WZA, only 17 paying players actually showed up to participate (with the co-TO stepping in as an eighteenth so no one had to take a bye). It was sort of a “ranked” event, submitting scores to the MechCommander Review Circuit, but the MRC isn’t exactly the ITC… they don’t just track event scoring, any randos who sign up can report their kitchen-table games for matched play rankings, with pretty broad and permissive guidelines on what those games can look like, so those numbers don’t mean much. The prize pool was significantly more lucrative than is the norm for BattleTech tournaments, but the atmosphere was hardly cutthroat.

BattleTech was tucked away in a hallway/lounge behind the main hotel ballroom where the main Warhammer gaming was happening. We were an inconvenient distance from the restrooms, but I felt pleasantly secluded, and we were never really interrupted by participants in any of the weekend’s other events.

Some of the other players complained about an automated fragrance-dispensing machine stationed near us, but I hardly noticed it myself. There was alcohol available on Saturday, with a staffed bar just past the end of our gaming tables and waiters occasionally circulating the area, while Sunday was a dry event.

The tone was set for the weekend when I stepped in the door and immediately had an excited tween (who had come from out of town with his dad) start info-dumping to me about the list he’d brought. Energy was high throughout the weekend, and most of the players happily intermingled between rounds, swapping stories of memorable victories and defeats. I wasn’t all that keen on WarZone’s baseball-themed event t-shirt, but our TO gave everyone a nice little swag bag with some snacks, water, and a few neat little tchotchkes, including a custom event patch, some 3D-printed hex bases, and a laminated GATOR calc aid.

Forces for WZA were 9k BV, built off of Civil War era MUL listings, with a maximum of six units, including up to two vehicles and two battle armor squads. No ProtoMechs, no conventional infantry, no on-map artillery, no aerospace. We could bring up to 30 BSP of “Strikes” (e.g. air strikes, air cover, and artillery) per the new Mercenaries BSP rules. Scenarios were not shared with the players in advance of the tournament: Individual packets were placed on the tables 30 minutes or so before the start of each round, with a quick huddle right before round start to let us ask any immediate questions we might have in a public forum. Each scenario allowed players to earn up to 75 points through completing a primary objective, up to 50 points of kill scoring depending on what percentage of the opposing force’s BV they destroyed (with crippled units counting for 50% of their BV), and a 25 point bonus if you won the game, for a maximum of 150 points available in each round. The optional rules in play were Backward Level Changes, Careful Stand, One-Armed Prone Fire, Floating Criticals, Expanded Damage Modifiers, Enhanced Flamers, and Front-Loaded Initiative (technically a houserule). Forced Withdrawal was enforced, and the pilot of a crippled ‘Mech with a missing leg would automatically eject at end of round if they failed to stand up. (That this did not apply to vehicles which were both crippled and immobilized was a surprise tool which would hurt us later.) Players were to declare attackers and targets before any dice rolling took place, but didn’t have to declare what specific weapons/ammo they were firing until attack resolution (unless they were splitting their fire between targets). Each round was played on two mapsheets or one BattleMat, with the short sides as the starting edges.

I set myself a challenge to bring a Clan list, and settled on Nova Cat in part because someone gave me a free Nova Cat t-shirt at Dragon*Con last year, and in part because To Ride The Chimera made me a huge fan of the Clan Protectorate. Even without seeing the scenarios for WarZone in advance, I played in a three-round tournament run by the same TO back in December (placing second out of a field of 24!), and I felt reasonably confident I knew what to expect. Two out of three scenarios in the Toys For Tots Tournament relied on tonnage-based objective control, while the third emphasized speed over everything else. I also knew that any area-control objectives would require VTOLs to land in order to claim them. With that in mind, I wanted a list focused on mobile beef, with one ‘Mech capable of jumping 7+ in case of any relay-race / flag-capture shenanigans, and I wanted at least one ‘Mech able to project a truly intimidating amount of ranged damage threat.

The Gargoyle Prime is always my first stop for a BV-efficient slab of armor moving improbably fast. Its armament should never be discounted, either: it has enough crit-seeking ability to pose an existential threat to Combat Vehicles, and it can also very convincingly threaten Battle Armor and TSM ‘Mechs with Inferno SRMs. I doubt I’ll ever go to a tournament without a Gargoyle Prime unless it’s era-restricted out of availability.

