Battletech 25th Anniversary Introductory Box Set
Battletech Introductory Box Set
This boxed set was released a few months ago (and has apparently sold out and they are doing another print run later this year) but this is a new blog and it's a product that I want to talk about in a post.
Battletech is something that I'm rather late to the game with. When I was a teenager 20 years ago I would see lots of mention of the game in gaming magazines (these used to come on paper you know) and would think it looked pretty cool. But I never got any further than that. The barrier to entry looked too great. You needed models, paints and terrain. Not to mention the rules looked pretty arcane from the outside (I didn't think at the time that AD&D was just the same for an outsider, I knew how THAC0 worked and I was happy). Fast forward 20 years and I dip in to Battletech a little by buying the latest edition core book Total Warfare. It whets my appetite a little for the game rules, and the fiction sections look cool. But the setting itself is still a little opaque to me, I start looking for ways to jump start me into a setting that's been growing for 25 years when I see on my favourite Australian internet games stockist that there is going to be a Introductory Box Set coming out soon. Great, I think, that sounds like just what I want.
I check the website next month and it's still 'Coming Soon'. Next month it's the same, and the next. So I check out the website of Catalyst Game Labs and there doesn't seem to be much information there. I find out that there might be some issues at CGL and I hear rumors that I'm not going to repeat here and I get worried that it might not happen at all.
Fast forward a few months and the word on the CGL website is that they have actually got the set printed and boxed and they even have photos of some of the boxes in their offices and I start getting excited again. Forget that I could have been spending the last few months getting up to speed with the background of the Battletech Universe (actually I didn't have time for that I had been running a D&D 4E game that was taking up a lot of my time), now was time to dive in to the world. The launch day of the product came and went and I waited for it to arrive in Australia (as is the way with living outside of the US) and when it did I snapped it up.
And then waited for it to be delivered. read on...