Social media targeted advertising is simply getting far too good. And correct. This popped up on my feed as an upcoming Kickstarter, I flung the link into our Discord to see who might be interested because I am “too busy to add another game onto my list” and it really took off amongst a few of our writers. Including me. Here I am a week later with two forces of mechs ready for playing. Oops? Something about weird mechs really just does it for us here at Goonhammer HQ. You can find the Kickstarter here. Note that it’s digital only, just STL files and PDFs. 

The Premise

Titanicus but it’s diesel/petrol powered rust buckets instead of towering God-Engines; it’s even called dieselpunk. That’s the pitch and that’s all you should need, really. Welcome to the Smoglands, a barren wasteland where industry and corporations “won” over government and have turned the world into exactly what you expect it to look like. The land are scarred from centuries of harsh mining, rivers of oil run thick, and the air is unbearably thick with smog and soot. Cities stand as fortresses ruled by corporations where production and industrial progress is a constant. 

There are five corporations each with their own lore, playstyle, and specific mechs to play with. The Krim Corporation are all about order, discipline, and exploitation with factories that are run as barracks as the most militant company. Nox Industries produce and expand relentlessly with thickly-armoured mechs wielding heavy weapons. Triton Engineering cling to their crumbling oil rigs, each mech salvaged from diving equipment and anything they can find. Arcus Technologies are the mad scientists powering their structures with arc-reactors creating mechs as precision instruments of war. Lastly the Freegear Coalition are…everyone else, made up of rebels, deserters, renegades, and rogues fighting against the last four corporations for simple freedom using whatever they can to create their mechs. 

All of the models for this game are 3D printable, with some options to buy physical prints around the internet in either 15mm or 32mm scale. The game is designed around playing the former, 15mm, scale on a table half the size of a Warhammer 40k table or 3’x2’ board with the 32mm scaled version simply doubling all sizes and ranges. Throughout we’ll be referring to everything assuming you’re playing the “normal” 15mm scale. Jake printed off a 32mm mech and while it would be very cool to play big stompy robots at that size it’s just far less reasonable and requires a larger terrain investment; this game wants you to play with a pretty dense table of terrain or to simply play very, very, short games. 

In short, it’s a skirmish game that’s going to have you field roughly three to eight models per side that operate fully independently of one another. At 15mm scale the small and medium sized mechs stand roughly to scale with modern day Space Marine Terminators, making them very easy to store and transport. We’ll get into how they play below. 

The Rules

We’ll start by addressing the God-Engine in the hangar: This game draws a lot from GW’s Adeptus Titanicus (AT). There’s a reason the Warlord Wednesdays crew jumped on the opportunity to check this game out. Your Rigs move around the table in a similarly lumbering fashion, lining up opposing targets in their sights while doing what they can to step just outside the enemy’s firing arcs. Each one has a command terminal that tracks its stats during the game, including what weapons it’s equipped with, how much damage it’s taken, and how hot its engine is running.

Probably the first difference you’ll notice when your Rigs hit the table is that none of them have void shields. And while playing a game of AT without voids would be rough, there are some smart rules changes to account for the fact that your Rigs’ sweet, sweet armour tracks are vulnerable right from the start. Shorter ranges and more effective cover mean that you’ll actually have to commit your Rigs to make sure you can get a shot, while more powerful flanking bonuses and a flexible activation system make well-positioned units even more terrifying. Add in the fact that your Rigs usually won’t go down the first time they take Catastrophic Damage and any concerns you had that the lack of voids would lead to nothing but turn-one engine kills are likely to vanish in a puff of smog. When we say more effective cover we mean it, too, a mech is entirely untargetable so long as just over 50% of it is covered by terrain or other mechs; we’ve been wondering if that means a savvy player can line it up to be able to shoot with their own mech while it can’t be shot back at and the answer is probably? It’ll be difficult to line up and it’s just asking to be flanked if you try. 

