Star Wars: Armada

Fuuuuuuuuck the capital ships look good. I don't have a problem with the unpainted fighters, but I could see more enterprising folks just putting a wash on them and calling it good.

Minis did look amazing. Not sold on the rules. Each capital ship fires twice each turn, one out of each arc. The bases with shields looked really fiddly, te fighters too. It's very difficult to read some of the numbers on the dials.

Also, you can easily run over stuff in this game and I saw several people having issues putting the movement tool down without bumping things out of position. If you overlap fighters the owner gets to place them in base contact anywhere around the big ship.

Capital ships have four dials, three of the new plastic maneuver ones and a cardboard one which has speed.

I really dislike the clicking base things. The fighters need to be clicked every time they're activated and everyone needs to click every time they take damage.

More in a few, phones about to die.

So the click bases don't look great to me because its difficult to click the fighters to activated if they're bunched up (this happened in the demo I watched). So people had to pick up the fighters and then set them back down after clicking.

I asked one of the employees about points in te box/per game. It's 300 points in a standard tournament game (100 point FFG equivalent). The box has about 130-150 points per side. Games going to be expensive.

Rules wise, there's no defense dice which is strange. You can manually flip over a limited number of special tokens each round to negate hits. These tokens can refresh. Named fighters get them, regular fighters don't.

I just watched Team Covenant's video of the demo they received. This is a different game with only hits of XWing.

Average game is 300 pts. The Rebel ships are in the mid 40's. The Imperial ships are in the 75-85 range. Fighters are around 10 and character fighters (such as Luke and Howlrunner) are in the upper teens to 20. This is just what I saw in the demo vid.

The ruler, I thought looked clunky and when the fighters engage it seems like they don't disengage until a big ship crashes the party or one side is dead.

The dice mechanic is pretty awesome. No defensive dice, but three tiers of dice - Black, Blue, Red. Each ship has dice ratings for their four arcs. Depending on the range that determines which dice they can roll - Short, Med, Long. So if a ship has 3 Blue and 2 Red, at long range they'd roll the 2 Red, at Med or Short they'll roll all the dice. That's only for capital ships though.

Getting into fighters there's another system where basically the capital ships have a fighter rating which tells you how many dice to roll, then the range tells you what colors.

As I mentioned there are no defensive dice, but there are defensive tokens. They start green and if you use them (move damage to another side, half damage, cancel dice...etc.) they flip to red. If you use a red token you remove it from the game. At the beginning of the turn red flips to green.

Watching the video two things stood out - First, it looks like there are two "layers" going on with the capital ships and the fighters and forgoing fighter escorts I think is going to be detrimental. Second, the game looks clunky. With all the ships going on, a movement template that bends and snakes around, even in the demo where there were about 100 pts, things were very clustered.

But maybe when played on a full 3'x6' table it will loosen up, but then again there would be about 3x as much stuff.

There's a lot to like from what I'm seeing - Attack Dice, The Command System, The Layers...There is a lot less connection to XWing than I was anticipated which is good. I don't think it is going to hook XWing players as a whole though. If XWing is your more family friendly lighter game, this would be more your gamer's game.

I watched the Team Covenant video also.

I have to say it's clunky as hell. Not smooth at all. I can only see marginal improvement even when you do get familiar with it.

Bottom line: this feels like a moderate complexity wargame created by FFG.

That TOTALLY works for me! But X-wing is much closer to what normal gamers want from Star Wars, so I definitely see a niche for this. I think the 100 dollar price point makes a lot more sense when you think this is a hard core hobby project with extensive procedure and rules. I didn't think the rules were that clunky if you think about this more as a wargame. I did think the dials and some of the physical production could get clunky.

I will definitely be getting this. But I've got wargamer genes and a star wars fleet wargame is a dream of mine---I never got into X-wing because I *didn't* want a seat of the pants 30 minute star wars game.

Gary Sax wrote: Bottom line: this feels like a moderate complexity wargame created by FFG.

That TOTALLY works for me! But X-wing is much closer to what normal gamers want from Star Wars, so I definitely see a niche for this. I think the 100 dollar price point makes a lot more sense when you think this is a hard core hobby project with extensive procedure and rules. I didn't think the rules were that clunky if you think about this more as a wargame. I did think the dials and some of the physical production could get clunky.

I will definitely be getting this. But I've got wargamer genes and a star wars fleet wargame is a dream of mine---I never got into X-wing because I *didn't* want a seat of the pants 30 minute star wars game.

I always thought x-wing looked really interesting but too light. This definitely grabs my attention, but without opponents, I'll be forced to play vicariously through the internet. Please move to California, Gary.

This might be a game that would really benefit from a nice VASSAL module...

God, I would love to move to a UC school but I'm not a big enough academic badass!

A bit bummed out by the first wave ships, wish there were more iconic ones in there. But I guess they gotta string everyone along for more waves.

After watching the Team Covenant video I think the only thing I don't like about the game is the distracting ship bases. They're so busy looking. I do love the idea of the dials for shields and all but I don't care for the busy look. They could have at least minimized the information on the base template. For the record, I don't like how they put the stats on the bases in X-Wing either. Does anybody actually fucking reference those?

Being able to keep track of HP's on the squadron bases is cool but they coulda just went with activation tokens instead of the slide-y thing which seems to add to the base depth.

Anyway... nothing deal breaking. I'm gonna grab this one.

In Star Trek I reference my opponent's quite often. I've actually gotten a bit screwed up when they've put the wrong side down. XWing not as much since there's little variety. Here, it could come into play more.

Gary Sax wrote: A bit bummed out by the first wave ships, wish there were more iconic ones in there.

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#Gencon2014 FFG report. Star Wars Armada first wave.

15 Aug 2014 12:46

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Yeah, me too. My first reaction was WHERE IS THE BIG SHIT? Crappy photo though.

Fuck it, it's as close to that feeling of being a kid at Xmas that I've had in a long time.

I do think they chose scale oddly by making the Victory as big as it is. I know they don't have to religiously follow scale or anything but it's strange to set your scale such that the iconic Imperial class Star Destroyer is like 1/3 a length of the play space.

Well...They did to the Rebel Transport and Tantive IV in XWing and the Tantive is about 1/3rd of the table.

^True... I guess I figured they'd make the Super Star Destroyer that size and make the normal Imperial class about the size of the Victory.