There are only six non-Experimental chassis capable of jumping 7+ on any Clan lists during the Civil War era, and only three of those are on the Nova Cat list: the Viper (Dragonfly) in all its configurations, the Conjurer (Hellhound) 2, and the Jenner IIC 4. I found the Jenner IIC 4’s armor pitiful, too vulnerable to air strikes which could ignore its TMM. The Conjurer 2 is an amazing platform, but it is expensive for the amount of gun it brings to the party. That left me the Dragonfly, and I settled on the Prime configuration as a reasonable facsimile of a Clan Wraith. It’s a little more expensive than a TR-1, it has less pulse damage, and it’s capable of exploding, but it’s even faster, has no heat issues, and, while the Wraith is a well-known quantity in tournament circles, opponents don’t typically expect a funny little guy with a big nose to be quite as tough as the Dragonfly actually is. Plus, I already owned the mini!

For the big damage threat, my testing lists looked at the Nova Cat E. I liked bringing the Clan’s namesake ‘Mech, I liked the all-range threat of the ATMs, I loved the thrill of sandblasting someone with enormous damage from high-explosive warheads, but I didn’t love just how many explosive crits it had, and I ultimately decided that I couldn’t afford the amount of time it was taking me to roll clusters and hit locations for all the ATMs in a tournament setting. I’ve only been playing since August 2024, and I don’t have the hit location charts memorized, and I don’t own a proper Box of Doom (a storage box divided into cells large enough to roll 2d6 in so that many pairs of dice can be rolled simultaneously). I needed my big damage to come in bigger chunks. I ultimately settled on a Gargoyle C for the final list (after some brief drama over the fact that its useless A-Pods technically weren’t tournament-legal equipment since they’re not described in the BattleMech Manual), despite my deep-seated fear of Ultra Autocannons’ jam risk.

For some more mobile beef, with added durability (no explosion risk!) and very accurate damage, my testing list turned to a Gargoyle D. I liked it in testing, but I didn’t feel like it brought quite enough bite for its BV. When I found myself rearranging the list, Perigrin’s enthusiasm for the Kingfisher led me to slot the Kingfisher Prime into this role. The list’s overall speed stayed the same, and the Kingfisher could boast more armor and more tonnage than anything else in either iteration of the list. It did bring a little explosive ammo, but its engine would be harder to crit, and its 10-damage energy weapons were even more accurate than the Gargoyle D’s TarComped ERLLs.

Past those four ‘Mechs, I simply did not have the BV to fill out the rest of the six-unit activation cap with ‘Mechs. I considered a Fire Moth to at least fill the ‘Mechs out to a Star, but I feared that BSP air cover might make it a liability. I looked over the Nova Cats’ vehicle availability, but found their CVs uninspiring, and I didn’t really have appropriate minis to proxy for most of those, either. That left me bringing battle armor, taking advantage of my omnis to haul some little Initiative-sinking nuisances into the fray. I didn’t have to acquire any new minis to bring BA, either, as I still have a big collection of the old WizKids Clix minis ready to be re-based, and the infantry aren’t far enough out of scale for their size to matter.

Since the Enhanced Flamers rule was in play, I had my eye on flamer-wielding BA, and fortunately they tend to the cheap end of battle armor BV pricing as well. I decided to take a point of Clan Medium Battle Armor (“Rabid”) for its bargain basement price and increased mobility (Jump 4 is a huge improvement over Jump 3); I also discovered in testing that their ability to spike damage by launching both their volleys of SRM-2s at the same time can be situationally advantageous, even if it leaves them under-armed after that volley. I considered a second Point of CBA, but I had enough BV to bring a unit of Salamanders instead. While Salamanders are a bit of a glass cannon, I appreciated their immunity to anyone else who might try to solve the problem of battle armor with Inferno SRMs, and their ability to convincingly threaten the full +15 heat a ‘Mech can suffer from external sources in a turn all by themselves was compelling.

I did worry a bit about my battle armor’s vulnerability to area-effect damage from bombing and artillery BSPs, but my testing indicated that the local player base wasn’t particularly well versed in battle armor’s weaknesses, and my BA was cheap enough in BV that I wasn’t too concerned if they got eradicated in some games.