That activation system we mentioned is the real selling point, though: Rather than the fixed order of operations in AT each of your Rigs here does up to five things when it activates, and can do them in any order you want. If you have a skirmisher with a 4” move and a sniper cannon, you could take three activations to move it 12” up the board then fire at an enemy with a fourth activation. It’s straightforward and easy to get your head around, though it does mean that the game lacks some of the catharsis that came with being able to thread the needle between two Warlords’ firing arcs to render them useless in the shooting phase. Rigs do have arcs still and we’d recommend using a bit of paint on the base rims to mark that out, just like Necromunda. 

All that flexibility comes at a cost, though: Every time a Rig takes an action, it also generates some heat. Generate enough, and you’ll have to roll on the Heat Threshold table at the end of the round and apply whatever terrible effect came with your result. Once you’ve done that, you reduce the Rig’s heat tracker by a number equal to its Exhaust value, which for most Rigs will be two. 

Each Rig has four components that are each tracked separately – Hull, Arms, Legs, and Engine.  Whittling a component down to zero structure points delivers an appropriate penalty to the Rig’s operation, and in most cases any additional damage to that component will destroy the Rig. And don’t worry, your Rigs get to explode dramatically when they are destroyed. The larger the Rig the bigger and stronger the explosion. Glorious!

A game using the current Alpha edition of the rules took a little more than an hour, with both players fielding two Light and one Medium Rigs each on a 30” x 24” board. The rules are slimmed down enough that there wasn’t a lot of flipping through pages trying to find answers to edge cases. In the first game we were a little confused at how to apply damage done in a single attack beyond what was needed to take a component to zero structure points. We applied it as “additional damage” as noted above, which meant Rigs were getting destroyed very easily. In a second game we decided that the excess damage would evaporate (like excess damage when void shields go down in AT), and a further attack dealing damage to that component would be needed to push the Rig to big badda boom. This second way felt more satisfying and gave multiple components the chance to go to zero, adding to the tension. The right way to apply the damage will no doubt be clarified in future iterations of the rules. 

Overall the games we played were light, breezy, and fun. Almost all Rigs ended up getting into melee combat eventually, possibly because of (poor) choices made in selecting our weapons. There was a lot of moving around the board because the bonus to damage from being in the side or rear arc of an enemy Rig is well worth a little more heat to get you there. It’s a very dynamic and simple game, easy to play in a lunch hour for a quick pick-up game.

The faction you choose will largely determine what “kind” of mechs you get to take. The rules, so far, only exist for Light and Medium mechs of each but we’re expecting the Large and Colossal variants of each to follow suit in theme. Krim Corporation are by far the best at shooting things being the only faction that hits on a 3+ instead of a 4+ with otherwise very middle-of-the-road stats with a move of 4”. Nox Industries mechs have more structure points but are slower at 3” and able to carry more iron on each mech making them hardy and heavy hitting. Triton are similar, though with less structure points on their Light mech than Nox but with slightly higher armour values making light arms almost useless against them; the real reason you play Triton is for the harpoons though, they’re just cool as hell. Arcus is your Eldar faction with very fast mechs moving 6” that will hit hard but go down quick if caught out in the open; equally you’re taking them because they’re sleek and have cool arc powered weapons. Freegear are the leftover faction and they feel kind of odd. All of their stats are very middle of the road with none really sticking out, similar to Krim but without any clear benefit attached either. 

For weapons, every faction shares a large number of guns with each other while each will also have their own unique guns. Each mech has a list of guns to choose from and we’ve noticed that the printable models have some options that there aren’t (yet?) rules for, these are still Alpha rules so we hope they’ll just be coming later. The longest range guns for most factions are 16” with most other weapons being around 8-10” range meaning you’re going to have to get in close before the hurt can start; making melee a very valid option since your opponent won’t be blasting you off the board from their backline. Just like Titanicus all guns have a short and long range modifier which does nothing or makes the shots more or less accurate depending on the range. One standout weapon for us is the flamethrower which only needs to hit the intended target to add heat onto their track, very likely to happen with six shots. Heat = bad news. 

