Reply To: Anti Shiny Syndrome League

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I LOVE Renegade Legion (it was FASA’s follow on gamr from BattleTech), particularly Centurion (the Grav Tank game), my only hurdle now is trying to afford the metals from CinC (wish I lived in the US, cus the shipping and import duties almost double the price 🙁 ).

It’s going back to an era when games had rules that were complicated by todays standard, but the designers were trying to “simulate” something on the tabletop (rather than trying to showcase a particular game mechanism). The rules had “meat” on them that you could get your teeth into, and kept the old noggin doing mental arithmetic (nowadays we have to do Sudoku to do that).

I dread seeing the words “streamlined” when the designer is explaining the rules (usually means simplified to the extent you may as well chuck dice at figures to calculate casualties, and that’s not a new thing H G Wells did it first 😀 ). Boardgames of the same era were usually just “family” games (monopoly, cluedo etc), or were military themed boardgames (usually a refight of a certain battle) put out by SSI or AH. There was no real middle ground (it was Grognard or nothing), but the games made no apology for it. It was up to the gamer to “learn” the rules (sometimes over multiple games), instead of being able to pick them up in five minutes.

I personally feel that it’s this simplification over the years that’s perhaps made a lot of games feel “generic”, or boring to play. Results are determined more on dice roll or card pull than anything the player does (and a lot of more modern games feel that way to me). Perhaps this resurgence of BT is down to players re-discovering the old rules, where the rules are more than 10 pages, you have to keep paper records of things, you have to apply your mind and pay attention to the game.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I want to play a more rules “lite” game, than can be over in 30 minutes. But there’s times when I want to spend a whole afternoon on a game and really dig down and get immersed in the game itself (I never get that feeling with the short run games). And over the past 20 odd years or so, the majority of new releases have been towards the “lite” rules and short games (although Risk has very simple rules, but the games can last for HOURS (as well as players refusing to ever trust you again for years after that game where you backstab someone to gain that continent 😀 )). NEVER play RISK with family, and only with friends you can afford to lose…….

But Renegade Legion : Centurion…Now there’s a game. Just such a shame it never got the chance to evolve like BattleTech did (and gather a wider following) before FASA went under 🙁