Becoming BattleTech: Aces with Tommy and Josh of Lynnvander Studios

I’m excited about a lot of new products coming to BattleTech this year, but chief among them is BattleTech: Aces, the upcoming product that turns a game of Alpha Strike into a solo or cooperative experience. Those of us who got in on the Mercenaries Kickstarter got a preview of this product, and after one cooperative game, I was hooked. Aces is going to fundamentally change game tables all over the world.

To get the inside scoop on BattleTech: Aces, I sat down with the folks who created it: Lynnvander Studios. I spoke to Tommy Gofton and Josh Derksen to learn more about how BattleTech: Aces came to be, what it’s like working with Catalyst, and what we can expect to find in the box when Aces arrives later this year, as well as when we might expect to see the Aces system arrive for Classic BattleTech. Enjoy.

Sean (Sarna): Thanks so much for sitting down with Sarna to talk about Lynnvander Studios and BattleTech: Aces. I have Josh Derksen and Tommy Gofton here from Lynnvander Studios—Welcome and thanks so much for coming by!

Tommy Gofton (Lynnvander Studios): Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us out. This is exciting. Nice to have a couple of Sarna articles back to back. 

Sean: Yeah, we’re gonna be completely Lynnvander for basically all of April/May.

Tommy: Sounds good to me!

Josh Derksen (Lynnvander Studios): We’re in the BattleTech machine now. 

Sean: We’re gonna start off with a little bit of background since Sarna readers aren’t necessarily familiar with Lynnvander Studios or even BattleTech: Aces—but after today they will be!

So let’s start with your BattleTech histories. What got you into the game? What keeps you playing?  

Tommy: Well, in the Nineties, I worked at a gaming store. It was one of my first jobs ever, and I’m a major Dungeons & Dragons nerd. Magic and D&D were my life—still are. But then there were these little cool models on the table.

I never got to play Classic. However, I sat there as a kid while someone else played in a tournament back in the FASA days, and he got third in the tournament and then gave me the plaque. I kept it because I thought it was cool—’cause it had a ‘Mech on it—but I had no idea. I didn’t follow it until maybe three or four years ago. I had completely missed the entire BattleTech train. 

Now I’ve been working with Catalyst and hanging out with them and making fun of them like Joey from Friends who lives across the hall. I’m the Joey of Catalyst for sure; I always just walk into the fridge and eat their lasagnas, if you know what I mean. But I was working exclusively on Shadowrun over the years ’cause Shadowrun and RPGs were my jive. This BattleTech stuff was always just this giant banner that I never looked at.

BattleTech became a thing for us when I realized that there was a really strong opportunity to grow the marketplace for families and friends with BattleTech: Aces. And when my friends at Catalyst—who were already family—were convinced that this was the future, then I was like, well, I better understand what the hell I’m walking into.

But this is not new for Lynnvander or for me. I think the only game we’ve ever made for a licensed client that I knew intimately was Star Trek: Alliance for WizKids, which is one of the predecessors to BattleTech: Aces actually. Almost every other license and or property that I’ve worked on, sans Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I knew nothing about. 

That’s not because I’m not interested in those things. I’m made fun of in Lynnvander as the guy that just culturally misses every single trend until the trend is well over, beaten dead, past its recycle phase, and maybe in its third revival—then I’m like, oh, that’s interesting. When did that come out? And then I get into it. So that’s how I got into BattleTech.

Now I can confidently say I have learned a lot about BattleTech thanks to Josh and Paul from Focht’s Network. Paul’s basically my third wife. I cannot have a conversation with Paul unless he starts talking about something in BattleTech. I’m kind of listening like a really bad husband who’s not interested in his wife’s knitting, but she still tells me all her different techniques. Between him and Josh, who has read every book under the sun like Commander Spock, I am learning the world, but the game—Alpha Strike specifically—I’m all-in on.

The only connection to BattleTech I had before that—which is why I’m obsessed with the Highlander—was that I was working with a friend from ScreenRant.com who was doing articles on MechWarrior and got a whole bunch of the MechWarrior Online beta stuff. I ended up doing a lot of early YouTube videos playing in my Highlander and getting my butt kicked trying to take on JagerMechs. I kind of just fell in love with the video game and then transferred it over to Aces. 

Josh: My journey into BattleTech actually begins with Tommy because I got into miniatures gaming when I was a kid. I went to a Star Trek convention and found people playing Heavy Gear, which at the time was in the Second Edition release from Dream Pod 9. I was all, oh, a miniature game with full scenery! This is model trains and board games in one! Cool, I’m here for it.

So I got super into miniatures gaming, but at this point, I’m like eight, so I have no disposable income. I remember saving up to buy a box of miniatures, I started playing miniatures games off and on, and now I’ve played a whole bunch of them. I’ve even made fan content for a lot of them—Heroes of the Aturi Cluster for X-Wing was a project I made that turns X-Wing into a cooperative game with an automated opponent.

Sean: Hmm, that sounds familiar.

Josh: We’ll come back to that, but that was kind of what got me into the industry. And I met Tommy and the Lynnvander crew shortly after that.

It’s been a pretty straight line from there to here in terms of working on stuff in the industry. I wanna say in December 2022 at PAX Unplugged, Tommy came up to me and he is like, “Hey, what are you doing tonight? Catalyst wants us to shoot a how-to-play video for Alpha Strike. Randall will teach you the game and we’re gonna just record an hour and a half long video.” 

