Board Game Designers Forum

This game seeks to translate the tactical ideas of games like Battletech and Starsiege into a more portable faster form. Focuses of the rules will be on movement, range, weapon properties, and resource management.

Elements:
Mech movement
Mech Weapon Loadouts
Mech Armor values
Weapon properties
Maneuvering
Different Pilots
action or tactics cards: adds an additional luck and tactic variable
Heat or Energy resource
Ammunition resource

Mechanics:
Mechs as a template frame for equipment cards. These are assigned based on the chassis that a player deploys. Each mech card has it's associate equipment listed with it; equipment is common between all factions. Chassis also define the movement speed, armor, and heat/energy dissipation, as well as the chassis' point cost. Point cost is used to set up roughly matched fights using multiple mechs from multiple styles.

Exhausting/Tapping:
Weapons and equipment are exhausted during the turn when they are used. Weapons have cycle time, equipment modules have response time, and so forth. Exhausting a piece of equipment activates it's effects and costs, like causing damage at the cost of ammunition or heat or energy. Until the next turn happens, the weapon cannot be used again.

Pilot Cards
Pilot Cards are either chosen by the players before the game begins or are randomly assigned. Each pilot card represents a personality in the game universe with bonuses and penalties they apply to the chassis they are assigned to, or "pilot".

Terrain, Tactic, and Action cards
These cards are the random variable in the game. Players have a hand of these cards, which are drawn from either a player deck or a single shared deck. They can be played at various times during the turn to alter the rules.

Shooting:
The primary action in Mech Combat. To shoot, the player whose turn it is selects a mech, and picks up all of it's weapon and equipment cards. They then pick which weapons they want to use against one or more target mechs. The other player looks at his tactics hand, and selects any tactics cards he can play during the other player's turn in response. Both players reveal their choices simultaneously, and then resolve the shooting according to the rules modified by tactics cards.

weapons have:
range (short, medium, long)
damage (in points)
heat caused/energy used/ammunition used
cycle time (usually every turn)
type (energy, ballistic, missile)

You determine if you Hit the target by comparing your Pilot's gunnery total, plus a D6 die roll, to the Target's defense rating. Gunnery and Defense can be modified by tactics, terrain, and action cards. The default Defensive value is found on the Chassis card, the base Gunnery value is found on the Pilot card.

If the attacker's Gunnery + modifiers + D6 > Defense + Modifiers + D6, then the target takes damage from the weapon declared. Repeat for the other weapons fired.

Simplified shooting would be gunnery + modifiers vs Defense + Modifiers.

Record damage by moving the HP marker on the damaged chassis, and record ammunition spent, heat gained, energy lost on both Chassis relevant fields.

Perform this for each weapon being fired. Tactics cards will specify whether their modifiers apply for one weapon or the whole phase. Something like "Smoke Screen" would apply the whole round, while "jank" would apply against a single enemy attack.

Possible Additions:
tile based map system
different rule levels:
Level 1: simplest and fastest.
Level 2: moderately complex and medium length
Level 3: intricate and long games