This is a negative review of a game my friends & I were really excited about. There's a lot to like about this game, but after three plays (each with the same three players), we think it's broken in ways which can't be fixed without significant changes, and we would rather play another game than test changes to this one.
There are a couple other reviews for this game; although they rave about the game's innovative systems, they don't really describe what those systems are. If you're considering getting this game, hopefully you'll find the information below helpful; perhaps the things which bothered us won't bother you, or they won't be problems with more or fewer than three players, or you're more willing to experiment with house rules than we are. Also, a new versionis supposed to come out this year; I don't know anything about it, but maybe it will address the problems we had.
How excited were we?
Two of us bought the rules. I spent more than I will admit to at my FLGS for dedicated dice. One of us built 20 frames for everyone's use. I wrote a doomsday clock Android app. After our first two games, one of us made laminated sheets for tracking attachments & allocated dice, and bought markers for writing on them. So, we were highly motivated to enjoy this game.
Why were we excited?
In no particular order, here are some of the things we liked.
The price is right. 386
$6 for a PDF of rules? Great! (Of course this presumes that you've already got $40 of dice and $500 of Legos sitting around, ha ha.) I've seen complaints here about the rules being black & white, or having only hand-drawings of Lego units, but I don't care about any of that. (Besides, when you're printing it out yourself, black & white line drawings of Legos are better than color photos.) And the half-height layout is perfect for tabletop play; that's the way miniatures rules should be laid out. So I was happy with the rulebook itself, and its price.
The rules are simple, concise, and clear, so no complaints there. I really like the writing style, too. For example, the description of the stationary flags which players will be fighting over: "A station might be a supply, command, or observation station, it might be a crashed satellite, it might be an ammo dump, it might be a jeep with a flat tire and a load of fresh peaches. Whatever: it's something worth fighting over." That's cool; that's my kind of game!
Army construction and the core of the game: you begin by building your mechs; each mech can have 1-4 attachments, where an attachment is a weapon, or some defensive attachment like a shield or ECM pod, or some movement attachment like jump jets or spider legs. (Weapons fall into three categories, but all defensive attachments have the same game effect; all movement attachments have the same game effect; etc.)
These attachments add dice to the pile of dice you roll at the start of your mech's turn. Each mech rolls two dice which can be used for anything; a defensive attachment lets you roll a die which can only be used for defense; a weapon lets you roll two dice which can only be used for an attack; and so on. These dice are color-coded--defensive dice are blue, movement dice are green, etc.--so if you use the same color of Legos on your attachments, you can look at any mech on the table and see what kinds of attachments it has, and therefore how many dice it will roll on its turn.
Cleverly, these attachments are also the way damage is handled: when a mech takes a hit, you choose an attachment and break it off the mech! (When you're out of attachments, two more hits kill you; you can represent the half-dead state by tearing off your mech's head or whatever.) This is a simple, fast way to track the decrease in quality of your mechs as they take damage, and having to choose which attachment to lose is painful fun: do you want to lose your shields and get killed next turn, or lose your gun and have to gum the enemy to death? Another interesting twist is that, when your mech's guns are gone, you may actually move faster, because you get to add a special green d8 (usable only for movement) to the dice rolled for that mech.
Another interesting thing is the way initiative & unit activation is handled. At the start of the turn, everyone rolls a d10 for each of their mechs to determine each mech's initiative, and then each mech takes its turn one at a time in ascending initiative order. 386