I’m like, sure, ‘Mechs are cool. I like the new miniatures that Catalyst has put out. I know nothing about BattleTech yet, other than I remember seeing the Timber Wolf from the cover of MechWarrior 2 in the local game store when I was a kid. I’m a big mecha fan; Gundam, Armored Core—literally everything except BattleTech—I knew about. Early BattleTech‘s art style just never quite clicked for me. 

So I play Alpha Strike against Randall, and as everyone would expect, his dice betray him. I’ve heard it’s the most lopsided game of Alpha Strike you’ve ever seen.

But that was literally my introduction to BattleTech as an IP—and Alpha Strike specifically—in December 2022. Everything that I have learned or know about BattleTech I have learned since then, and most of it since April last year.

Sean: So you’re both latecomers riding the BattleTech renaissance wave! Tommy, you’ve already mentioned your favorite ‘Mech, which is obvious to anyone who’s watched you as ‘Lynn-Six,’ but Josh, what is your favorite ‘Mech?

Josh: My go-to ‘Mech, I’m gonna make the argument purely on aesthetics. It is the Clan Marauder IIC. I love the standard version with the three ER PPCs, and I love the stealth fighter aesthetic of the Catalyst redesign especially; it’s got these faceted armor panels in a cool way that I like. 

And then my heritage through Armored Core and anime is like, of course, the Eris is a very close second nipping on the heels.

Sean: You very rarely get the anime-style robots in BattleTech. There’s the Incubus, and if you go back, older Unseen ‘Mechs like the Stinger and Wasp, but modern incarnations have moved away from the Armored Core-style. We’ll see if maybe they’ll come right back with the BattleTech anime box.

Josh: So very excited for the anime box.

Tommy: The reason why I chose the Highlander is because when I played MechWarrior Online, I picked the ‘Mech and yelled through the chat, “There can be only one!” They’re like, “You’re not gonna be able to enjoy this ‘Mech. It’s not up to your speed.” But I like big, heavy things, and then of course I’m frustrated when I can’t maneuver through buildings and stuff quickly. But I was addicted to the jump jets and I just kept stubbornly playing the Highlander. I fell in love with it. 

But a close second for me was the Centurion because when I did eventually switch out, I switched to the Centurion and I got my head blown off constantly. But then folks told me to just run sideways at the enemy ’cause of the shield, then turn around, AC to the face. I’m like, I love this ‘Mech.

Sean: Every MechWarrior needs to learn how to torso-twist to shield themselves. The Centurion is probably a better starter ‘Mech than the Highlander, but if you love the Highlander, you love the Highlander.

Let’s get into Lynnvander Studios. What is Lynnvander Studios? What do you do? How long have you been around? And who is part of Lynnvander Studios? 

Tommy: Lynnvander Studios started as a theatrical acting troupe in 2005, then was involved in filmmaking. I was a producer for television in Toronto for quite a while, and through a series of events, I was dared to make a board game. I did so, and then that started a chain reaction of events that turned Lynnvander from exclusively film into film and games, and then basically just games.

The whole plunge into making games was as a publisher at first, and then there was a ping pong of not being a publisher and only being a design studio, and then only being a publisher, and then being a design studio because of the way the markets were trending and/or our knowledge of the industry at the time.

Then individually in our team, we are a collective of designers who are publishing products of our own volition—mainly RPG books and light-to-medium weight board games now. We have a team of five heads of the hydra, as we call it. A couple of solid teammates who are our full-timers. I think we struck gold in some of the combinations that we have because—and I don’t mean this arrogantly—I think we have some of the best, humblest teammates in the industry who actually care about the craft of the game.

We all have our perspectives as to what we wanna see in the industry, but we also have our dreams and goals. We all have our loves and we really do try to push ourselves as a no-ego, what’s-best-for-the-community studio, which sometimes can hurt the profit margins because sometimes we make decisions that are more heart-on-the-sleeve than a shrewd business person, but it’s how we got where we are.

I think the reason why our team has been so tight for so long is because we just love what we do and we constantly remind ourselves of that, even when the projects are tough. 

So there’s me, and if we were a Shadowrunning unit, I would be the face. I’m the one who does the talking, gets us in trouble, gets us more work than we can handle, cleans up the mess, chases the money, and comes up with a lot of the business development decisions that end up either blessing or cursing us as time goes on. Including BattleTech: Aces, which we’ll talk about later.

Then we’ve got Dylan. We call him ‘The Android.’ He is a very intelligent individual who can just look at numbers like it’s Severance and complete the project. I’ve never seen someone be able to balance a game just by looking at the spreadsheet. He’s also a fabulous writer who can spit out words in hardcore dev mode. He looks like Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, where he just starts going crazy at the computer answering emails. 

Then we’ve got Peter, who is higher up in the admin side. His ability to read the game from a distance and provide this incredible library of pop culture information is just… He’s got this really cool perspective on things and gives us fresh air on some of the designs to make sure that we’re not just copy-stamping things. 

Devin is our RPG writer and he’s our first employee of the team. He’s also a fabulous, eloquent writer who is narrative-focused and very good at anything RPG-based. He also runs the Six Sides channels as our lead game master, and he plays in Shadowrun. 

And I’ll leave Josh up to Josh. 

Josh: Well, you’ve pretty much caught us up to where the company’s at. If it’s not done by somebody else, it’s done by me (laughs). But my primary roles are as a game developer and graphic designer.

Pretty much every piece of artwork, graphic design, or packaging Lynnvander has ever put out was either me making or art directing. Or, in the case of BattleTech, Dak showing me how to work in the BattleTech style. For those of you who don’t know, David Kerber is the graphic designer extraordinaire who does a lot of the layout and packaging work on the BattleTech line. 

