RTFM

My perennial opponent Britt and I are both also getting into Heavy Gear. I stockpiled tons of minis over the course of the past few years, and I'm finally getting around to doing something with even some moiety of the pounds and pounds of lead they represent. However, our first game - game might be an exaggeration, skirmish might be more fitting - was a frustrating, stop-and-go affair at best, which is totally on my head. While I'd read the rules over the course of my protracted buying spree, a tenuous, mostly theoretical grasp of a ruleset is arguably worse than useless when the rubber meets the road for the first time. We split up a MILICIA GP squad I'd assembled and primed, plunked down some incredibly basic terrain and went at it. I don't think I got any pictures that night, which is just as well because I really made a hash of the rules, and wasn't even able to look stuff up terribly quickly. After grinding to a halt, we took another stab at it, and the followup match seemed to flow noticeably better and was much more fun, although still a halting mess. Fortunately, I think our enthusiasm for the background, the miniatures, and the rules themselves (despite my hamfisted attempts to interpret them) won out, and a week or so later we played a much, much smoother (although still quite interrupted by 'damn let me look that back up' moments) match between my MILICIA trash and Britt's UMF blockheads.