Tentcon, our club’s annual convention, has come and gone. Per usual, it was a great success. I ran two events: Battletech: Alpha Strike Lance Busters and Big Chain of Command.

Lance Busters is a game mode of my own design for Battletech: Alpha Strike. It was an effort to make a game mode for Alpha Strike akin to the existing Solaris game mode for classic. It’s meant to be a party game mode where up to eight players can play.

The rules are simple at their core: you want credits to win. You earn credits by killing opponents or standing in the 2 foot square center of a 6 foot board. Each player gets a lance and can spend their credits to respawn mechs at random locations. Players can also freely exchange credits for deals with other players. The game used card draw for single unit activations (in effect, chit pulling). Tanks, VTOLs, and infantry are allowed alongside mechs, but each player can only bring four units valued at 150 points.

The game played smoothly and the players all reviewed it positively. The main piece of feedback I got was that the economy needed to be tweaked. Respawns were too cheap, so players had little incentive to bribe others.

I intend to play test more and add a few more features before public release. Specifically, I’d like to add more options for how players spend credits and give alternate activation systems. I’m a little worried doing so may overcomplicate an otherwise smooth running game exchange for more engaging repeat gameplay. To address this, I plan to fragment the ruleset into convention and  club varieties. One is the version you run with newbies and strangers while the other is for a club to run it repeatedly.

I don’t plan on campaign elements–I view Alpha Strike as beautiful in its simplicity and don’t wish to dirty that purity with large ungainly club campaigns.

Need to remind myself that I have a central objective here: build a simple party game mode that is fun, engaging, and smooth. Clarity of vision guides success in design.

Chain of Command worked out quite well after a brief wind up period of my players remembering their rules. Once they got into the swing, they managed to run through a full six player game in three and a half total hours. Success!

The scenario was dead simple: hold the crossroads for two consecutive turn ends. Done.

Simple is beautiful, I have to keep reminding myself. I spent hours agonizing over some interesting scenario ideas and then day of a few things went wrong and I defaulted to a simpler mission. Turns out that was the right move all along. The players managed to make it into a very interesting battle, with artillery strikes, heroic charges, valiant tankers, and embarrassing failures.

The MVP would be the Romanian player, whose poor soldiers shed a lot of blood pushing back the British and Soviet punches that kept coming.

The real scrum happened around the crossroad, appropriately enough. Repeated attempts by the British to throw back the Romanians in close quarters met variable success. In the end, the Romanians and their allies managed to barely hold on for the second turn end, their entire force being just one bad roll away from total morale collapse.

I was stunned by the timing and luck of the result. Literal single dice rolls could have swung the battle either way at multiple points in the final minutes. This was Chain of Command at its best and I honestly believe I dropped the ball as an organizer in producing an interesting mission. Thankfully, the sheer quality of Chain of Command as a ruleset saved the day and everyone ended up having a great time in a very dynamic battle.

Tentcon 2024 gave me a great excuse to put out some beautiful boards and hang with the people I love to hang with. Great success all around–I owe thanks to the organizer, Stephen Duall, our fearless club leader. His dedication to keeping our club a club (rather than a wargame chat group) is to be praised. He’s succeeded a decade now and I hope for many decades more.