Sean: I have to know—who came up with the name Lynnvander?

Tommy: That would be me. I was constantly taking D&D names thinking that they were my own. And so the D&D names for my characters’ family line were copied from things like McLeod (gee, where’d that come from?—Highlander).

I wanted something unique. This was pre-my university’s Classics Linguistics minor—I studied a lot of things like Latin and different languages, and I’m obsessed as a linguist. So I started looking at different phonetics and different languages and started creating my own words.

Lynnvander was actually created while I was in the bathroom one day, just sketching on a scratch pad. I came up with the phonetics—it means ‘of the Crystal Lake.’ I’m obsessed with Arthurian legend, with Excalibur coming from the Crystal Lake. It’s meant to be a hope for those people in need when the kingdom needs it most—we come to help and create games. 

This was all prior to creating games. It was just a weird serendipity. I created it as my Dungeons & Dragons character’s last name, and then when I decided I was getting into business I just didn’t know what to call my company, so I called it Lynnvander. It would always create a conversation piece, which it has now. 

Sean: I can tell the long version would be quite the story. Seems like it could go down rabbit holes.

Tommy: It was a long number two.

Sean: I recommend Metamucil?

Tommy: That’s why it was a long number two.

Sean: You’ve already rifled off a bunch of names like Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Heavy Gear. Were there any other collaborations?

Josh: Those are not collaborations so much as how we got into it. We’ve worked on a lot of different license properties at Lynnvander— since 2015. The first big game that was our break into licensed properties was when Jasco trusted us to make the Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, which did very well. That really got us the attention of a whole bunch of other indie publishers who were like, “Whoa, who are you? You’re a for-hire design studio, and you made this thing?”

We’ve worked with a whole bunch of different folks over the years. I would say at the moment our big clients are, of course, Catalyst, but we’ve also done a bunch of work for Gale Force 9, we’ve done multiple projects with Japanime Games, some stuff with Dynamite, some stuff with WizKids.

And in the middle of all of that, we’ve also just done a whole bunch of our own original properties. The two that we’re kind of pushing now are Gemini Gauntlet, which is a sci-fi universe, and Imaria, which is the ongoing evolution of a very old role-playing setting that Tommy used to run with his group when he was much younger.

Sean: Let’s move on to BattleTech: Aces. Not everybody has heard of Aces, so let’s have a brief rundown. What is BattleTech: Aces? 

Josh: Aces is really two things. The first was when Tommy and Randall kind of both said, “Hey, BattleTech really should have an automated opponent like you’ve done for these other games.” And so BattleTech: Aces is really an automated opponent for Alpha Strike. In the future, Classic also—that is very much in the pipeline, which we can talk about more later.

But more than just having an automated opponent, I felt very strongly that because BattleTech is such a narrative-driven game—given the universe and all of its sourcebooks—it would be weird to make an automated opponent that didn’t also have a narrative campaign to play it against so that you could actually gather all your friends and play a series of adventures as if you are playing through a BattleTech novel.

So it really is the two things: the automated opponent and narrative campaign with some light RPG elements where your pilots level up. For those of you who have ever played or seen my previous work on either Heroes of the Aturi Cluster or Star Trek: Alliance with WizKids, Aces will be very familiar to you.

Sean: Would it be fair to say that the idea for BattleTech: Aces came from those two previous games? 

Josh: Pretty much, yeah. If you look at all the projects that I have led at Lynnvander over the years and Heroes of the Aturi Cluster before that, I feel like there is a very clear throughline across my career of how we got to BattleTech: Aces.

I mean, bless Catalyst for all their support and belief in the vision—but the big difference now is having resources. Access to their team of sculptors, artists, and their stable of fiction authors, and then having the Lynnvander team backing me up: Tommy to keep advocating and streaming, and Dylan with all of his expertise in building Choose Your Own Adventure stories (because of course he is also a published author). Really, it is now just this massive group of very talented folks to build this project. I just get to be the poster boy leading it. 

Tommy: Oh, don’t discount yourself! His engine is insanely good. But he’s correct about how Aces began. It’s a very interesting lily pad hop of this led to this, this led to this, this led to this. And there was a definite line for my producing path to when those two merged together—it was just a matter of time. 

And it’s still a matter of time in terms of some of the other games we’ve been asked to do an automated opponent for. Randall feels that BattleTech: Aces is going to change tabletop gaming for families, young people, and other connected players just because it’s just gonna become a massive gateway and grow the tabletop sphere in general. 

Josh: He thinks we have a couple of years before every game system has this. 

Tommy: We’ll see if he’s right. Based on the offers we’re getting, it’s not too far off. 

Sean: Let’s get into the creation of this deck. The idea of making a deck of cards to determine actions for an artificial opponent seems relatively simple, and there are a lot of games that do that—Call of Cthulu being one off the top of my head. But making a game that revolves around that deck versus making a deck that revolves around Alpha Strike, which has a lot of parameters you have to account for, sounds a lot harder. How big is the spreadsheet that goes into determining all possible actions for each card?

Josh: You’re right that cardboard automated opponents, or automa, are very common in the board game space. Ever since we had Pandemic in ‘09, we’ve now had lots of game designers say, “Oh, actually no, we could make a cooperative board game if we have some deck of cards that drives the engine.”

Most of these are fairly easy because the board game is a very discreet set of steps. There’s no measuring necessarily, there are a lot of things you don’t need to account for. So it can be as simple as flip card, read a couple instructions, do a thing, and that can be a challenging enough opponent for a board game.

