# Mecha! *Created:* 2025-01-06, *Modified:* 2026-10-08 ![[Mecha! (cover).jpg|600]] ![[Mecha! Spirit Warrior Empire (cover).jpg|600]] *"If you like the idea of humans piloting gigantic metal versions of themselves and using them to wage war across the cosmos … this is the game for you."* That's **Mecha!** (Seventh Street Games, 1991) introducing itself straight off the title page, no false modesty whatsoever. It's a tabletop miniatures wargame built to simulate "the action, pace, and drama of Japanese animation giant robot combat" — and, being from the early nineties, it does it with a box of dice, a tape measure, and its own gloriously homebrew 3D gimmick: segmented **Battlepoles** you stand your mechs on to dogfight in actual third dimension. It's generic by design (recreate any anime you like, or let it hand you a bizarre new one), yet it's remembered for the utterly un-anime setting it tucks into the back of the book: Aztec mecha. Physics, the authors cheerfully confess on page six, has nothing to do with any of this; this is a game about seeing things explode. *(Not to be confused with [[Mecha]], Chris Perrin's anime-drama RPG of the same root word.)* ## Setting **Mecha!** is a skirmish wargame of mecha and powersuits duking it out on land, at sea, in the air, and in space — a universal toolkit for the whole [[mecha (genre)|mecha]] genre rather than a single locked-down universe. The core book opens with a construction system meant to let players recreate whatever anime they've been obsessing over, from twentieth-century tanks up through towering human-piloted war machines, with the human value baked into the equation: robots are automatic, but mecha have pilots and crews, and the game is as much about the warriors inside the suits as the metal titans flailing at each other. The fiction threaded through the rules follows one such crew — a rookie squad led by a hard-bitten pilot who keeps correcting himself when he says "guys," fighting an empire-spanning war and praying they live long enough to stop being fodder. But the book's real setting, and the reason anybody still talks about it, is what it offers as its own twist on the genre: the **Spirit Warrior Empire**, previewed in the core's back pages and expanded across a full sourcebook. That's the story of a pre-Conquest Aztec society ripped bodily off Earth and dropped onto an alien world where the gods are real — ancient alien patrons of the **Huitznahua** clan — and where blood sacrifice measurably powers the divinity you're praying to. More on that below. ## Mechanics The resolution engine is clean nineties dice-vs-dice: attacks resolve as an **opposed 1d10 roll** (attacker vs. defender, ties to the attacker), modified by gunnery/piloting levels, range, firing arcs, and dodging. A hit rolls a number of **d6 of damage**; the defender rolls its **armor dice** (regular + heavy + shield) and the excess bleeds into **System Integrity** — which is both a mech's hit points *and* its fuel gauge: - Each phase sequence opens with a **Control Phase**: both sides roll 1d10 and the higher controls the turn. Only the controlling side may take offensive actions; the other side is limited to reactive, defensive ones like dodging and defensive fire. The side that lost gains **+2** on the next roll, and a side that loses two in a row automatically wins the third. It's random, it's swingy, and it's supposed to feel like a battle no one actually steers. - **System Integrity** serves double duty as health and as the pool that fills **Action Points**. On gaining control, a side's mechs refill their action points up to their current System Integrity, so a banged-up mech does less — and the core economy is wonderfully blunt: *it costs one action point to cause 1d6 of damage.* Overload doubles your action points for the phase but permanently halves your System Integrity; anime heroics, priced accordingly. - The **Missile Phase** is a chess game of salvoes. Missiles cost 1 AP each, do 1d6, and have unlimited range; disposable **pods** carry five and vent the whole load, while **bays** hold up to ten and can split fire. Incoming missiles run a gauntlet: defensive missiles detonate at the halfway point into an **attrition zone**, defensive ranged fire tries to shoot them down (a weapon rolls 1d6, a 5–6 scores), and a **dodge** evades an entire salvo. What gets through stacks the **Overwhelm Effect** — each missile past the first adds +1 to hit, capped at +4, because missiles arrive together and are hell to slip. - **Movement** uses three methods — ground, skimming, and flight — each with its own action-point ratio (inches per point) and distance limits by hull configuration, plus turn lengths (humanoid 1", surface 3", aerospace 5"). Flight is where the Battlepoles come in: a 30" pole divided into six 5" **flight bands** simulates vertical space, so dogfights genuinely climb and dive above the table, with special rules for changing bands and spectacular rules for crashing. - The **Ranged Attack Phase** reuses the opposed 1d10 with modifiers for range (within max is a bonus, past max a penalty per 10"), arcs, and cover. Hand-to-hand has its own flow: **punch** (+2, damage per armor die), **kick** (up to 1.5× armor dice), **charge** (bonus damage for momentum, at a to-hit penalty), **grapple** (expose, squeeze, throw, carry), plus the defensive **dodge** and **shield block**. - **Damage** is armor-first: the defender rolls armor dice to soak, and only what gets through eats System Integrity. Every **six** (natural or pushed there by critical-hit modifiers) is a critical, stripping an armor die and rolling on the Additional Effects table — the good stuff, like ejecting your own crew or cooking off a missile bay. Get hit by double your armor roll and it triggers the game's favorite spectacle: **Exploding Mecha**, where the blast radius and force equal half the mech's remaining System Integrity and the dying machine may stagger through a **delayed explosion**, pilot scrambling to eject (survival, camouflage, or homing pods) before the fireball. - **Powersuits** are