On Mechaton

I bought the PDF of Vincent Baker's Mechatonover the weekend. I think he's got the basic rules (or at least playtest) rules up for free, but I figured for six bucks, I'd just buy the thing with pictures and all that.

My son is seven, loves his Lego, loves games in general, and reads and "maths" at two or three grades above his class. He's reading the first Harry Potter book to himself. He plays Settlers of Catan and wins. So I figure the moderately abstract rules of Mechaton are a good fit for him, especially with the building robots thing.

So over the last couple of days, we've been building robots and we played half a battle tonight before bathtime caught up to us. And it's been fun, but there were some unexpected oddities, most of which have nothing to do with the rules.

Oddity the first. Nathan's never seen Transformers, Macross/Robotech, or anything like that… he doesn't "get" giant man-shaped fighting robots. Netflix is going to fix that for us, after I screen Macross. (Oh, don't I wish the Transformers movie was appropriate for a seven-year-old.) So none of his robots were "mecha" looking… they were both more "sled" looking, because standard Lego bricks encourage that form-factor. That doesn't hurt anything… the game is pretty abstract, and if you want those two transparent red studs to be lasers, they are. Just so long as you can break off all your "attachments," you're good.

Oddity the second. Nathan doesn't like abstract rules. The fact that cover blocks (or doesn't) direct fire and artillery equally doesn't seem right to him. Doesn't seem right to me, either… there's no line-of-sight rules. Your mech is only covered if he's immediately adjacent to the cover, and the rules don't recognize "height" of cover. I find that a little odd myself… two mechs can be separated by a wall twice their height and still shoot at each other with lasers. Maybe the game assumes that all cover is highly frangible and it's easy to blow holes through it.

And then there are, much to my son's frustration, things like no rules for a slime gun that covers your mech in slime and makes the ground slippery, causing it to fall down and be unable to get back up. (But then Nathan's the type that is suggesting rules before he's even played the game.)

Oddity the third. The idea of building robots with your Lego and fighting with them is really cool. But you don't get to build them with your Lego… you don't have all the tiny specialty pieces that Mechaton's default scale expects. We're talking mechs under 2" tall that fit more or less into a 1" hex. Yes, you can build bigger mechs… that's what we did, and playing on a 1" hex grid is doable, but annoying. But if we used a larger scale, we wouldn't have had much maneuvering room.

If you want to build mechs like Vincent does, and you will, because he and his friends have developed some really cool designs, some of which look scarily like Macross/Robotech designs, you're going to have to go shopping. And not at Target… at online shops that specialize in selling individual pieces. And an army of four mechs could cost you $20 or more in parts.

Sure, that's not bad when compared to a lot of metal miniature games, and a good selection of parts means a wide variety of designs. But it's not what you expect "out of the box"… you think you already own the box, and that's why you bought this game in the first place. (Granted, more research on Vincent's site would have told me that.)

But at least there are… 1,793 shops on bricklink.com, selling 49,251,589 items (as of this writing)! I didn't realize there was such a huge market for individual Lego parts. If you do visit Bricklink, compare prices… the first store I tried was twice as expensive on the average than the second I tried.

Oddity the fourth. If you aren't convinced that Vincent owns stock in Bricklink, you'll be convinced he owns stock in dice companies. My very first indie RPG was Vincent's Dogs in the Vineyard, and I spent like $25 in on dice for that game. Now I need four d6's each of green, red, blue, yellow, and white, plus two each green and red d8. Not to mention about twenty smaller blue d6, ten smaller yellow d6, and twenty d10 to indicate mech status. And a d12. Something like $20 worth of dice at dicepool.com, buying the plain-jane opaque style. (That "about twenty" is the maximum number of mechs you want on the table at once.)

Now, I used to play Champions… I own about forty six-sided dice. But due to dice mysteriously disappearing in my group, we all agreed to pick a color so we couldn't mix them up… I have around thirty blue six-sided dice and ten white, and none of the other colors the game calls for.