It’s completely different with a miniatures game. One of the things Randall correctly identified very early on is in X-Wing and Star Trek: Attack Wing, and also Snap Ships, which also has an automated opponent—all of these games have a very specific, regimented, measured movement so that everything that happens is almost like spaces on a game board. You lay this template, you move here, and movement is done. Very straightforward. But how do you do that when you have a miniatures game where you can move anywhere? This is new ground for me as a designer. 

So I would say your question is sort of three questions, right? The first is, how did Aces come about? Second, what was the process like? And the third thing is, how big did it get? 

How it came about was we had a ton of lead time on this project. The seeds for this started in 2022 when I was taught Alpha Strike. After that, it was, “Okay, now that you know how to play Alpha Strike, how would you automate it?” And I said, “I need to play it a lot more because it’s only as good as my understanding of the game.” The more I can play it, the more I can internalize the rule book, find all the weird edge cases, find all the units that are interesting and exceptional that bend the rules, or just are on the outskirts of the possible design space for the game. I wanna know about all of that.

We previewed an early version of BattleTech: Aces on the Mercenaries Kickstarter campaign. That version was developed from December 2022 through to Adepticon 2023, so we had about four months to make that first draft automated opponent.

It sort of worked. People could catch the vision of it. But there were a lot of details I was unhappy about, and it was very rudimentary or just ignored some aspects of the game. For example, it didn’t understand heat at all. It had no calculus for when to overheat or how to properly manage heat in Alpha Strike.

And so from there, we had a much, much longer development time to work out all of the kinks and get a whole series of decks that we were happy with. And then add all the various accoutrements we needed, like having them play for objectives, to hunt down and destroy things, to be able to do area control, to be able to do indirect fire incorrectly, choose spotters—all of these things are now in the system, but it is entirely just a result of that lead time. 

We started with the easy decks—the ones that are “I go over and hit the thing,” so your Brawler, your Juggernaut, your Skirmisher (a sort of mid-range brawler, don’t-get-too-close kind of guy), and your Striker. Those are the ones we did in the Mercenaries campaign. Then we took those, and my greater understanding of Alpha Strike and the BattleTech engine in general, to make the other decks. 

The Aces decks themselves are six cards. You assign each unit a deck. When you’re playing them, the front side is movement phase instructions and then you flip them over halfway through the turn for combat phase instructions But there is a whole design bible for how the different columns of the card and the front and the back of the card collate and how they also reference up to the command card—that is, the force commander directing their actions.

The goal is capturing various board states and making sure that you’re making the right move for the right time. Because it’s a miniatures game, I can’t just say, “Where are you on the table?” I also need to know your unit’s condition, how much cover you have, if I can get behind you, and all of these other things, right? 

So the BattleTech: Aces decks, rather than being a simple “go here, do this” became a set of Venn diagram filters almost. Here is the total possible space of things I can do. I’m gonna use this card to narrow down half these possibilities, then eliminate these other possibilities, until eventually I’m left with this very small subset of things I need to look at. From within those, the card gives you some parameters to filter them down to a single optimal course of action. 

This is just a small taste of what went into Aces.

To make this work there’s a fairly extensive Google sheet (we work in Google ’cause I can collaborate with people, comment, or access it from any device). But there are many, many tabs for different facets of this project. Some of them are story-related, but the one that drives the 320 or so Aces cards that have been designed to date is a row per card and about 50 columns. Google Sheets chokes if you try to load it on a phone—it’s that big. 

But some of those columns are not data. They’re for generating the layout file we build in InDesign, a data merge that pulls in all of the appropriate art and background and literally builds the card, swapping out text for icons. It’s very extensive, but the end result is that I can write out a card in the spreadsheet and then have InDesign make the card automatically. 

Tommy: I also choke when I look at the spreadsheet. It’s just like hooking into the Matrix.

Sean: So you’ve got a bunch of these cards, and you kind of have to randomize those parameters so that each of these cards isn’t basically saying the same thing over and over again. How do you decide what goes on any given card? Is it just thrown into a randomizer, or is there logic to what commands go on what card?

Josh: This is actually going back to stuff learned three projects ago in terms of developing automated opponents. When I did the one for Heroes of the Aturi Cluster, the automated opponent that can run X-Wing, one of the things that we saw immediately was that players would just go, “Well it’s my turn. I’ve gotta plot my maneuvers, but what might my opponent do? Let’s look at his logic chart.” And they would start to game the system and figure out if I’m here he’s gonna do that, so I should do this. 

X-Wing has more maneuvers that are applicable in a situation in that game than there are states to check. Basically, your ship can do 15 different maneuvers, but really, there are only eight directions to look at. You kind of want some variety—it’s not just gonna always do the same move in this situation. So we took all the maneuvers a ship could do that seemed decent for each situation, picked the three most reasonable ones for the case, and said, cool, we’ll make a little roll-and-lookup table so it’s semi-random. 

And what we discovered is that’s still not good enough. Players will still look at that and go, “Yeah, he is still gonna do this thing.” So then I got really crafty with it and said, well what if every direction and angle bracket was a gamble? If I’m gonna be here and I’m gonna proc this table, what are the chances that I get outmaneuvered versus I get to outmaneuver the opponent? Sometimes the deck will counter your counter, too.

So that’s really what it’s about. As long as each of those cards has its own internal game plan for handling a board situation—seeing if something will get the unit in trouble, being cautious or aggressive, playing defensive when appropriate, and having a distinct way of solving problems—then you get interesting and semi-random feeling behavior.

Sean: Will any single deck ever contain two identical cards? Or are they all unique?