My final list, then, was a Kingfisher Prime, Gargoyle Prime, Gargoyle C, Dragonfly Prime, Clan Medium Battle Armor (“Rabid”), and Salamander Battle Armor. To answer the question I got repeatedly throughout the tournament- “How did you fit three Clan Assault ‘Mechs into a 9k BV list?” -everything was at 4/5 Gunnery/Piloting except for the Gargoyle C at 3/5. While I’m glad that BattleTech doesn’t care about such things, I was amused to be able to say that my entire list was WYSIWYG down to their specific Omni configurations!

For BSP, I brought a Light Strike, Light Bombing, and Heavy Air Cover. I wanted at least one AoE to deal with enemy battle armor, and going with the light bombing gave a better success chance (unless opposed by light air cover) and saved BSP points relative to the heavy bombing or artillery. A light strike gave me a second chance to deal damage to a high-TMM enemy unit, and heavy air cover maximized my point spend and offered the potential to shut down a more expensive, higher-damage enemy air attack. Unfortunately, using BSP is still fairly new and unfamiliar for me and much of the local community, and in two of my five WarZone games both my opponent and I completely neglected to use our air support.

Round One: Operation Sumo

In this round we were tasked with pushing a line of five objective markers across the map. Whoever had the most tonnage on a particular marker controlled it, and whoever controlled the most markers pushed the line four hexes towards their opponent’s starting edge.

My opponent piloted a Kuritan Ghost Regiment list, focusing on bringing relatively unusual units and close-range brawlers. Sunder Prime, Charger SA5, Wraith TR1, Bishamon 3K, Raiden Battle Armor (Laser), and Sprint Scout Helicopter. Everything was 3/4, except the helicopter at 5/3. Thankfully, both he and the other LBX/20-wielding player had brought Boxes of Doom to roll hit locations.

The story of this match largely revolved around my Gargoyle C. Positioning and terrain kept my Kingfisher out of the fight in the early goings, and my opponent poured everything into trying to kill my UAC/20 while I, in turn, tried to neutralize the LBX/20 on his Charger. Somehow, the dice permitted the Garg C to survive without even being crippled, even when I spiked its heat up to +19 by committing to an Alpha on a turn when I didn’t expect it to survive the weapon attack phase!

We started our final round shortly before the TO called out “Don’t start another round,” and its pivotal shooting carried on over twenty minutes past the point we were supposed to be dice down. My opponent hoped that he’d be able to finish both my Gargoyles, but instead he learned the downside of Inner Sphere XL engines: Both the Sunder and the Charger died to side torso loss in that last exchange. He did, however, enjoy getting to boast of the fact that my Gargoyle Prime was finished off by pilot death due to LBX pellet pings, an SRM to the head, damage from falling after failing the 5+ consciousness check, and finally an ammo explosion.

As for my opponent’s conventional forces, I destroyed the helicopter turn one when it landed to try to claim an objective marker, and I vaporized the battle armor with a bombing run the turn they dropped off the Sunder. Combined with pushing the objective twice to my opponent’s one push, I won 85/20.

We were formally on lunch break after round one. Since I was on the cheapskate ticket and my game had gone over time, I just pulled a peanut butter sandwich out of my backpack and ate that.

Round Two: Operation Red Queen

This was my least favorite of the scenarios, though that was partly just due to circumstances. This was a modified head-hunter scenario, with primary points scored by destroying your enemy’s command ‘Mech, keeping your command ‘Mech alive, and destroying enemy units with your own command ‘Mech. There was a minor twist of an escalating bonus to Initiative if you lost initiative 2+ times in a row.

My problem was that I paired into the “ringer,” the co-TO who was filling out our numbers, and he didn’t actually care about winning. His force was, approximately, a Schrek PPC Carrier, Behemoth tank, Hunchback 4P (lasers), Hunchback 4SP (SRMs), Grasshopper 5J, and Quickdraw 5A, with varying skill levels (as high as Gunnery 2 on the Schrek). He nominated his Quickdraw as his commander and set out to play keep-away, tucking it away in the backfield while everything else moved up to screen. I got my Dragonfly through to hunt the Quickdraw, but just did not do enough damage to put it down. Meanwhile, my own commander was my Kingfisher, which was nearly indestructible, but didn’t bring as much raw killing power as the Gargoyle C might have offered. I exacerbated the situation by spreading damage across his force, unwilling to ignore either of the Hunchbacks, the backstabbing Grasshopper (which walked off two AC/20 hits without any internal damage), or the deadly-accurate Schrek. This was also one of the two games in which I forgot to use my air support. I intended to hold it until at least one hit location on the Quickdraw was into internal structure, but I waited too late.