Technically, you can get away with a pair of each color for the entire table, but I found that awkward… in the middle of your attack, the defender needs to roll all of his dice (not just defense), and you're tying up half of those dice keeping track of your attack, movement, etc.

Mechaton is (implicitly) meant to be recordless. All your abilities and status are indicated by the mech and dice on the table next to your mech. But since I was playing with a seven-year-old, I made little record sheets with colored circles to put the numbers in. I found this sped things up… when asked how long the game takes, Vincent said that it speeds up after a few turns, as mechs get parts blown off and players become familiar with how many dice each of their mechs are supposed to get and quit counting attachments every turn. The record sheet helps with that. You could also record initiative and the like on it. Because we didn't have enough colored dice, I took generic ones and put them on the record sheet in the proper colored circle to indicate move and attack results while someone else was using the dice. But you could resort to the old-fashioned method of just writing numbers on the record sheet and revising them every turn. (When I fine-tune the sheet, I'll post it somewhere people can download it. It doesn't have Spotting on it yet, since I'm not using that rule with Nathan until later.)

Of course, all the indicator dice could be replaced with chits of the appropriate number. Litko Aero's custom counters would be really nifty for this, except that they'd cost way more than buying dice. 10 counters for $6.99, just so you can number them 1-10 (for initiative). You wouldn't have to have a full set for every mech, but you can buy ten d10's for $5, and twenty small d6's are under four bucks. But Litko's counters sure are pretty. If you're at all handy, you can make your own handsome chits, though they probably won't be laser-cut and engraved plastic.

Overall, Mechaton's been fun so far, and, with some bits of annoyance, you probably can play it with only the Lego and dice you've got. But a smoother, more aesthetically enjoyable play experience is going to require an additional investment.

Play-wise, it's fairly smooth. The abstraction seems to be at just about the right level to keep it from getting bogged down, but detailed enough to make tactical maneuvering and all that meaningful. I think I see why cover works like it does, because that's a major tactical component. Even if it feels a little odd. Though I think it undermines the idea of "artillery" if artillery's only function is to shoot at the range longer than direct fire, since there's no concept of "shooting over things." But it does keep things simple.

It can be kind of annoying to "hit" and then not do any damage (each damage die has only a 1-in-3 chance of damage), but when you do do damage, mechs deteriorate fast… every point of damage removes an attachment, and you have a maximum of four. After those are gone, you've got only two "structure" dice left, and while you can still function, you've lost a lot of flexibility. But we did have a turn where nearly every shot was a whiff.

Even if you've got a good selection of parts, count on setting aside more than a few minutes to build mechs, especially with newbies. Figuring out how to configure things without all the specialty parts is a challenge, and even with specialty parts, figuring out how to get this cannon to face forward is sometimes tricky. Nathan and I probably spent two hours building mechs, and I wasn't happy with mine. (Also, invest in parts trays. Nathan's Lego are typical for his age… all dumped in one big box, and all the neat bits settle to the bottom.)

(Side note: I had an advantage on the "nifty bits" part. When we bought Nathan his first "big" Lego set when upgrading from Duplo, we got what they call a "golden box". It didn't contain any of the advertised parts (standard bricks), it contained bags of random parts from other sets… from Han Solo in carbonite to control panels to weird connectors to antennae and blasters and castle walls. We had more than the usual number of nifty bits, and building mechs was still difficult.)

All in all, I like my first impression. The game is fun so far, I want to build those cool mechs like are in the book, and I'm trying to fine tune my parts list to a reasonable dollar amount. (Lucky me, someone local is looking to buy my copy of Aberrant, which will help subsidize my purchase. I should look in the basement to see what I can sell on eBay to raise more funds.)

Curse you, Vincent! You have me pawning off my beloved games in order to buy tiny Lego robots! (Okay, so Aberrant isn't exactly "beloved" by me.)

Anyway, I'll give another play report when we finish our game and maybe get another in there. Gotta play this with some adults, too.