Josh: All 300 rows of that spreadsheet are unique. Some of the cards are similar, but it’s like the flap of the butterfly’s wing sort of situation; if you take the movement priorities for a card and just randomize the order, you get very different results. Some of those results are desirable and some of them are strategically terrible.

There are certain design patterns you’ll see across all the BattleTech: Aces cards. There’s a reason you check for cover before seeing if you should get closer, depending on what kind of unit you are or the board state you’re in. There are a lot of repeated instructions across different cards, but the situations that trigger them—and the results, depending on the board you’re playing on—are gonna be very different.

Sean: Will there ever be an instance where you’ll find two equally valid options to satisfy a single card’s requirements? 

Josh: Yes, absolutely. It can happen. 

Tommy: For me, what I’ve noticed when interpreting the cards is that there are lots of opportunities to have the model decide where it needs to go at equal proportions. There are also times when the card says to do something that you wouldn’t do as a player. 

One of the secret things I love about Aces is that it’s as good as you are—that should be the tagline! I watch people use these decks and then I also play competitively against ’em for fun, and the people that read these decks play their playstyles. Josh is the only person I know outside of Paul that reads the decks and will not break the letter of the law on the cards. If you do that, the deck is still very, very gross, and I’m still like, how did it figure this out? 

But if you play somewhat subjectively where there are two options, a fun test I’ll do is pre-decide where I’d place the models as if I were playing competitively and then see if the deck agrees. Eight times out of ten, the instructions will be exactly as I predicted. One out of ten times, it’ll be nothing like I would’ve predicted, but in a very good way, and then one out of ten, it’ll not be like I predicted, but in a flawed way—just like a human player making a mistake.

I really want to take the BattleTech: Aces deck into a tournament and make no decisions for myself—just use the deck. The Wolfnet guys are saying they would love to do this as well. I’ll have them prepare a nice competitive list but put the Aces deck to work. I’m gonna be on my phone playing Brick Breaker or something the whole time, then when it’s my turn, just read a card, move the model, roll dice, then eat some popcorn and see where I place at the end.

Sean: I would be very interested to see how that goes. I hope we get to see that sometime later this year. 

Tommy: Oh, probably at Gen Con. 

Josh: I’ll also just add that the decks are made to be played with the commander cards, which are intended to be faction-flavorful. The commander provides a couple of variables for directing the overall actions of the force. So rather than controlling a single unit, it’s sort of coordinating. We ended up at a place in development where the deck doesn’t necessarily play like a human player does a lot of the time. It may prioritize things in a strange order, but that prioritization makes perfect sense for the in-universe character it’s supposed to represent. 

One of my early playtesters commented that it doesn’t feel like I’m playing a person, it feels like I’m playing against a Jade Falcon. And that has stuck with me. It’s a cool feature of the Aces automated opponent that I have not done or seen in any of the previous projects we’ve worked on.

That for me is the really new and exciting bit and makes it so much more replayable and variable because you can just plug a different commander into the same five-‘Mech Star or four-‘Mech Lance and get a totally different battlefield strategy.

Sean: That’s very cool. Now, BattleTech: Aces won’t just be one product; it’s actually going to be four! Each new box set will have new stories and eight new minis, according to what we learned at AdeptiCon. How much pull did you guys have in choosing what ‘Mechs go into which expansions?

Josh: This is a fun one, ’cause the plastic miniatures selection criteria are frankly insane and so much more complicated than anyone would imagine. Catalyst themselves will tell you that they pick models by everybody submitting a ranked list and they fight over them. That was not my experience making Aces.

I was given a fairly large sandbox by Ray and Randall. They told me, “Hey, it takes a long time to sculpt new ‘Mech, so we’ll give you two. You can have two brand-new minis. The rest need to be variants of existing ‘Mechs so that we don’t have to spend a year just making plastic for one box set.” Because it’s essentially a giant ForcePack, right?

In Scouring Sands, you get nine miniatures: two hover tanks and seven ‘Mechs. The hover tanks are new and one of the ‘Mechs is a brand-new unit. They also said, “By the way, now that you’ve figured out your story concepts, the ‘Mechs you pick have to be appropriate for the opposing force. The Clan has to have that ‘Mech in its touman, and it must be reasonable for that character to be assigned that ‘Mech.” Because even if a ‘Mech is listed on the MUL, some ‘Mechs are only given to second-line garrison Clusters for instance.

Of course, that’s not complicated enough. You need to be able to select units that cover all eight battlefield roles (Brawler, Striker, Sniper, Skirmisher, Scout, Missile Boat, Ambusher, and Juggernaut) and all four ‘Mech sizes (light, medium, heavy, and assault). Then you have to make sure that across all four BattleTech: Aces boxes, you’re not making two Juggernaut decks that are identical because the Juggernaut units you picked are too similar and should play the same way.

Also, there are more decks than just these eight roles. Something with Improved Jump Jets or a Partial Wing—that has the JMPS special ability in Alpha Strike—really needs a specialized Aces deck for its keyword, so that the unit plays to maximize its advantages

Then there’s the question of which planet are you setting the adventure on. The units on that planet should probably be available locally or manufactured nearby. So then I had to dig through Sarna and cross-reference all the old factory stuff from the one old sourcebook that players love, but all the developers hate because it’s locked all of this in stone and they have to work around it every time.

This is how I knew we were in a good place. I had a follow-up meeting with Randall and Ray where I sent them this spreadsheet of all the units I chose. Ray looked at it and said, “Yeah, this is really solid.” We did substitute one model. Ray said, “I don’t like this ‘Mech. You should do something different.” And then of course Randall also said, “No, I want this one. We never did this one unit from the Mercenaries Kickstarter—you gotta put that in somewhere!” 

