Mechas & Monsters

[Malebolgia]

Hi,

I'm almost done with a new project called Mechas & Monsters. It's all manatic's fault with his excellent Pacific Rim project (link). When I saw this I knew I also wanted a Kaiju project. Fortunately I already had a box of 10 Macross Veritechs at home and some monsters, so time to get started!
First thing I did was to buy Ganesha's Samurai Robots Battle Royale and Mighty Monsters. I really liked the concept and some of the rules but as a whole it never clicked well. Next up was a table. Now I almost always play the 28mm scale, so I didn't want to invest a lot of money in a project in a new scale. Fortunately, Hawk Wargames sells a box of cardboard city tiles and cardboard buildings. For about 30GBP, excellent price IMO!Ordered one right away and bought a big plate of foam core in an art store.

Building a city
I decided to make the city in 6 3'x1'strips. This way I can easily make a 3'x6' playing field which fits on the gaming table. So I first cut the foamcore in strips of 1' by ~100cm. For each strip I took three of the 1'x1' tiles and glued them on top of the foamcore. Here are two shots of the first two 3'x1' strips with the first two assembled buildings and some models I had close by:




I was happy with the first results. The assembly went fast and was easy to do. I liked the look. Although the tiles are flat and the buildings are obviously cardboard, they give some height to the table and the total look is nice. So on with assembly! During the summer and fall I continued the assembly and glued the rest of the tiles and all of the buildings. I also ordered a big bag of 50 cheap Chinese 1/200 cars. Perfect as fillers for the table. Also scoured the web for more miniatures. Bought two more boxes of the Macross Veritechs, a lot of Monsterpocalypse miniatures and some big Tyrannid models.
Time for some new shots:






Really happy with the table layout! The scale is perfect for the models and there are enough buildings to make the table interesting to play on. So time for games...but when reading the rules again I decided I wanted something else. The Ganesha rules were a bit too complicated (or maybe "odd" is a better word for how it feels to me) and I wanted a simpler game with simpler mechanics. So I decided to make a rules set myself. A bit generic but with options for mayhem and differentiation between models.
Here are the rules as they stand now:

http://paintoholic.nl/kaiju/Mechas_Monsters.pdf

It uses elements and ideas from the Ganesha games, but simpler and for me are more logical.

I also ordered a bucketload of dice and green tokens for 'Hyper' so now all is set to play some games. Hopefully soon!

If anybody liked to read the rules and give feedback, that will be great! It's all my own thoughts and I like having input from other people.

[beefcake]

That's great. The cardboard buildings really fit the space and because it's such a small scale they don't really need any depth to them. The cars look cool too. Are you going to do any wrecked buildings?

[YPU]

Always happy to see more projects of this nature on here!

[Cosmotiger]

Are the Valkyries you're using the old 1/200 models?

[Malebolgia]

@Cosmotiger: They are from the Veritech box with 10 Veritechs...I got three of the boxes at Hobby Link:
https://secure.hlj.com/product/YMT00077
http://www.hlj.com/product/YMT00096/Gsh

Not supergood models, but good enough for gaming and they got the right size for me.

@Scurv: Thanks for the input! Let me know your thoughts on combat. After all, it's the most important part of the game! I decided to do something else than Ganesha as I'm not a fan of 1d6 systems for combat. I like rolling multiple dice, like in Pulp Alley, Tomorrow's War or the 4-goal system. But I liked Ganesha's system of colored dice and wanted to use that in some way.
For ranged weapons, I want to give players options. So if someone wants to blast away from a distance, then this is perfectly fine by me. But maybe I can add some more punch to melee combat to give it an edge against ranged combat.

[Malebolgia]

Wow Scurv...that is an EXCELLENT idea! Love the simplicity of it and the options it offers for the players. Many thanks! Will write up a system for this

[Warren Abox]

Looks good, one small thing you can do to add to the visual appeal is throw out some more 3D greenery.  Just a few trees here and there and a couple of clumps of green flock in the grassy areas will really bring that cityscape to life.

[manatic]

Great to see my little project was of inspiration - especially as I haven't done anything to it in a good while. Looking really good there!

[Uncle Mike]

Great stuff! I will be watching this with much interest. 

[CLT40K]

Looks super cool...