A while back I remember there was a thing on Kickstarter that caused quite a stir among all of us Robotech fans, the promise of a new game that would let us play with the miniatures in a style like Warhammer 40k. The project raised over one million USD… AND IS CONSIDERED A FAILURE !!!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rrpgt/robotech-rpg-tacticstm
Now in all fairness I didn’t get in on that project because at the time I was jobless and a whole list of other reasons so I don’t know what took place, why it failed, etc..
Recently I was at the local game store and saw it sitting there, so I snagged it up and ushered it home and opened it up to behold my prize… talk about a nightmare in a box !!!
The miniatures are something like 1:285 scale or roughly 4cm tall/40mm. They’re tiny !!! But that’s cool, fine, more to fit on the field… except you have to assemble them and these nippleheads thought it was a good idea to try and see just how many pieces they could break these down into !!! As of the time of this post I’ve built four of the destroids and swear I’ve gone Southern Crosseyed ( did ya catch that there lol ).
So I can see that as one big issue among people, they’ve created a disaster in a box and you have to sort it out before you can even play the game. At least the original Battletech boxed set came with cardboard standups that allowed you to get right into the game. Which brings me to another point. Back in the 80’s I want to say Ral Partha made several Robotech miniatures out of metal, much bigger than these and more detailed with far less pieces. For what they pulled in off this project surely they could have achieved something better in regards to creating better minis for the game.
So enough bitching about minis… let’s move onto something else I discovered in the box…. these tiny little unit cards I guess they are. These things are so tiny I can barely read them. What the hell guys.
What happened was they literally ran out of money and then the copyright expired and wasn’t renewed. This meant that Palladium, the parent company for the project wasn’t able to deliver on all the products offered through the kickstarter project and if you scroll through you’ll see, EVERYTHING was unlocked.
Here’s an article on the failure:
https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/2/17071612/robotech-rpg-tactics-kickstarter-disaster-palladium-books
So now we’re left with a partially finished game, a lot of cheesed off people, and a bunch of minis floating that nobody really has the time to assemble or wants to assemble because you can no longer get the game unless you snag it on eBay or something… don’t get me wrong, it’s still available, just not like, walk into the game store and pick it up off the shelf….. even though that’s what I did…. you know what I mean.
So…. where does that leave the world that wants to use these minis or wants to play a miniature based Robotech game? Kinda stuck in the mud. There are some rule sets out there I’ve scanned over and they all read like 5 year old Cowboy and Indian stuff. I want something more and if you’ve been following me lately you know I’ve gone down a deep rabbit hole with Team Yankee…. see where I’m going now?

So here’s what I’m proposing… a miniatures based Robotech game, using the structure of Flames of War/Team Yankee, complete with the unit cards, etc. Can it be done? Hell yeah? And here’s why…
To begin with it just takes someone with a computer and Photoshop to create the template for the Unit Cards. There’s plenty of STL and OBJ files on the net to print out the minis needed to play. I’ve managed to compile a collection of all the classic destroids, all the veritech variants, a 3 meter long SDF-1 and Zentraedi Battleship, as well as the little vehicles and Zentraedi power armors, and warriors. BOOM GAME TIME !!!
Terrain is simple as much of the fighting took place in cities, in space, or inside spaceships so damn near anything will do.
Sounds way to easy right? Just don’t overthink it !!! Keep it simple… the basic rules are already out there, keep it open sourced so everyone can help it grow, and who knows… maybe in a couple of years it’ll be a thing you see played regularly at game stores.
So those are my thoughts… I’ve got all the RPG books and reference books, novels, videos, etc.. so I think in my spare time I’m going to start laying out the ground work for this and see where it goes.
LOVE LIVE ROBOTECH !!!