But that was all after the fact. At that point, it was pretty much set in stone and being turned over to the sculptors. That was all done before anything else. I didn’t touch it again. Catalyst had learned from the Clan Invasion and Mercenaries Kickstarters that you have to start all your concept art, 3D modeling, TRO line art, Alpha Strike card art, and key art for covers all at the beginning. The entire delta of all the graphic output downstream depends on getting the model for each ‘Mech done, so you have to start way at the beginning and then everything else can fill in around it.

Sean: I could see why the ‘Mech selection is really the most important step. 

Josh: Yeah, way more complicated than anyone thought it was. And I made it more complicated for my own BattleTech: Aces design purposes. This is how we got the Bane 3 though. 

Sean: What’s the story behind this campaign? Can you tell us anything about Scouring Sands’ narrative? 

Josh: The campaign structure came from me doing the setting research and then Dylan writing a Choose Your Own Adventure flow for the 21 missions. The campaign’s only seven missions long no matter what path you take, but there are four different endings, and you’d have to play at least three times to play each mission. The exception is there’s one mission that you’ll fight every playthrough—it’s a key turning point in the contract and can play out a couple of different ways. Then for all those scenarios, there are assigned opposing forces, what commander and Aces decks to use, some special rules for flavor, and some waypoint cutscenes.

On the fiction side, I had the pleasure of working with Russell Zimmerman, who has done a bunch of work for Shrapnel. John Helfers is in the mix doing some fiction direction and editing here too, but Rusty did the awesome and heavy-lifting work of adding 500 words of introduction fiction to every scenario and a lot of flavor text. 

Scouring Sands is set in mid-3151 on a Hinterlands planet called Apolakkia, previously part of the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone. When Malvina Hazen takes all the Jade Falcons and tells ’em to come to Terra, some logistical issues cause a few of them to miss the bus. The planet itself is not particularly notable except for some local industry that is producing munitions. Some light mining and plants making shells—autocannon ammunition, basically.

Sean: Everybody needs that. 

Josh: Of course—the basics! It’s a minor industrial center that people are not too concerned about, and it’s right up against the borders of the newly formed Alyina Mercantile League.

The story is the Mercantile League has absorbed most of the merchant caste from the Jade Falcon Clan to become this new merchant-run version of the Jade Falcons. Apolakkia would like to join the Mercantile League, but the existing Clan warriors on the planet are really not having it. They don’t believe that this is an appropriate way to conduct things according to Clan tradition. 

You’re basically hired to resolve the situation. There’s a whole bunch of ways you can go about completing the contract, but shots will be fired. 

Sean: The first one, Scouring Sands, will be in the Hinterlands. We have at least three more announced products coming—one will be based on the Empire Alone sourcebook, one is supposed to be Dominions Divided, and then one more I think?

Josh: Yep. They wanted to do all four of them based on the four ilClan-era sourcebooks after ilClan. We’ve got Scouring Sands based on the Tamar Rising sourcebook, set in the Hinterlands and your opposing force is the Jade Falcons. 

For Empire Alone, we looked at doing a Wolf OpFor for that box, but Catalyst had already planned three ForcePacks of Wolf-related miniatures, and we all felt it was enough. So I looked at what else is in the sourcebook and decided I would really like to see the Capellans as the opposing force. This box set is called Wrath and Reprisal, and it’s set in Capellan space along the border of the Duchy of Andurien. 

The third box will be based on Dominions Divided. There are two big chunks in this sourcebook. One is the Federated Suns/Draconis Combine border and the taking of New Avalon. The other big chunk of that book is the Ghost Bear Civil War in the Rasalhague Dominion—the dispute between the Joiners and the Deniers as to whether they’re going to join Alaric Ward‘s new Star League. So we ended up with the Snowblind box set. You get inserted into the civil war and have to deal with trying to keep the peace between two different sides of the Ghost Bear touman. It’s a nightmare contract full of ethical gray areas, and I love how it’s turned out.

And finally, the fourth one is based on IlKhan’s Eyes Only, which is brand-new if you haven’t read it yet. Fantastic sourcebook—lots of really cool stuff happens in there. One of the new players that takes a bigger, more center-stage role in lKhan’s Eyes Only is the Raven Alliance—the Clan Snow Raven/Outworlds Alliance mashup. Box four is called Controlled Burn. You’re defending a planet on the border of the Federated Suns and Outworlds Alliance against a Snow Raven invasion. 

Sean: I don’t remember reading about that in IlKhan’s Eyes Only.

Josh: In a sense, we got to do some expanded-universe material, off-camera. The Ravens have four Naval Stars and three of them are at Terra. What’s the fourth one doing? Invading under the banner of the new Star League? 

Sean: Good question! Another good question; will Clan opponents have cards that tell them to follow the rules of zellbrigen?

Josh: In the ilClan era, the Clans generally don’t believe in following zellbrigen with Spheroids. They really only use it for Clan-on-Clan trials. Spoilers for Scouring Sands; one of the ways that the campaign can end is in a Trial of Possession for the planet against the last five Clanners, and they have special rules for zellbrigen in that case. But most of the time, they won’t. 

Sean: Fair enough. I know in the ilClan era, zellbrigen might be a little antiquated, but it would be interesting to have those rules if you wanted to play BattleTech: Aces during the Clan Invasion, for example.

Josh: Literally pull that section of special rules out of that one scenario in the back of Scouring Sands, and there you go: zellbrigen in whatever scenario you want. Some of the Focht’s Network boys have been running Aces testing for the better part of a year now, and they’ve done all kinds of stuff with those zellbrigen rules in giant co-op games, and they work really well. They’re generic enough to really have legs.

