On Saturday June 25th, we were afforded the opportunity to host a fantastic event in conjunction with our friends at Catalyst Game Labs! We got to put on an all-day BattleTech Grinder!
If you're unfamiliar with the grinder format, it is a casual beer & pretzels event. Everyone randomly selects a rather unimpressive light mech, and just jumps into a large Battle-Royal scenario. Once your mech is destroyed, you graduate to a more powerful category of mech and get to jump right back into the action. There are 6 categories in total ranging from the simple locusts and commandos to the mighty dire wolves and kodiaks. All in all its a great way to get a feel for the game and have a lot of fun with other folks in a casual setting full of destruction and shenanigans.
We started at 12pm and ran until about 10pm. Overall we saw over 60 players come and go throughout the course of the day, with as many as 44 active at the same time over the course of two tables. This made for a lot of action and several opportunities for great moments. My favorite was getting to see an urbanmech successfully DFA a hatchetman. That particular success was worthy of winning the urbanmech player an entire company of the brave little trashcan mech.
There were actually several opportunities to win fun prizes during the day. Every mech killed won the pilot who struck the final blow one of the random salvage boxes, and there were some bonus challenges brought in by the Catalyst folks who would randomly drop a much stronger mech than the average player had in the middle of the board, and offer special prizes for defeating it. We also had some achievement prize for the players who survived the longest, got the most kills, and other odd things like killing an assault mech with a light. Players got excited about the fun ways to play and it helped at to the dynamic nature of the event.
We were floored by the turnout and are very much looking forward to doing another one soon, as well as having other BattleTech events in the interim. We're excited to see all our miniatures communities thriving in our Events Center, and we hope you get a chance to come out and see it soon!
We also want to say another big thank you to Catalyst Gamelabs' Randall Bills & Co. For helping us put on this great event! It was great working with you and we hope to do so again!
