X-Wing Archives | No High Scores

Back to basics with X-Wing and Armada

March 14, 2016September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

My wardrobe is full of spaceships. So many spaceships that there’s barely room for clothes. Most of them live in an enormous box which crushes my shirts out of all recognition when it’s squeezed in and out for play. It’s a good job I play with spaceships a lot more than I wear shirts.

Having a cupboard crammed with spaceships is awesome, but it’s also a little tiring. Each comes with cardboard and plastic that must be meticulously selected and laid out before playing. That was, up until recently, where most of the game was in x-wing, and that’s sad. What was sadder is how often I’d ruin the suspension of disbelief just to make a better list.

Take Poe Dameron. Poe’s an incredible fighter pilot, and it shows in his skills and abilities. He’s also an incredibly expensive fighter pilot that you’ll want to preserve to cause maximum carnage and deny the enemy victory points. So, given that his ability lets him benefit from focus tokens without spending them, it makes sense to give his ship an astromech droid which can spend the token to regenerate shields. Right?

Of course it does. Poe with R5-P9 is a great combo that I’ve seen used to great effect in many games. It’s also completely and utterly wrong.

You’ve seen The Force Awakens. You know that Poe would never take to space without his beloved BB-8 and focus tokens be dammed. So, with the Force Awakens base set for X-Wing and one each of the existing expansion models, that’s exactly what I did. I flew Poe as he’d want to be flown. With BB-8 on board, a rookie wingman, and nothing else.

They ran into an ambush on the wingman’s training flight. Three members of the First Order’s Omega Squadron and their fearsome ace. Similarly unequipped with any modifications. The TIE f/o’s caught them in an ambush and smashed down the rookie’s shields with a volley of plasma fire, before smartly executing a k-turn and coming back in for the kill.

Poe screwed up. He panicked, and no matter how much he weaved and used BB-8 to barrel roll, he could barely make it into the fight beyond a couple of stray bolts. The rookie, meanwhile, took a deep breath, concentrated on the force and flew straight and true into the heart of the enemy swam.

When the dust cleared, only Omega leader was left flying and the rookie, his hull hanging together with prayers and sticky tape, joined up with Poe and caught the wicked ace in a murderous crossfire. Game over.

It was simple. It was fast. And it was brilliant.

Armada had the same feeling of freshness when it was first released. That’s part of what I liked about it: a rich, epic game that played in a couple of hours and didn’t need lots of pre-prep work. What mattered were the decisions you made on the table, more than the ones you made beforehand. Wave 1 didn’t overburden that dynamic too much, and the game did need a few more ships.

So now we’ve got wave 2 and so far I’ve picked up the rebel releases. How could I not, with Admiral Ackbar coming in the Home One expansion and giving me the chance to shout “it’s a trap” when my fleet came into contact with the enemy? Plus, Home one and the MC30 rebel frigate are sweeting looking models. The Frigate also promises to bring some much-needed black dice firepower to the Rebel side. I still haven’t tamed my inner wargamer enough to resist pre-painted plastics.

Throw in the Rogues and Villains expansion and you’ve got a plethora of ships to play with. And that, for the moment, is all I care about. So I’ve started doing the same there – forgoing lots of detailed upgrades in favour of a fleet commander, a couple of capital ships and a few characters and fighter wings.

It’s hard to leave out Han and the Falcon when you’ve got them in your collection. You can even take the little plastic ship off its stand and perch above the bridge of a Star Destroyer if you’re a real geek.

The first time I ran a list like this was against someone who’d tooled up with upgrades just like usual. Because there’s still not a fleet builder for Armada that actually prints the card effects on the output sheet, it took a while to get set up. I’d seized on the concept of using Garm Bel Iblis and just taking as many ships as I could, to maximise my free tokens. It seemed like a good plan. It wasn’t.

In truth, it was a massacre. I didn’t play well, treating it more like X-Wing and going in all guns blazing than the more thoughtful approach required for Armada, but even so, I don’t think I took out a single Imperial big ship. Upgrades, it seems, are more important in Armada than they are in X-Wing. Which makes the lack of a fully-featured fleet builder all the more annoying.

Such an awful loss was partly down to an unfortunate feature of Armada that I don’t think I’ve spotted before. With the range ruler literally allowing handfuls more dice to be thrown between range steps, tiny distances can make a big difference in the outcome. His Gladiator-class Star Destroyer was in black dice range on a critical turn, and my MC30 wasn’t. If the opposite had been true, it might have been a very different outcome.

Frankly, I stopped playing miniature games to get away from exactly this sort of thing. But I like Armada too much to hold that against it. So next time, I think I might make both lists. Hang the upgrades and just take Akbar and Home One squaring off against some big Star Destroyers and squadrons, just like the denouement of Return of the Jedi. I’ll get to shout “it’s a trap!”, and I’d urge you all to do the same.

Star Wars Armada Wave 1 Review

June 12, 2015August 2, 2020 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

The base set of Armada looked to have the makings of an outstanding game. But it was kind of hard to tell for sure. With just three ships and a handful of fighter squadrons to divide between two sides, all you could do was sense the potential rather than experience it for yourself.