Sean: You kind of went into this earlier when you talked about picking ‘Mechs, but other than that, how was it collaborating with Catalyst? Was it mostly Lynnvander making the decisions or was it more of a conversation?

Tommy: I mean, yes and no. If it wasn’t for Randall, I don’t think this would’ve gotten green-lit in the time that it did. It would’ve eventually come to reality, but it’s very important for BattleTech fans to note that if not for Randall, this product would not exist. That’s also true of Josh and me because the three of us are integral in the very Hollywood playbook of how this exciting project came to be.

Josh: Randall fought from his side, you fought for it from our side, and I came and said, here’s how you actually make it. 

Tommy: Strangely enough—and I know this is something that will probably get me burned for mentioning on this channel—but it actually started with Games Workshop. I had worked on a small development to try and make Warhammer 40K single-player way back before I knew anything about BattleTech. 

I went to Essen Spiel in Germany with a manila folder that had a rule set and two units of Tyranids and one unit of Space Marines, and I guaranteed you the Tyrannids would kick your butt every single time. But Games Workshop didn’t play ball. They didn’t want to acknowledge that I was about to show them something. 

Then it was a few short months later that we had done a pitch meeting with WizKids for a bunch of different board game products, and they kind of politely turned down all of our game designs. One of which is now Gemini Gauntlet, which is successful for us on our own. 

Josh: The other one was the engine that became Shadowrun: Takedown. 

Tommy: Which ended up becoming Catalyst—very funny!

I come from the film world, the ‘Hollywood North,’ as they call Toronto, so I get very fired up—my heat sinks go off—when I hear “no.” Not due to my ego, but due to recognizing that something is gonna be very good for the industry. But people may or may not see that vision. Or they do see the vision and then just go, “Nah.” I tend to get a little frustrated.

So when the thing with Games Workshop fell apart because they were not willing to acknowledge who was involved, that kind of burned me. And when we were sitting there with WizKids and after we got three noes for these really good board games, I turned in and was like, what if I told you that we could make Star Trek: Attack Wing a single-player game? And they were like, “No, can’t be done.” And Josh was there, and I was like, actually, it can be done and it has been done, but for your competitor game and not in a sellable way.

So here’s the cherry cluster. They call in his chief in charge of Attack Wing and Josh whips out a scenario, and next thing you know, we make three boxes of Star Trek: Alliance. The same kind of thing happened with Randall’s opening story, where we were talking about various options for BattleTech, and then it was more like, “Hey Randall, I think we can make Alpha Strike single-player now.”

And he is like, “Whoa, that would be a feat.” And I’m like, well, we can do it. Josh can do it. Josh wasn’t even there to defend himself—I kind of sold Josh before knowing that he would do it. I kind of threw the planet on him and then he rose to the challenge, like I knew he would. Randall immediately turned and said to the rest of the team, we need to do this. Then Ray bought in almost instantly, and then it was just getting the great Loren on board.

I think he recognized what BattleTech: Aces was going to do to the gaming sphere. I think he was just doing what all strong and independent CEOs of companies would do, which is looking at the numbers and going, “This is going to be a hell of an investment because it’s not a small product.”

And then finally when everybody just sat him down and said, “You have to do this.” And, then he is like, “Fine.” Then he and I did the Hollywood thing where he tried to producer me and I producered back, and then we shook on it, and bam! Then it was off to Josh. How was your working with Catalyst?

Josh: Actually very interesting. I always appreciated the fact that they were a fully remote company. I was not quite prepared to be the liaison between every separate department of Catalyst to get this project done. 

It was not uncommon to talk to fiction about this and then get feedback about game design from Joshua Franklin and Keith Hann, who are the Alpha Strike and Classic rules keepers over at Catalyst. Then talk to Aaron and Ray about fiction and are we setting it in the right place? And Ray, do you like what we’ve done with this campaign mechanic? 

In some ways, I ended up going from having one boss to having 12 people to report to and/or work with horizontally. I think I’ve interfaced with almost every aspect of the BattleTech machine now. I learned so many weird things about their working process, for why things are done the way they’re done in BattleTech land and most of that isn’t written down anywhere. 

Tommy: Don’t get us wrong though. This isn’t saying bad about Catalyst. The one thing we will say about the family inside Catalyst, it has been the same family forever. The no-turnaround thing is that these people are aligned with us in the sense that they care about the community first. They actually love BattleTech. I feel like an imposter because BattleTech isn’t my first love, right? D&D is my first love, but these guys breathe BattleTech.

But sometimes when you love your favorite hobby so much that the system of how to run that efficiently gets pushed to the side because your love for BattleTech is the primary focus in this situation. We were able to corral those different departments into creating this fused product like a really good television show—like Severance or The Studio. By the way, you gotta watch The Studio. 

Sean: I’m watching The Studio. It’s very good. 

Tommy: That has been my life in film, and it is my life in board games. So that’s what I do for board games—I walk on set and I screw everything up. That’s just what I do; I am Seth Rogen. 

But we’re like a good TV show. Even in the presale numbers discussion, was a good enough number that we’re already getting greenlit for BattleTech: Aces – Classic. We’re gonna be doing this for the next two years for sure. That’s not the only product that Catalyst is putting out, obviously, but in terms of big box set leads, people are not gonna be disappointed with the stuff coming out.

Sean: Speaking of BattleTech: Aces for Classic, you said it’ll be two years before we see it for Classic BattleTech? Is that just because it’s a much harder task to create cards for Classic?

