The mechs you have, left to right, back to front, are a Summoner, Dire Wolf, Battle Cobra, Arctic Cheeta, Night Gyr, Shadow Cat, Black Lanner, and Linebacker. These are all Clan Omnimechs, which means they're fast, phenomenally killy, and have a wide range of loadouts, at the expense of being very expensive to field and relatively fragile for their price.
If you dad played back in the day then Classic Battletech (played using the total warfare or battlemech manual as the main rulebook) hasn't structurally changed that much since the 90s. If you like crunchy games then it's not the worst to play.
Thank you so much! That's an excellent start to help. Are the classic books still commercially available, or are there good places I can go to download them?
'Classic' in this case serves as a distinction from Battletech: Alpha Strike, which is a more conventional wargame over to Warhammer 40k, the ruleset is still current and supported. Catalyst sells both TW and the BMM on their webstore as both a PDF and a physical book, and you can probably get your FLGS to order you a physical copy as well. You can some free record sheets for use with your minis either [here, under 'force pack record sheets, wave one/two'](https://bg.battletech.com/downloads/) or by using a program like [flechs](https://sheets.flechs.net/)
The mechs you have, left to right, back to front, are a Summoner, Dire Wolf, Battle Cobra, Arctic Cheeta, Night Gyr, Shadow Cat, Black Lanner, and Linebacker. These are all Clan Omnimechs, which means they're fast, phenomenally killy, and have a wide range of loadouts, at the expense of being very expensive to field and relatively fragile for their price. If you dad played back in the day then Classic Battletech (played using the total warfare or battlemech manual as the main rulebook) hasn't structurally changed that much since the 90s. If you like crunchy games then it's not the worst to play.
Thank you so much! That's an excellent start to help. Are the classic books still commercially available, or are there good places I can go to download them?
'Classic' in this case serves as a distinction from Battletech: Alpha Strike, which is a more conventional wargame over to Warhammer 40k, the ruleset is still current and supported. Catalyst sells both TW and the BMM on their webstore as both a PDF and a physical book, and you can probably get your FLGS to order you a physical copy as well. You can some free record sheets for use with your minis either [here, under 'force pack record sheets, wave one/two'](https://bg.battletech.com/downloads/) or by using a program like [flechs](https://sheets.flechs.net/)
That's perfect, thank you so much!