the infantry of the setting — the "tunnel rats" sent into urban fighting and starship corridors too cramped for a full mech, and the "powered infantry" that scouts and harasses. They don't fly, they *bounce*, via suspensor packs and booster jets. - **Experience & campaigns**: crews earn XP for kills, captures, and salvages (divided among crew, remainder to the pilot) and spend it on Gunnery and Piloting. Three campaign systems ride on top: the **Scenario Game**, the **Strategy Game**, and the **Total Anime Game** — for players who want more than head-to-head arena battles. ### Constructing Mecha A full design toolkit covers anything you want to field, with three **hull configurations** — humanoid, surface vehicle, and aerospace vehicle — that mechs can transform between, and a class ladder from lowly powersuits up through Slaves, Lights, Mids, Heavies, and Super-Heavies. The core's pitch is that you build your machines to recreate any anime you've ever sweated over, which is also the quiet confession that the minis were meant to be kit-bashed commercial plastic models rather than a line Seveenth Street ever cast in its own resin (that happened later, fitfully, and died with the company). ## The Spirit Warrior Empire The supplement — whose own cover is a masked, feathered, turquoise-spined mech standing in front of a stepped stone pyramid — is where **Mecha!** stops being a generic toolkit and starts being a *world*. It reworks the premise into something genuinely odd: the **Azteca**, torn from Earth and set down on the alien world of **Tamoachan**, discover their gods are real. The **Huitznahua** are the patron deities of the Azteca's old faith — Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent, Tezcatlipoca the Jaguar Lord, Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, and the rest — and the empire runs on a literal economy of **sacrifice**: the psychic energy of blood spilled in battle is converted, dollar-for-dollar, into divine power, so war and worship are the same industry. Sacrifice that honors gods like these is never far from mind — those warriors of the Spirit Warrior Empire accept "no sacrifice is too great." The Azteca conquer the way they always did — by **tribute**, not occupation, demanding yearly tithes from beaten states they never bother to govern — and their internal squabbles take the form of **Flower Wars** (the *Xochiyaoyotl*): openly met, deliberately restrained battles fought to take prisoners for sacrifice, so the city-states' civil war mirrors a war among the gods themselves, each faith's power waxing and waning with the blood offered to it. The book's framing story, *The Betrayal of Quetzalcoatl*, hands you the meta-conflict: the empire's alien gods are fighting over who leads, Tezcatlipoca schemes against the trusting Feathered Serpent, and Quetzalcoatl's demigod son **Yaoltzin**, Lord Enemy, was remade from a sacrificed man to teach the Azteca to build mecha and join a **War of the Heavens** against the other star-faring empires pressing in on their space. To fight them, the sourcebook gives you six ready-to-play **war parties** drawn from the empire's city-states (Cuauhtlicalli, Toxcatl, Tepeyolohtli, Chantico, Ixcuina, and the Chichimeca), a complete set of new rules, and a **Storyline Campaign** system that walks a war party through Training, Standard, and Heroic missions toward a Final Ending tied to Quetzalcoatl's fate. And it lays out the neighbors worth fearing: - The **KreeSara** — waterworld carnivores whose cold-turned world forced them into a ruthless, territorial, and eventually spacefaring survival doctrine; the empire's long war against them set the whole betrayal in motion. - The **Ja-Naketh** — a defeated rock-folk, once a single orderly mass-mind, now being rebuilt on the sun-scorched world Paynal under a clan god gone thoroughly insane, so their collective consciousness has frayed into near-individuals plotting against one another. - The **Shadow Walkers** — an empire that exists in another dimension, able to pierce into ours only by expending energy, becoming more solid the harder they strike and leaving no bodies behind. They haven't expanded toward the Spirit Warriors yet. That's the ominous bit. The core's intro dangles expansion sets for the KreeSara, Ja-Naketh, and Shadow Walker empires, plus a scenario sourcebook, off the back of the Spirit Warrior setting; none of it ever shipped, the casualties of the company's collapse. ## Editions **Mecha!** was a one-shot line, and both of its books are in the library: - **Mecha!** (Seventh Street Games, **1991**) — the core rulebook: construction, the six-phase combat engine, campaigns, scenarios, and the Azteca preview. *In the library.* - **Mecha!: Spirit Warrior Empire** (Seventh Street Games, **1991**; First Printing, December 1991) — the Aztec-mecha sourcebook above: six war parties, the Storyline Campaign, new rules, and the three alien empires. *In the library.* No revisions, no second editions — the game's history is two books and not much else. The publisher's line itself was short-lived: Seventh Street Games (Alameda, CA) had ceased trading by the turn of the millennium, its **Mecha!** system and resin models passing through Flagship Games and ending up with **Scale Creep Miniatures**, which still sells the two books as PDFs. The physical game is long out of print; the miniatures line died with the original company. The rulebook's own "upcoming" promise — KreeSara, Ja-Naketh, and Shadow Walker expansion sets — reads today as a gravestone rather than a catalog. ## References - [Mecha! / Spirit Warrior Bundle - Scale Creep Miniatures, on DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/304452/mecha-spirit-warrior-bundle) - [Mecha! (1991) - BoardGameGeek](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8131/mecha) - [Seventh Street Games - Lost Minis Wiki](https://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Seventh_Street_Games) - ["Mecha! and Spirit Warrior Empire" - The Miniatures Page forum](http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=296096)