When all was said and done, all that had really happened was that I’d crippled his Schrek (scoring an engine crit to completely disarm and immobilize it, but NOT destroy it), and he’d crippled my Gargoyle Prime (landing two engine hits off of one center-torso through-armor crit), earning neither of us any kill points since neither crippled unit was costly enough for half their BV to reach the 10%-of-overall-BV mark where we would start earning secondary points. 15/15 draw.

This was not the last time I would suffer because I didn’t focus my damage on a single target.

Between rounds we did the Force Parade: Everyone set up their forces for paint judging and we got to vote for our first, second, and third favorites. Results would not be revealed until the awards ceremony at the end of Day Two.

Round Three: Operation Daisy Cutter

This was a fun scenario, though almost inevitably high-scoring. Our objective was to destroy the enemy’s three fuel depots (level one buildings with CF 80) while protecting our own. The twist was that they would blow up for significant AoE damage whenever they were destroyed, but with the -4 TN from being Immobile targets it wasn’t at all hard for most lists to hit them from a distance rather than getting too close.

I paired into the man who was TO for my first-ever BattleTech tournament, who was jovially drinking cocktails and taking it easy through WZA. He had the standard Nightstar, an Archer with Artemis’d 20-tube racks, the dreaded Pulse/Targeting Computer Phoenix Hawk 3PL, the standard Locust IIC, an Ostscout 9S, and a Warrior VTOL.

The Nightstar and Archer were able to get on hills high enough to guarantee that they could see all my fuel depots, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to effectively protect mine and would need to level the playing field by pushing up to destroy his. The dice were fairly screwy this game: His Phoenix Hawk could barely hit anything even at a -3 TN bonus, my Gargoyle C once again survived an improbable amount of hate thrown against it, etc., and that all led up to the moment which truly sealed the game for me: I tagged the head of the Nightstar, which had previously been damaged by an exploding fuel depot, with one of my Viper’s pulse lasers in our last round of shooting, killing it. The Locust IIC was eviscerated by my Kingfisher the same turn, and the Warrior had previously died, while only my Salamander BA (victimized due to my opponent’s past trauma regarding Salamanders) were crippled on my side, so I won on secondaries, 125/75.

After that most of us sat around and chatted for a while, waiting for a generous out-of-towner to pick up pizza for everyone. It took a while for them to get back, despite having ordered in advance, but the conversation was good, and the pizza proved worth the wait. The best stories I heard from other people’s games: One player had blown the leg off of a Zeus and moved in for the kill, detonating its gauss rifle to finish it off… except in the same round of firing, the Zeus squeezed off a desperate gauss shot from prone, inside minimum range, and managed to blow its attacker’s head off for a mutual kill. Elsewhere, a particularly reckless player decided to DFA one of Operation Daisy Cutter’s fuel depots with a Wasp, but then also shot at the depot with other ‘Mechs just in case, and blew it up in the weapon attack phase, annihilating the poor Wasp in midair. Rest in Pieces, Waspy.

Somewhere in the midst of waiting and talking and eating I looked over placing and noticed that despite my low-scoring draw, I was in third, as the rankings preferenced win/loss over scoring, and I was one of only three people who hadn’t dropped a game at that point.

“Wow,” I said to myself, “all I have to do is NOT LOSE tomorrow and I’ll be in the top three!”

Reader, one should never tempt fate like that.

I ended up going to bed in a bit of a rush on Saturday night and forgot to turn my alarm on; it’s only through the grace of the Blessed Blake, Great Father Kerensky, and my own circadian rhythm (because I usually open at work on Sundays) that I woke up only a few minutes past when my alarm would’ve gone off. Therefore, I was on time for…

Round Four: Operation Domination

This was a scenario I’d playtested for the TO, but with a surprise twist. It was an objective control mission with five level-2-tall objective columns. A player would gain control of an objective as long as they were the only player with units that weren’t crippled, shut down, involuntarily prone, or unconscious adjacent to that objective at the end of round, and objective control was “sticky” in the 40k sense: You would continue to control an objective until the opponent contested it at the end of a subsequent round. The twist was “The Floor Is Lava,” with ‘Mechs taking extra heat if they ended their turn on level 0 or lower terrain (including water), +5 in rounds 1-6 and +10 for rounds 7-12. Incidentally, I did check before the start of my game, and I was glad to see that no table was stuck on a map lacking elevated terrain.

