Record sheets for Mobile Frame Zero, and a post-play report

What the? You’re not supposed to use record sheets with Mobile Frame Zero – the different systems (attack, defense, movement, etc.) are represented by differently-colored dice, so if you know your frames and you have enough dice of different colors, you’re good to go.

OTOH, if you’re just starting out and don’t have your frames all memorized, and also don’t have enough colored d6s, record sheets can be handy, both for remembering how your frames are equipped and for writing down rolls.

Mobile Frame Zero record sheet v3

Here’s one I made for my recent games with London. The idea is that you circle the dice for the systems your frame has and scratch off the rest. That tells you which dice to roll each turn. As your frames lose systems, you scratch them off, too, so the record sheet always represents the actual state of each frame in real time. I added little vertical dividers to separate turns, but I only made two blanks for each turn. If you roll three dice, just write small enough to squeeze in all three numbers. You can draw arrows for bringing white dice rolls down to fill in or replace other systems.

Oh, we finished our big game yesterday morning. I lost, badly. I had planned for my soldiers to screen London’s forces while my artillery picked him apart with battlefield-wide spotting. But through a combination of inexpert play and some truly heinous dice rolls, my front line got shot to pieces and then his soldiers advanced and blew away my artillery at direct-fire range. I shot up three of his frames pretty badly and destroyed a lot of cover, but that’s about it in terms of tactical accomplishments for me.

The photo at the top of the post shows one of London’s transforming Land-Air Mech (LAM) frames flanking my Tactical Turtle and blasting the crap out of it. Our lack of dice also explains why there are blue post-its stuck to the battlefield with the defense rolls and spot numbers (if any) for each frame.

I might have gone down to ignominious defeat, but I learned a ton. I had one frame with double defensive systems and double spotters, which was intended to just hang back and put spots down all over the battlefield. After the game I decided that was a waste, as long as that frame was hanging back I should have replaced one of the defensive systems with artillery (making it equivalent to my tactical turtle and ice tank) so it would have some teeth. If I had it to do over I’d probably have three frames with double spotters, artillery, and defense, screened by five standard soldiers (one each of movement, defense, spotting, and direct fire). And I’d be less cavalier about advancing my frames without adequate cover. London played with great restraint, advancing when cover was available and smartly pivoting back or sideways when the cover got shot away. He earned the win, awful dice rolls notwithstanding (he had some stinkers, too).

After two months of BattleTech and Mobile Frame Zero, I think we’re a little wargamed-out, so we’ll see if we get any more games going soon. Before we go on to something else (probably D&D or Star Wars), I’d like to teach him Ogre. If that happens, it will truly be a story for another post.