Lancer: Battlegroup (Part 1)

Best time-travel roleplaying wargame

Lancer: Battlegroup is a game published by Kai Tave and Miguel Lopez. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Massif Press. Lancer: Battlegroup has been enclosed as part of Role’s platform economy crowdfunding efforts.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do not find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement. )

Ludo

What can I say, this is a masterwork? Everything comes together to really enhance the experience of evoking massive stellar shipyards, the vibration of these death engines, the rippling impact of every movement of the fleet. Layout, art, writing, approachability of content, readability, accessibility; I have little to say — you will not be disappointed in any of those aspects.

To many, this would be “good/best/great”; but alas, that is not my measuring stick for such things. We need to turn to work and material conditions. When we compute those in, Lancer: Battlegroup approaches new highs, reaching the select pantheon of the kind of art that is impossible — the art that given everything we exist on, should not exist.

For that conclusion, we must take a brief detour to Role. Role proposed itself as a premium marketplace for roleplaying games, a platform for playing games and for supporting game artisans and creators. In reality, its innovations were to bring fintech and venture capital in an attempt to disrupt and capture the artform into yet another platform economy. With hustle culture at its innovations, with the face of rainbow capitalism, Role rolled in artificially inflated by venture capital with money that the people within the artform just do not have, and scamming other investors through Kickstarter for extra capital that they refuse the benefits of a donation and/or dividends that they owe their venture capitalist partners, tried to corner its little Uber-For-TTRPGs by affording to lose money in an attempt to corner the feud of a captive platform population.

The trick, however, is that those successful monopolists accomplish their goals by offering something too good to refuse; Role ignored that step and four years in, still lacks audio and video services that are even comparable to platforms people already been using for years, laughable VTT capacities and a marketplace for TTRPGs that cannot even compare with the pretty bad ones we have already. What they did is to jump to implementing more and more features nobody asks for but are meant not to appeal to users but the drawn further fintech and venture capital investment, specially those looking for some easy rainbow-washing.

Let it not be said that Role did not bring innovation into the art-form: they brought in tech industry-tier hustle culture and crunch! To sell people on the Kickstarter, Role spiced the deal with six collaborators with six actual games; actual art that people want and can use to make more art. As the tech of the platform was barely usable during its first year, this put more pressure on those deliverables; this was not a problem for the known scammer involved or the corporation partner that spoke the same language as Role and had a big library of content to drip through Role updates. However, this was a nightmarish pressure put on all the tiny teams with no-budgets pushed to deliver something.

Lancer: Battlegroup was created under those conditions.

We all bought and supported these projects, we all know the song and dance. Development in designing a game goes out of the window, all collaborators do token contributions to justify them being added to the project, things are dropped here and there, and something is delivered — often hoping that the art assets already done for the crowdfunding serve as base for it to pass as a decent art book. It is just how the dice fall; you do with you can with the conditions you subject too, and this is what you could do.

This is all what Lancer: Battlegroup could do.

The book you can get and read should not exist. This art is impossible.

And as we will cover through the critical analysis, the first thing to always go out of the window — game design — remains sacrossanct and central. It knows what it is and the gargantuan goal it has before itself and while it downscales, it becomes further focused on delivering the intricate and polished pieces that a game like it would need to produce the desired art.

Again, Lancer: Battlegroup is impossible art.

Brad

Lancer: Battlegroup is beautiful, it’s lean and mean, no bloat, no chaff, just a well-organized and beautiful killing machine of a ttrpg. I know nothing of its history, so I will tell you for a moment about its layout.

In my humble opinion, a TTRPG should teach you the mechanics of the game before it tells you how to build a character for that game, that way you can actually understand the mechanical choice you are making. Lancer Battlegroup does that, all the page numbers in the text work, and the layout is clean and concise, easy to understand, and flows well from one section to another.

Another often mentioned Brad-point is that the game has excellent art direction, the art all feels like it belongs together, and works well with the layout, enhancing each other rather than contrasting.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lucrécia

Lancer: Battlegroup is a wargame. With it also being a roleplaying game, you have both a level of detachment to absurd amounts of violence and death and cataclysmic actions and a deep emotional connection to every movement in the battlefield — and you play through all of that. The game does its best to prepare for that, but it is still going to be an unavoidable element that you need to figure on your own how to navigate safely and comfortably.

When playing Lancer: Battlegroup, you will need to be comfortable with committing to a course of action and accepting the outcome. Reaction are rare opportunities in Lancer: Battlegroup and cannot be counted on. This is not a game where there is a play-by-play of rounds and you can adapt what you do according to the luck of the dice; turnabouts are also rare and if it seems you are losing, you will probably lose. If you do not enjoy committing to the unknown and living with the consequences, Lancer: Battlegroup may not be very enjoyable for you.

While you cannot avoid bringing up Lancer when discussing the game, as we tried over this critic in vain, the game requires little to no familiarity with the main lineage games. It will enhance your enjoyment, for sure, but you operate at such different levels that you will not need to even acknowledge it during play.

