It has been nine years since I last wrote about a Robotech/Macross board game on this website, and I feel like that is far too long, so thankfully I’m getting the chance to revisit the subject with a new tabletop experience.
This is the promising, if also cumbersomely-named Robotech Macross DOG FIGHT- The Miniatures Game, one of the first major pieces of licensing to arrive since decades of conflict over the series’ rights were put to bed last year.
While the last game I wrote about was a squad-based tactics experience, this one draws a lot of inspiration from titles like X-Wing and Wings of War to make a dogfighting game that’s little closer to what we’d expect given the source material.
Here’s the official description:
Experience the Robotech universe like never before. In this revised version of our classic game, players assume the roles of mecha pilots in control of Veritechs, Battlepods, or Destroids entrenched in a fast-paced, high-speed combat encounter.
Players recreate the intense, acrobatic fight scenes found in the original Robotech animated show by employing programmed movement, secret actions, and various weapon cards.
In addition to the character-based fighter combat there are also ground and ship-based mechs that can join in, as well as capital ships, including the centrepiece SDF-1. And while it borrows this genre’s now-established system of mapping out a flight path on the board with arrows, I love how this game is simulating elevation by actually allowing for “steps”, which can pass over or under other players.
This isn’t actually a new game; it was released last year in a simpler form, allowing for only 1v1 dogfights, but the team went back to the drawing board and came up with this revised edition, which blows the number of units in combat out to 50, and has gone to town on some of the miniatures, including a 15cm SDF-1.
As an enormous Macross fan I’m super keen to check this out…whenever it actually ships to customers (there’s a tentative release date of December 2022, but the board game business is still deep in pandemic hell). It’s currently running a Kickstarter campaign which asked for $75,000 and has already blown right past that, sitting at $135,000 with 13 days left to run.