Tommy: I don’t think it will be two years. 

Josh: This is tied up in a bunch of different things. I actually had an extensive conversation with Ray about this at AdeptiCon, but I don’t know what the timeline for Aces Classic is. It is pretty much all but greenlit at this point. Everyone has said they want to do it; contracts and such just have to get finalized. There’s also this thing about getting these other three Alpha Strike boxes in the can completely. 

Tommy: My whole side of the company is the biz-dev thing, so I need to think four boxes ahead. It was a long ten-month process to get the first box done, and then it was very quick to fire off the other three because all the heavy lifting happened in the first box. We knew that this was what it was gonna be like. It was a slow chug of the big file and then all the little files getting put into place now. 

But with Classic, I was jumping on that before we even discussed whether it was gonna happen or not. You’ll see it on my stream—there are a few times where I’ve run Classic with Paul against some VTOLs and I just used the first version of the Aces decks, like the very crude versions. Then I subbed in my own off-the-cuff heat, weapon, and ammo management just based on my own skillset. 

Now, there’s a lot more to the mechanics and nuances, and probably another three or 400 rows of spreadsheeting for Josh to get it to a functional opponent. We’re not on the line yet, but we’re already heading there. Catalyst now knows where we’re going with it story-wise. We can’t say what the box is yet, but we know where we’re kind of going. 

Josh: You can definitely use the BattleTech: Aces decks to play Classic. You’ll just have to—like Tommy said—fill in some of the blanks where the Aces deck is built for Alpha Strike, which doesn’t go into enough detail for some aspects. The biggest ones are, for example, ranges and heat management, ’cause those things are very different in Classic. 

Sean: That is true. Okay, let’s wrap things up! When are we going to get BattleTech: Aces? I believe the scuttlebutt from AdeptiCon was we’re looking at Gen Con. Is that when we’ll get Scouring Sands? 

Josh: Let’s hope so. Fingers crossed for Gen Con, but certainly on track for Q3. 

Sean: Okay. Will it be available to purchase at the Catalyst store? Or is it going to go to game stores everywhere? 

Josh: I’m sure it’ll be in retail a month or two after Gen Con. 

Sean: All right, cool. Now we always have one fun question before I let y’all go. This year we’ve seen BattleTech: Gothic announced which is a weird gothic take on the BattleTech universe with genetic monsters and ‘Mechs with pope hats. If you could do a crossover product with the BattleTech universe, what would be the theme?

Josh: Oh, I’m gonna give a super boring answer, which is I just want the anime box set. I’ve seen the concept art for the anime Timber Wolf. Just like, turn that thing to eleven, gimme that model. I’m ready. 

Tommy: I am a proponent of doing some alternative universes, even if it’s just for fun and for a small line to attract other players into the game itself. We need to separate the story from the mechanics. Some people just wanna play mechanics, some people wanna follow the story, and if people who aren’t really interested in getting into mechanics get into the story, then they will get into the mechanics and vice versa. This is why Magic keeps putting storylines out, ’cause some people care about what’s happening in the world of Magic: The Gathering. Other people don’t care and just wanna play competitively. They don’t care if the card is called A, B, or C, as long as it does the effect they want. 

I’ve already done streams where Paul has 3D-printed all these crazy monsters. We’ve just pretended they were dinosaurs that have 20 armor, spit eight acid balls, and destroy ‘Mechs in one gulp. I love that kind of stuff. For me, Gothic was a very cool thing. 

If I could get an alternate or mixed universe, believe it or not, it would be Shadowrun. I think if you were to try ShadowTechrun, if you had ‘Mechs in a dystopian Shadowrun universe with orcs and magic and stuff, it would be straight out of Final Fantasy. We’d have these ‘Mech wizards shooting lightning bolts instead of PPCs. Your runners could go and try to get the plans for a brand-new Atlas, things like that. I think it would be a very interesting world to mix. 

Sean: I feel like Catalyst has already done something similar as an April Fools product, but they didn’t really dive into it.

Tommy: Oh, they aren’t April Fools things anymore. 

Sean: Well that’s everything I had. Was there anything else you wanted to mention? 

Tommy: Well, I wanna thank you for all your dedication in taking time and effort to help the community grow, give them something to read, and a place to stay on Sarna. I think it’s really nice that there is someone with a unified voice like this to help interview various facets of the industry, to grow the stories and the communities.

Sean: Aw, thank you!

Tommy: Of course, we have to do a huge shout-out to the Focht’s Network and to Catalyst for teaming up and Red and Tex—Basically the Mechnificent Seven. I’m hoping that show really galvanizes a lot of our influencers to create new BattleTech content and to promote BattleTech.

So I just wanna give a shout-out to all those guys and everyone for taking the time out of their busy schedules to help startup stuff like myself and the Mechnificent Seven. I also own Six Sides of Gaming, and our channel’s exploding. We’re about 80 away from 60,000 subs, and a lot of that has been from people jumping in to watch more BattleTech content. 

BattleTech is in no threat of dissipating or falling apart. In fact, I think it’s just getting stronger and stronger, and a lot of that has to do with you. So thank you.

Sean: I think it has a lot to do with you as well, with exciting new products and a more multimedia-focused approach. It’s a very exciting time for BattleTech! Again, thanks so much for speaking to me, and I’m looking forward to seeing BattleTech: Aces in stores!

Thanks again to Josh and Tommy at Lynnvander Studios! We’ll be sure to relay any announcement on BattleTech: Aces‘ release date and don’t forget to catch Lynnvander on the Six Sides of Gaming YouTube channel.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.