What To Do With a Dead Mech?

One of the dirty little secrets here at the Lead Gardens is that I'm not immune to the lure of the "Pre-painted But It's Hard To Get What You Want in the Box Without Spending a Lot on Stuff You Don't Need Collectible Miniature Marketing Systems".

"MechWarrior", by the now defunct "Wizkids" was my latest venture into such. It was five years ago during a two month "ebay binge" that I netted a large tub of plastic Mechs for a fairly cheap price. I played the game for a few months and then moved on to other stuff (as we all often do). Though the rules that came with the figures were ok, I just couldn't love (though I tried) the click bases and the surprisingly slow pace of the game... probably due in large part to my failing eyesight trying to read the microscopic numbers on the bases. The final straw was when I witnessed a large MechWarrior tournament at Origins where all the tables were simply flat green squares with cut out flat terrain...I'm sure everyone was having fun, but visually, it was definitely not my cup of tea!

But I still have the miniatures and they are pretty good castings even if a little indifferently painted. So this past month I have jumped into trying to repaint the minis and snap them off their bases and use them with a better (at least more fun... IMHO...) set of SF rules, OGRE/GEV by Steve Jackson Games. These rules are great fun, fast and you don't have to get bogged down in a lot of detail. I've worked up several collections of vehicles over the years and used them with these rules. My favorite was a set of "Mega Force" vehicles by Kenner that are now out of production and unfortunately I sold my entire collection many years ago and surprise surprise they are now highly valued by toy collectors and are as rare as hen's teeth now on ebay.

So while I cry in my beer over that, I'm painting up these Mechwarrior minis and here is the first batch of repaints...(the vehicles are based on fender washers and the infantry is based on the plastic disks that were formerly a part of the original click base....and yes this does ruin the figures for using the original Mechwarrior game but....nonetheless I went ahead with the project). The numbers you see on the bases are the combat values of the minis in OGRE/GEV to make the game even faster to play!

A Company of PanEuropean GEVs

the numbers are read left to right: attack value /range in (4") hexes /defense value...the game used a "classic" odds table 1-1, 2-1 etc. from the original board game which makes adding and designing vehicles to the game easy.

I've got a "model-bashed" Ogre planned that will use parts from two vehicles reassembled and there is a nice set of additional rules for Mechs adapted to OGRE/GEV to be found at Steve Jackson's website.

Pan Euro Heavy infantry based on disassembled plastic click base wheels..talk about recycling!

Combine Infantry

Combine Commander with a missile launcher battlesuit.

Combine heavy mobile missile launchers