I had no qualms with the scenario, but this was a thoroughly miserable game for me. My opponent was a long-time player from out of state, with two GenCon World Championships under his belt from the late ‘90s. He was operating on a different set of basic gameplay etiquette than I’m used to from my local group, and we mixed like oil and water. We disagreed frequently on LoS questions and the like (leading to more judge calls than all the rest of my matches combined), he misgendered me in conversation with the TO during judge calls, he complained about his dice while thoroughly kicking my ass, I got more tilted than I should have, it was just… rough.

Not helping my mood was the fact that I was also just completely outplayed here. My opponent had a very lean and VERY mean Wolf-in-Exile list, as the only player in the tournament who brought just four units: Kingfisher Prime, Nova Cat M, Phantom H, Puma S, all upskilled (I thought I remembered them as being 3/4 across the board, but that doesn’t actually work out BV-wise. I’m not sure which one was less skilled, though I’m pretty sure I remember the Kingfisher’s BV being over 3k, which would indicate it was 3/4). I went in with a very wrong-headed determination to focus on the objective rather than trying to out-fight his ‘Mechs: By spreading myself thin I prevented myself from focusing firepower against him – a single engine crit on the Phantom was the only critical damage I landed the entire game – where if I had managed to take out one or more of his units, he wouldn’t have had the manpower to go wide in the late game. In any case, I emotionally lost the game on round 3, when his Phantom drilled my Kingfisher’s left torso from behind and set off the LRM ammo, sending it into forced withdrawal, and my play just got sloppier from there. I completely forgot to drop my Salamanders (having mounted them on a different OmniMech than I had in the previous rounds or any of my practice games), I exposed my Gargoyle C to a back shot from the Nova Cat M (and proceeded to watch it score more than 10 potential crits across the Gargoyle’s torso with LBX cluster, killing it extremely dead), etc., etc. I also forgot to use my air support in the midst of everything, while my opponent was contemptuous of BSP in general and chose not to use his. In the end, only my Clan Battle Armor survived the game, and I suffered a brutal 30/110 defeat. My opponent went on to place second, and I… well, you’ll see.

Lunch was a pack of sandwich crackers and a fruit cup, because I’d run out of time to make another proper sandwich for myself that morning and was down to my backup snacks. It’s just as well… I was still shaking off my salt from round four while I ate, and I probably wouldn’t have had the appetite for much more than what I had.

Round Five: Operation Flagrant Fowl

This was a capture-the-flag mission, but with the added local color of the “flag” in question being a 3D print of the “Big Chicken,” the iconically kitsch, mildly-animatronic sign seen in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the heart of Marietta, GA. I was facing off against a frequent opponent, the man who placed third right behind me at the Toys for Tots tournament back in December. I played against him in my first game testing a list for WarZone and got plastered… but I had shifted my list since then where he hadn’t, and we were playing an entirely different scenario.

He brought a Zeus 9S2, a Lynx 9C, a Phoenix Hawk 3PL, a TR1 Wraith, and “Muhammad Ost-li,” an Ostsol 8M with a 4/2 pilot. I believe the Zeus and Lynx were at 3/5, the Wraith was 4/4, and the 3PL was 4/5, though I could be wrong.

The way things went, he kept the Zeus and Lynx back to play defense for his chicken while sending the rest of his ‘Mechs at my chicken. I, in turn, only sent the Dragonfly forward while keeping everything else back to meet his faster elements. I basically set up a kill box around my chicken, and, critically, he let his forces trickle into it, rushing the Wraith ahead instead of holding back to push all three fast ‘Mechs in at once. Muhammad Ost-li punched the foot out of my Gargoyle C by drilling two punches into the same leg from a lower level, but that was the only critical damage my opponent landed, in trade for all three of his fast ‘Mechs being destroyed. On the opposite end of the field, my Dragonfly narrowly survived a very scary Lynx head kick to grab the chicken and get back out, though I wasn’t able to quite get it back to my board edge before game end.