Brad

Lancer: Battlegroup is a fleet based wargame, it will not be impossible for your characters to be responsible for death on a scale that is almost unimaginable. You and your group should discuss what this means to you and how to do this as safely as possible. The game’s unique approach means trying to keep a cool head and focused mind as you deal with everything is constantly on fire, if that sounds bad to you, skip it.

The Lancer connection informs the universe, but I have never actually gotten to play Lancer and it didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and creates a common space for creation.

Ludo

Lancer: Battlegroup is a starship combat wargame roleplaying game set in the void of the Lancer universe. Players take control of battlegroups of ships, coming together into a larger fleet. The game is not focused on tracking individuals; the commander and the battlegroup are the same character. Battlegroups are created and retrofitted based on limited intel, deployed in an engagement where you bash your devastating warcrime machines and go back to the shipyard. Missions come and the cycle restarts. No space for heroism, only the waste of war.

Brad

Lancer: Battlegroup sees each player character in charge of a group of ships that they lead into battle against other groups of ships. This process is going to be ugly, you are going to be turning the whole crew into casualties, and in all honesty, your commander is about the only character in the battlegroup, so get ready to burden yourself with all the hard choices that come with command.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists on a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lucrécia

Lancer: Battlegroup is a game about time.

There is no cheap space travel in Lancer¹. The ships you command in Lancer: Battlegroup travel at nearlight speeds, and cannot cheat around and must suffer the full blunt of relativistic time dilation. A month-long mission puts you out-of-sync with the universe almost one entire year.

This makes playing Lancer: Battlegroup an experience of being swallowed by tides of temporal dissonance. You react to intelligence that may as well be frozen in time, with weeks and even months, to manufacture new weapons or retrofit entire ships. Then you are thrown into the time-sense of a ship’s crew, where what feels like less than seconds sees the wealth and labor of years of planetary sacrifice disappear in less than a blink — alongside the frozen potential of who knows how many humans and sentient artificial beings. And when you return, people have been looking for the consequences of your actions for weeks, been pondering intelligence for months and have spent years building replacement ships.

But are you really back in sync?

To come aboard a Lancer: Battlegroup’s ship is to die; not only to die, but to die in a way unknown to most of humanity. And I don’t mean the many lives lost to asphyxiation, radiation, void exposure or being reduced to atoms by a stellar rail gun. To come aboard is to become socially death in the most extreme ways, to become a nomadic time traveller; enslaved skeleton crew to ghost ships, looming over worlds as an omen of death, stumbling back into spaceports to haunt the living.

Everything costs time. Things fail because of lack of time. Time throws its way around, and this makes everything in Lancer: Battlegroup as heavy as the stars themselves. This weight of time also gives Lancer: Battlegroup an astonishing sense of scale often lacking in sci fi. It is a known issue with the Lancer mechanics that the mechs don’t feel as big as they should be², and the setting does not feel big in any significant way³. Time dilation, the lag between the consequences and the actions leading to them, the effort and sacrifice implied by every component in a battlegroup, they all create this overwhelming sense of scale⁴; playing Lancer: Battlegroup is going through cycles of ignoring the scale to focus on something you can do and then being hit by it the moment you relax and take a break.

Brad

Lancer: Battlegroup is about the horror of command, it is about having to be the person who makes the call that gets people killed. You don’t get the freedom of having just built the bomb, or just having to shoot the enemy. The Commanders of each Battlegroup make the calls that lead to parents never coming home, and the most they get out of it is a “Good Job” or “It was a decision that had to made.”

But is it?

Your character decided to sacrifice that boarding party, you knew that every turn they were in the enemy ship risked their lives, and you took that risk. They died, you won the day, but those people don’t get to go home. The Commander sitting next to you parked his frigate in the firing range of that enemy gunboat, every soul aboard it died, and he didn’t, he came home. When do these things start to weigh on you?

You gain a reputation, that is one of the core advancements of Battlegroup. How do you handle the whole universe calling you a Butcher? How do you handle it when you can argue that while an ugly choice the death of The Crimson Dawn’s crew of 10,000 saved the lives of the rest of the fleet!?

How do you sleep at night?

There’s always the flipside too, when you have killed so many that an enemy ship surrenders seeing your Battlegroup turn its massive guns on them. When you can almost see the enemy commander shake with fear as they surrender before your brutal efficiency. They know you have sent so many to the breathless void that they’d rather risk your mercy than your fury. You hear them refer to your capital ship as Bloody Peace’s Promise.

What do you think your own officers call you? Do those medals on your chest feel heavy yet, Commander?

1. Except when there is, but Lancer: Battlegroup is very explicit about the lives and deaths of those that inhabit the void of nearlight travel.

2. An artifact of its design lineage and the abstraction of being locked to a grid where all the impacts of a skyscraper moving around are not easily conveyed.

3. Leaving the galactic scale of the world of Lancer feel like serving only to handwave certain elements rather than storytelling utility.

4. And even then, Lancer: Battlegroup finds a twelve-worlds setting to be the best example to a setting to showcase the game.