A generous first wave of expansions has now arrived. Each contains a variety of upgrades, many of which can, of course, be used on a variety of ships. And all that extra variety does the job. Armada finally plays like the game that it was shaping up to be.

Both sides needed extra ships for reasons other than variety, however.

The spindly, fragile Rebel ships felt desperately under-powered compared to the might of the Imperial Star Destroyer. The new Assault Frigate expansion fixes that to an extent. Dubbed the “space whale” by virtue of both a curvaceous design and a lumbering maneuver chart, it’s the most eye catching ship in this wave.

It also comes with a wealth of upgrades to increase its firepower and durability. And it needs them: this isn’t the panacea you might think it is. Even festooned with additional cards, it can’t match the devastating laser broadsides of Imperial ships. Which is for the best, since it ensures that the two sides play in a distinct manner, as they should.

One nice feature of the Assault Frigate is that the two ship cards you get offer quite distinct builds. One lends itself to being tanked up and sent into battle. The other looks to be an impressive fighter base for co-ordinating rebel squadrons. All in all, one of these models will lend Rebel Admirals a lot of flexibility in fleet building.

The other two rebel ships are copies of the ones in the base game, the Corvette and the Nebulon-B. Each comes with some new upgrades, of course, to tempt you into investing.

In truth, it’s kind of hard to see why you’d want a second Nebulon. There’s nothing essential in the upgrade list and the ship itself is hard to use effectively thanks to its flimsy flank shields. Some neat title upgrades are tempting. Especially Yavaris which helps turn the frigate into a squadron command platform, a role to which the ship is well suited. The Corvette is a different matter. Fielding two or more of these as cheap, mobile fire platforms is a viable way of counteracting the ponderous Imperial ships and their short-range firepower.

The Imperials, in their turn, get the option of a new medium class ship, the Gladiator. While still at its best in close quarters combat, this adds some much-needed speed and flexibility to the Imperial fleet. It packs an enormous punch at close range and, thanks to a much kinder maneuver chart, it’s far better placed to get in their and deliver its payload. Plus, since it’s cheaper than the Star Destroyer, it means the Imperial player can field two big ships with enough points left over for those all-important TIE fighters.

The points cost of the Star Destroyers themselves makes it buying the expansion something of a quandry. Two of them on the table look terrifying, but it leaves little left to get anything else, and they’re so ponderous that Rebel ships can dance round them at range. The lure is more likely to be the expansion cards. There’s a nice commander, and the title Corruptor offers the possibility of outfitting a Star Destroyer as squadron command rather than just brutal damage output. But this is probably the least interesting pack in the wave.

All these ships help add depth and breadth to the game. Bringing even a couple in to your collection should give you enough upgrades to build a lot of interesting lists. But what really shocked me about wave 1 is that the real interest isn’t in any of these lovely big models. It’s in the fighter squadrons.

There’s a pack for each, both with four different models of fighter. Different fighter models excel at different roles, as you’d expect. Rebel A-Wings and Imperial TIE Interceptors excel at taking out enemy squadrons. At the other end of the scale B-Wings and TIE Bombers offer impressive anti-ship firepower for their meager cost. Each fighter type also comes with a new hero, like Tycho Celchu or Darth Vader should you want him.

It’s because each pack contains four very different types of craft that these have such a huge impact on the game. Fighters can screen big ships, venture out to blow away the escorts of enemy craft, creep in close for a killer blow. Co-ordinating the different types along with squadron commands from the big ships is a complex and compelling source of tactics. It’s hard to learn to use these things well, but it’s essential for success.

The main issue with Armada was and remains its cost. There’s a slight saving grace here in that these expansions punch above their weight. If you’re collecting one faction then just a couple of selective purchases will add enormous diversity and fun to your games. And if you can afford it, you should. With wave 1 on board, Armada has blossomed into an incredible game. It looks great, plays fast and offers enormous replay value alongside a fine balance of depth and drama. It’s the best game I’ve played in several years, and you should play it too.

Star Wars: Armada Review

May 1, 2015September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

It takes about a New York minute between seeing a copy of the X-Wing base game and wondering what a Star Destroyer model might look like at that scale. In that minuscule time frame, Star Wars: Armada became an inevitability.

In truth, the Star Destroyer in any scale is almost bound to ruin the look of the game. Even here it looks enormous, and dwarfs the spindly Rebel ships that oppose it. The quality of the paint jobs seems to have gone down a notch, too. Armada just doesn’t have the same visual appeal as its illustrious predecessor.

So it’s a good job that it’s a much better game.

Miniatures games are, on the whole, luck-fests. The skill comes in picking your lists beforehand, like a chef carefully eying up flavour combinations for that nights’ dinner menu. At the moment, the lack of expansions means there’s a lot fewer options for Armada and that feels like a breath of fresh air. Instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae of choice, you can slap a list together and play. And when you do, you’ll find that here, it’s the game itself that demands planning and strategy.