List Building 

We really like how sleek and simple list building is here. You pick a game size between Skirmish, Operation, and Warfront. Operation is the designated recommended game size which makes a lot of sense since you get to field a fun number of mechs without it getting to any sort of insane level of activations to think about. Depending on your game size you choose one of the formations and then choose the weapons and any additional loadout options like equipment that your mechs will be carrying into battle. There aren’t any points for anything, you get to choose guns and upgrades relatively freely, only hindered by the weight of them in Iron and your mech only be able to carry so much Iron. I really, really, like this way of balancing a game out because the “better” upgrades and guns weigh more while going for lighter options means you can just have-more-stuff. All while not needing to choose between taking more models or “better” stuff! 

When assembling your squadron of rigs you’ll want to start with a nice, small, easy Skirmish game to get to grips with the rules and without any Heavy mechs having rules at this point the choice is pretty easy between a Sword, Dagger, or Spear formation. Sword seems like a solid little all-rounder type but going all in on just four little rigs is very cool and for the faster factions probably quite good, too. For Operation games at the moment you’ll be stuck just playing Broadsword formations, there’s probably scope to just grab a few mechs and have fun though if you wanted to field Just-Mediums for example and chat with the person you’re playing with about what they’ll field against that.

Your Rig card tells you how much Iron it can carry into battle between guns and equipment, going lighter on guns will let you go heavier on equipment making weaker guns stronger, letting your rigs move around much quicker, and a slew of once per game effects that could save your rig’s life if it doesn’t just die before getting to activate! We can’t find a limit to how many pieces of equipment you can take and there’s a 0 Iron cost piece that ups your overall Iron cost by 1 without any drawbacks; remember that these are Alpha rules but there’s basically no reason to not take this every single time. So as a result we are simply not taking it right now but if loading up all your rigs with just more and more gear is your thing and you want to? Hell yeah, do it.

head58’s Squadron

Freegear Coalition, Sword Formation

Scraphound – Weapons: Flamethrower and Ripper Saw. Equipment: Concentrated Fuel

Hijack – Weapons: Saw Blade and Machine Gun. Equipment: High Calibre Ammunition

Hijack – Weapons: Mech Rifle and Cannon. Equipment: Stabilized Weapon Joints

The idea behind this list was for the Hijack with the Mech Rifle and Cannon to stay a little further back and drop shots into higher armour targets while the other two went up the board to engage.  The added speed on the Scraphound from the Concentrated Fuel was key to getting it into range to spread fiery death. Unfortunately the flamethrower was the weapon that always got blown off immediately, so it goes.  There’s no restriction against using guns when you’re in melee range so there’s no real need to take one gun and one melee weapon. But melee weapons don’t need to be reloaded to use them more than once on the same activation, an action that costs precious heat for guns.

Bair’s Squadron

Triton Industries, Sword Formation 

Nautilus – Weapons: Rotary Cannon, Mortar Cannon. Equipment: Stabilised Weapon Joints, High Calibre Ammunition (Rotary Cannon), Extended Barrel (Rotary cannon)

Trench – Weapons: Hookshot, Gouge Anchor. Equipment: Concentrated Fuel

Trench – Weapons: Rivet Gun, Gouge Anchor. Equipment: Concentrated Fuel

The idea here is simple: the little Trenches move up the board at quicker pace making use of their shorter ranged weapons and gouge anchors in melee while the Nautilus stays at a safer distance. I wanted my Nautilus to really make use of its high Iron allotment and kitted it out so it’s firing in the full 180 degree arc with a Rotary Cannon that loses one rate of fire down to five shots but is boosted up to S10 making it as strong as its Mortar Cannon with a higher rate of fire and Sustained Fire built in. That’s going to be a very deadly mech that’s also harder to get to with faster Trench rigs running around!

Final Thoughts

We’ve said it a few times but these are all still Alpha rules and are likely/liable to change when the “real” game does finally arrive later on. We’ll likely be covering that when it does, too, because why wouldn’t we? We’re back on mechs, baby.

Overall the game is loads of fun and feels solid to play, too. We’re very interested to see what Heavy and Colossal mechs actually look like on the table but there seems to be a great balance of little guys being able to run around and flank to take them out. What I really love here is how small of a footprint the game takes up, we’ve seen a big uptick on smaller skirmish games and this fits the bill for being playable on most kitchen tables.

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