We both forgot our air support until the very end of the last weapon attack phase of the game, when I suggested we should throw all of it at each other to see if it accomplished anything. I immediately regretted this when my opponent’s air strikes did nothing of consequence while mine dealt the final blow to finish off the Wraith; my opponent was dealing with more than enough injury without that final insult. With that act of ‘Mech murder, though, the game ended in a 65/0 victory for me.

With the fifth and final round in the books, it was time for awards! Certificates and Salvage Boxes were given out for a few specific accomplishments: “Heart of a MechWarrior” for bringing positivity and good cheer to the tournament, “Bold Strategy, Cotton” for bringing the force with the lowest BV total, “The Price is Right” for getting closest to 9k BV, “Focht Yeah!” for focusing on objectives over kills, “Honorable War Crimes” for focusing on kills over objectives, and “Didn’t Hear No Bell” as the obligatory Wooden Spoon.

The main awards went back and forth between the tournament winners and the force parade winners, with first place in the tournament choosing his prizes first and third place in the paint voting getting the last of the prize pool (except for the UrbanMech Lance he didn’t want). I ended at fourth in the tournament standings, just off the podium.

Check out the awesome ‘Mechs the top painters brought!

The undefeated tournament winner was the paint winner of my heart, however, with a collection of RWBY-themed paint schemes and a display board to match (complete with Grimm Clanners!):

My biggest takeaways from the event were:

1. Spending BV on beef and tech instead of skills – my mental shorthand is “building wide rather than tall,” but there’s only so wide you can go with a strict unit cap –  isn’t the only winning strategy. I’m fairly comfortable playing with 4/5 skills, more so than a lot of folks in my meta, and they usually serve me well enough (even if Piloting 5 in conjunction with the ubiquitous Expanded Damage Modifiers optional rule puts a lot of my mechs on the ground), but my round four game definitely taught me how a player skill differential can make a MechWarrior skill differential really hurt. A Gunnery 4 Dragonfly Prime also feels worse than a Gunnery 4 Wraith when you’re constantly missing with the SRM on the jump, even though you don’t actually miss out on all that much damage. On a similar note…
2. Sometimes, you need to kill. I generally favor the Speed and Armor axes of the Speed/Armor/Guns trifecta, and I prioritize completing objectives over sheer violence, but an opposing force of sufficiently high threat must be blunted before you can afford to focus on objective play, and lethality is necessary to score secondary points in this tournament framework. I need to learn how to balance my mobile beef with some good ol’ ultraviolence, and I need better target discipline when it comes to focusing down enemy units.
3. Battlefield Support can be impactful… as long as I remember to use what I bring. The MRC community is actually slightly horrified over our TO’s decision to hand out BSP points rather than charging BV for Battlefield Support, with several voices fearing that it does too much to discourage bringing Battle Armor and squishy Light ‘Mechs… and frankly, it’s in my best interest to help spread that fear! While I never leave home without my Inferno SRMs, the fewer Fire Moths and Spiders I have to deal with, the better. Now, if they only made airstrikes big enough to deter Phantoms…
4. Bringing tools that are underutilized in my local meta is definitely still a good idea. Inferno SRMs, flamers, battle armor, Gargoyle Primes… as long as I’m the primary source of these things in my community, the player base is going to continue to be under-prepared to counter them. I’m sure they’ll still adapt over time, but I’m the right kind of nerd to keep pulling new variants out of my hat.

Ultimately, I was disappointed that my fourth game went so badly and I ended outside the top three, but I have to acknowledge that I did well, and my overall enthusiasm for playing Classic BattleTech at an unusually competitive level is undiminished. I’ve only been playing this game since August 2024, and I look forward to learning more and more of its intricacies.

I won’t be able to make it to “Brawl in the Bluegrass” up in Kentucky, so my next tournament is likely the local “Summer Fever II” in early June. It’s going back to the Helm Renaissance, the period my very first BattleTech tournament was set in, and I’m planning to go back to the Free Worlds League, my favorite Inner Sphere faction, despite their highly dubious use of rediscovered technology during that time frame. I really don’t love playing in that time period (no Gargoyles!), but it does succeed in forcing me to consider new angles to approach my problems. Perhaps I’ll see you again in June, with more stories to tell and more lessons learned!

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