Battletech: How to Manage the Game - Playing with Introductory Set

Hi everyone,

Playing a practice battle with our friend Mr. E last night.  We worked on showing him the basics of the game.  He's taught us a lot about Warhammer 40K -- so we're teaching him about Battletech :)  Interesting to see how Battletech is different.

[Please check out our earlier post where we first opened up our introductory set.]

One big difference is that you have to somehow manage a fair amount of information for each mech through several turns.  Doesn't work to use dice-markers the way people do in 40K.

The game figures you'll use character sheets for that - and mark them up as the battle goes.  Here's how we have been handling that....

In our battle, a good guy Atlas managed to get toe-to-toe with a bad guy Assassin.  Not a good deal for the Assassin!  (Zeus and Whitworth in the background....)

When we played our first battle a couple of weeks ago, it got really tricky to manage the attacking phases.  In Battletech all attacks are "concurrent" - so you can't just resolve things one by one.  We got mixed up all the time.  "Did the arm get blown off that one this turn?  Or was that last turn?  Can this mech still use weapon XYZ?"

So, we came up with the idea (probably the whole world has been doing this already ??) of putting our mech sheets into plastic sleeves -- and marking off things in different colors for each turn.

Here's how the Atlas sheet looked during Turn 2....  (Orange for Turn 1 stuff; Red for Turn 2 stuff.)  We put "W" (walked); "R" (ran) or "J" (jumped) and then the number of hexes so that we could keep track of what the mech did.  W2 = walked 2.  And, we had marked the heat from the prior turn (notice that 's orange) so that we can remember whether it's updated THIS turn or whether that update is from the PRIOR turn :)

And, here's how the Assassin's sheet is looking....  In turn 1 it had taken some arm damage (Orange), and in turn 2 it jumped 7 (J7 marked in Red).

Then, we had some lucky dice rolling for the Atlas....  Hit with its Autocannon 20.  Where did it hit?  Worst case for the Assassin!!!

With the whiteboard markers + the plastic sleeves, two people had no trouble managing a battle of 26 mechs.  We had about 8 colors of pens.  But, it would probably have been OK if we had only 4 colors - we could have rotated through....

The big question....  Are there even better ways to manage this?  Trying to do it without using a computer - but maybe that's best.  Would appreciate any suggestions or ideas.