Junk Mech

- Junk Mech -

Match Pairs of Arms and Legs to Turn your Mech into the Perfect Battle Machine

Junk Mech is one of my favorite games to design for and play test because of the Heat Sink mechanic.

I LOVE MECH WARRIOR!

I was piloting my Shadow Hawk for house Davion waaaaay back on my 486 PC so, um... yea, I've had a soft spot for Mechs for like, ever. ...and I guess I'm going to finally just come out and admit this in public; "Robot Jox is one of my favorite movies of all time!".

Seriously.

In fact, I watch it every couple of years just to keep it fresh in my mind. “Crash and Burn!“

All that being said, I really wanted to make a shared-deck, mech-themed card game that was trying to be an honest abstraction of battle mech combat.

As I started brainstorming ideas on paper and working out mechanics with complex mech cards and even crazier attack rules I decided to re-think the game from the ground up, instead of from the top down.

Chevee Dodd's series on additive game design helped to give me some of the focus I needed to bring my idea to a simpler place. Thinking about the fun and challenge of being a mech pilot led me to focus on the struggle of balancing heat sinks, energy weapons and ammo in combat, as well as during mech configuration.

Junk Mech is a set-collection (basically a Rummy variant) game where each set of pairs is either a pair of Legs (giving your mech more heat sinks, thus greater ability to fire weapons) or a pair of Weapons (causing greater damage when firing).

Players must balance pairing Legs and Weapons together while making sure to stay under their mechs maximum weight capacity.

If you pair the wrong Legs with the wrong Weapon your mech won't have enough heat sinks and it'll take damage when you fire the weapon or, in some cases, not be able to fire at all (equivalent to a forced power-down).

This seems to create some fairly interesting game play although, overall the game is fairly chaotic at the moment.

I think I need to get some new play testers to try it out before I make any actual changes to the game simply because I think a more casual audience might not mind / care about the randomness.

It can be a whole lot of fun if you don't mind blowing yourself up to win!

The version I currently have is in the very new prototype phase and it still has ripped graphics from the interwebz.

It's working great but consequently I don't have a ton of picture to show.

I am willing to give out PDF files to anybody who would like to test it out however.

It's super quick to PnP because it's only a 48 (54 with the 6 "chassis" cards) card deck right now and it's supporting 2-4 players.... mostly.... I've come dangerously close to running out of cards a couple of times but that should work out with some more playtesting.

Other than that and a few really unexpected wins the game is quite entertaining.

Info:

Players - 2 to 4

Game Time - 20 to 45 mins

Style - Light strategy, set collection, take-that

Ages - 12 and up

Components: 48 Card deck

6 Basic mech chassis cards

1 Rule booklet

Not Included - Pen and Pad for HP scoring (each base mech chassis has its own unique number of hit points)