A Mechaton record sheet

I started out playing Mechaton with my seven-year-old son. (Read the previous two posts for background.) And while Mechaton supposed to be a "recordless" game, where everything you need to know is on the mech or on the dice, it's a bit much for a seven-year-old to keep track of. So I made some quick record sheets... and I've revised them a bit.

That prints out on a quarter-sheet of paper.

I find it handy. Some Mechaton players insist that you can just look at your mech to know what attachments you have, but that's slow... especially if you have attachments that aren't attachments ("these four-legged mechs don't have movement attachments," or "this mech has a defense attachment in the form of his blocky form is armored") or worse, you get into loose definitions where what an attachment does is entirely based on non-obvious interpretation ("I have this co-pilot and he's Defensive Engineer, no wait, he's the Targeting Officer, no wait, he's Leg Movement Coordinator.")

And Vincent (the author) has said that the game speeds up when players start remembering what attachments their mechs have. Which I think is further justification for having record sheets. When you've got ten to sixteen units on the table, you shouldn't be waiting on players to tally up their mech abilities.

Now, as one person has pointed out, you can keep track of all of your mechs on a half-sheet of paper. But where's the fun in that? I'm playing with a seven-year-old, and this iconic record sheet works well... the colors are coordinated with the die types, of course. Weapons are ordered by range, left to right, to reinforce the iconic message. The only one that isn't entirely clear is the initiative icon... I couldn't think of an iconic representation of "who goes first?" and initiative is only thing the d10 is used for.

Oh, yeah... you write the number of dice you get in the blank circle. You write your total number of attachments in the circle in the upper-left corner, by your mech's name.

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to represent is where the d8 rules come into play... so far, I'm just writing "d8" in the circle instead of the number of six-siders. And it's a little messy when you start crossing out numbers and writing in new numbers beside them. These would be really slick if they were glossy and you could write on them with a wipe-off marker.

Feedback is welcome. I'm especially finding the shield and cross-hairs a bit boring.

When I finish tweaking it, I'll post the SVG file. (I'm working in Inkscape, an open-source vector graphics editor.)