Heavy Gear Blitz!

Last night I had just started to put together a blog post about games I had Kickstarted, that I was looking forward to getting... today, the postman made a section of that (future) post irrelevant...

Heavy Gear Blitz has arrived at the Castle!

Heavy Gear was a role-playing game I played a lot in my younger days, it is a game choc full of great setting material, interesting worlds, and wonderful anime style art. Published by Dream Pod 9, the role-playing game originally came with a set of rules for playing out battles with miniatures on the table, Heavy Gear Blitz is an evolution of that system, and focuses purely on the table-top experience.

While it's been around for a while, Heavy Gear Blitz was never a game I really got into, despite my liking of the setting, the miniatures were hard to get hold of, and quite expensive here in Australia. With the new Kickstarter, Dream Pod 9 has produced a set of plastic miniatures, with a very reasonable price point. In fact, the Kickstarter was thoroughly excellent value, providing four starter armies with a good range of miniatures for each. Between my mate Quinton and myself we got two core sets, which means both lots of fantastic miniatures, but also lots of assembly!

The four armies represent core forces of the Heavy Gear universe, I took the Northern Army (Planet: Terra Nova) and the Colonial Expeditionary Force (Planet: Earth), while Quinton took the Southern Army (Planet: Terra Nova), and Caprice (Planet: Caprice).

Everything in bags...

One set of CEF sprues laid out...

Wasting little time, Quinton and I managed to wrangle a quick meet up and doled out the bags and bags of sprues and bits, and went our separate ways with the homework task of reading the rules and putting together a 50 Point force each. Having a look over the sprues I was a little disappointed to see there were some production issues with the plastics (crackling and dimpling on some, mainly the larger Caprice models (something Dream Pod 9 have said will be fixed next run)), and with the fact that all the hex bases are slotted (when none of the miniatures have slots). I was very impressed however with the quality of the miniatures as a whole, the detail is excellent, the casting is sharp and the models look like they will go together very well. The really look great.

The game has many options, with Gears (the mechs and main fighting units) able to armed with a variety of weapons. I am still chewing over how I'm going to manage that with my models - magnets seem the obvious option, but some parts may be too small - we shall see. There's always the lazy option of just gluing them, since I have two sets I should be able to build a good variety, and I have never been one to insist that 'what you see is what you get'...

All in all I am hugely excited by Heavy Gear Blitz, from what I have read of the rules they look excellent, and the miniatures (aside from some small issues) look fantastic. I really can't wait to start putting them together and getting them on the table, I think it's going to be a blast. It also has me inspired to dust off my Heavy Gear RPG book... So many games...