

Like, a lot of people started making stuff for Tabletop Simulator,” says Turduckens after his initial release of the BattleTech game boards. “As the word got out it kind of blossomed.
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“I didn’t know how to use the hexagonal snap at the time so all of my hexes were slightly uneven and disjointed, haha!”įortunately for Turduckens, after the initial release of the hex boards he didn’t have to work alone. When developing the original hex boards for use in Tabletop, he ran into a few minor issues. Like, there was always the paper models, which a lot of the times were MechWarrior 4 and 3 models, which I don’t know what magic they used to rip those from the game because I could not figure it out.”Īnd of course there were some mishaps along the way. “The hardest thing was originally trying to find good sources for models. That means hex maps, ‘Mech models, even the Record Sheets had to be recreated by hand to work in Tabletop. Because the game has almost no scripting outside of rolling dice, everything that exists in real life has to be made to work in game. And I think the game had only come out for, like, a year or so, so then I decided I’d get to work on that.”īringing BattleTech to Tabletop Simulator wasn’t entirely a walk in the park.

“When I heard of Tabletop Simulator I found out that there was nothing on the Workshop for BattleTech. “I’ve been playing BattleTech since… well, yeah I started playing MechWarrior since I was, like, you know, three,” says Steam user Turduckens, who was the first to see the potential for Tabletop Simulator and its glaring omission of BattleTech. This new approach, Bills says, speeds things up considerably compared to previous efforts.“When I heard of Tabletop Simulator I found out that there was nothing on the Workshop for BattleTech.” As a result, older versions of BattleTech that have included non-mech units have taken hours, sometimes entire days to play. ”Īnother problem has been that in past implementations of similar combined arms rulesets the complexity has gotten out of hand. “So we have now taken the non-stars - the secondary guys in the wings - and allowed them to eclipse our stars. “One is that there are ways in which vehicles can start to overshadow BattleMechs,” Bills said. In so doing, Bills said that his team has solved two fairly intractable problems that have plagued BattleTech for years now. Since 2019, the publisher has sold nearly nine million miniatures - a huge number for anyone other than a company like Games Workshop.īattleTech: Mercenaries will expand Catalyst’s line of plastic miniatures even further, but it will do so with a new unified ruleset that emphasizes combined arms warfare - that is, BattleMechs, ground vehicles, air assets, and infantry all working together.

Bills’ Catalyst took the reins of the tabletop game some years later, relaunching the entire line in 2015.
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Only later did it morph into a tabletop role-playing game, a long and beloved series of video games, and a destination pre-VR arcade experience. Polygon sat down with managing developer Randall Bills to learn more.īattleTech began as an elaborate miniatures wargame in 1984, created by Jordan Weisman and L. Get ready to fight alongside ground vehicles, flying machines, infantry, and more in the game’s next incarnation. Now Catalyst’s legion of big stompy robots is gearing up for all-out war with BattleTech: Mercenaries, a new boxed product and an expanded ruleset that hits Kickstarter today. Later, in 2020, it launched the BattleTech: Clan Invasion boxed set at retail - alongside nearly 100 new plastic BattleMech miniatures. In 2019, Catalyst Games rebooted the nearly 40-year-old BattleTech tabletop franchise with two stellar boxed sets.
