Battletech
Battletech Game News, Reviews, Editorials & Unboxings. BattleTech is a wargaming and military science fiction franchise launched by FASA Corporation in 1984, acquired by WizKids in 2001, which was in turn acquired by Topps in 2003; and published since 2007 by Catalyst Game Labs. The trademark is currently owned by Topps and, for video games, Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios; Catalyst Game Studios licenses the franchise from Topps. The series began with FASA's debut of the board game BattleTech by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock III and has grown to include numerous expansions to the original game, several board games, role playing games, video games, a collectible card game, a series of more than 100 novels, and an animated television series. In its wargame form, BattleTech is played on a map sheet composed of hexagonal terrain tiles. The combatants are roughly 12-metre-tall (40 ft) humanoid armored combat units called BattleMechs, piloted by Mechwarriors, powered by fusion reactors and armed with a variety of weapons. Typically, these are represented on the game board by two-inch-tall miniatures. BattleTech's fictional history covers the approximately 1,150 years from the end of the 20th century to the middle of the 32nd. Most works in the series are set during the early to middle decades of the 31st century, in the current galaxy, centered around the Terran system, known as the Inner Sphere.