There’s a new Kickstarter project up from the creator of Mobile Frame Zero: MFZ: Alpha Bandit. This takes the fight into space, with players constructing fleets of starships from Lego pieces and fighting carrier group level combat by the sounds of it.
I’ve already backed this project based on the strength of the fantastic Mobile Frame Zero game (follow that link for the free PDF rulebook). We played a series of three player games using Lego Frames I’d put together from my personal Lego collection. The game was fast and furious fun, and worked surprisingly well considering the odd number of players. Unfortunately we sort of stalled on MFZ because it requires a reasonably large Lego collection, and a fair number of odd pieces in order to build a decent squadron of Mobile Frames to fight with. This meant my war gaming friends were stuck with playing with the Frames (and load-outs) I was constructing, and I was stuck constantly reassembling stuff after each war gaming evening.
I hope Mobile Frame Zero: Alpha Bandit will get remove a lot of these problems, due to the smaller size of the Lego spaceships involved. The largest vessels, Cruisers, are based on an 8 x 8 Lego plate and Frigates on a 4 x 8 Lego plate. That’s still pretty generous, but not large enough that it requires a huge Lego collection to build a fleet. Lego spaceships also have the advantage of being a lot easier to construct from any random collection of Lego pieces, because of course you don’t need any odd taps and clips for limbs for example.
Even at the lowest backing level, you’ll be getting the ‘in progress’ PDF rulebook files which will hopefully be enough to play the game – that was certainly the case for Mobile Frame Zero. I’m really looking forward to the first one of these appearing in a Kickstarter update. Time to shoo the kids away from the Lego and start building some Lego spaceships! Ok… maybe I’ll let my kids help too.
Update: Looks like Joshua’s blog has early play-test rules on it for Alpha Bandit! They’re early days but will make sense if you’ve played MFZ.