Chaos on Chahar

For the BattleTech Clan Invasion kickstarter, my friendly local game store (Hangar 18 Hobbies) was selected to be one of the kickoff event hosts. They had some BattleTech events lined up, but I offered to do an Alpha Strike game as part of it.
I wanted to do something similar to the BattleTech Grinder, an event where players can drop it, get a single ‘Mech, start blowing things up and if they are destroyed, they just get another (more powerful) ‘Mech and keep playing. It’s pure fun, and I wanted something similar.
The idea was that the table should be able to handle up to 8 players, and I didn’t think a single unit was enough for Alpha Strike, I tried it with two units per player. I divided up my minis to make similar PV totals for each “set”, and then players could just grab the minis and units card from a set and play immediately. Mostly I went with one heavier unit paired with a lighter unit, but some clan assaults got paired with a battle armor unit, and there were a couple sets that were more equal pairs.
The table was whatever terrain the store had available. Fortunately, a player had brought some excellent industrial terrain (some early Thunderhead Studios’ AFAIR). I was able to build a central complex with spokes sticking out to divide up the play area, while still giving players the option to maneuver to get shots on each other.
I then created objectives cards. Each player would get a single card. Each card had a way to gain victory points by destroyed enemy units, but each then had another objective, most of which were based on objective tokens spread around the center of the table. Different cards would want to do different things with the objectives, but the objective tokens were all shared. Thus one player would want to destroy the objectives, another player might want to control the objectives, another player might want to escort a truck to the objective, and yet another player would want to pick up the objective and take it back to their home.
I had intended for this event to be like a Grinder, where if the players lost their units they would grab another set and a new objective card and keep playing. But during game day, the players generally preferred to just play until their units were destroyed and be done. Instead we just reset the entire table every couple hours, and it worked well that way.

Chaos on Chahar