Although the models and the license beg comparison to X-Wing, this is a totally different game. Instead of secret movement selections you pick secret orders to fire, repair, maneuver or command fighters. The bigger the ship, the further in advance you have to select these orders. As they come up, you can chose to take a token to use on a later round for a weak effect, or use it then and there for a powerful one. So for a behemoth like a Star Destroyer, where you’re picking orders three rounds ahead, a lot of advance planning is necessary.

What really makes the game, however, is the turn structure. In this game, you fire before you move. A simple change, and one that’s hardly novel, but it means you have to make sure your ships are where you want them the turn before. More planning, more strategy. The more novel idea is separating the fire/move phases for the big ships and the fighters. Normally, the latter move after the former, making it doubly hard to get them into position. But if you use a Squadron command, you can move some of the little ships with the big ones. And at those moments, they can prove decisive.

The whole thing feels like a ponderous yet wonderful ballet. Colossal frigates and dreadnoughts wallow in the vacuum, trying to line up broadsides against one another. Fighters dart around them, hoping for the orders and information that will allow them to make a difference. Yet even as the fistfuls of multicoloured dice rattle over the table, they’re just arbiters to tip the see-saw and excitement to ice the cake. Most of the time, victory goes to the player with better list, the better plan and the best ability to predict moves ahead of time.

Nailing the balance of skill in list-building and skill in play is the chief triumph of Armada. It’s a tricky thing to get right, and many games have fallen by the wayside on the way. Whether Armada can maintain this delicate act in the face of an inevitably-expanding expansion roster remains to be seen. For now, it’s a thing to be savoured.

If you can afford it.

Because price and accessibility is one area where this does deserve comparison to X-Wing. For that, a modestly priced starter box gives you everything you need for a fun few games. Armada’s initial outing is about three times the price. And to get the most out of it you need not one copy, but two.

While the game excels at providing a challenging yet thrilling experience, it can feel gamey in a way that X-Wing never does. Instead of fighting until the bitter end, it’s played for a fixed six-turn duration. That makes it surprisingly quick, but can lead to bizarre situations toward the end like the leading player suddenly trying to break combat and run.

The clever twist of making fighters move after capital ships may add a lot of depth, but a moment’s consideration shows it’s also silly. It makes nimble fighters less able to react to the situation than ponderous cruisers. So you end up with the peculiar spectacle of fighters dancing around a bigger ship they can never hope to get into their target arc.

These problems are fundamental to the game, but the more models you put on the table the less of an issue they become. As the number of combatants increases, it becomes harder to run away, harder to leave your enemy without something to shoot at. Full scenarios also have objective cards which offer more complex and interesting victory conditions.

You get none of this with the starter scenario you can play with the paltry three models in the box. So right now, you need access to two copies for a satisfying game. Even then, the limited selection of ship models feels contraining after a few games. Things will improve a bit when the wave one expansions come out, but it’s still an expensive proposition.

Which is a shame, considering how great the beating heart that drives this title has the potential to be. Space combat is often imagined to be a bit like naval combat, but this is the first game that really made me feel like an Admiral. It’s just that you’ll need an Admirals salary to get the most out of the experience.

Collective Action

April 17, 2015September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

I blame X-Wing for a lot of things. I blame it for making me read more than is decent about the expanding universe of Star Wars. I blame it for the gaping hole in my bank balance. Most of all, though, I blame it for turning me from a player into a collector.

Those of your who’ve been with us for the long haul will remember the amount of words I used to lavish on getting people to play their games. All the dire warnings against acquiring another identikit cube pusher when so many gamers already don’t play the ones they have. Part of me still wants to believe that. In reality, the tottering piles of hardly-touched games and expansions tottering out of shelves and cupboards all over my house say otherwise.

It was X-Wing that started this, because it was the first game I’d seen that made me want to own it just on the strength of how it looked. There are other games with fantasic design and production: Napoleon’s Triumph and Claustrophobia are prime examples. Yet I would never encourage a gamer to own any other game on the strength of how it looks alone.

X-Wing was different. X-Wing spoke to the long dormant miniatures gamer in me. The gamer that used to rejoice in seeing three thousand points of intricately painted Warhammer figures duelling it out on the table, supported by cunningly crafted scenery. Those little ships. Those simple, yet realistic paint jobs. How could I not love them?

So the piles of figures started to grow. Originally I promised I’d stick to designs that were in the movies I remembered as a child, but then an HWK-90 and a Tie Defender turned up at bargain prices, and I was unable to resist. I tried hard to get them all on the table, and succeeded. But I’d bae lying if I said that some of the less successful models, like the TIE Bomber, were every likely to see play time again. Still I kept them, carefully ensconced in foam, because they were beautiful. And the towers of foam stacked up, and up.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So it was that the next nail started out with a premise to keep true to my original promise. If I focussed on expansions, I reasoned, I could get more play out of the games I already owned while still enjoying the process of acquisition. This realisation sparked another buried facet, a march toward completest tendencies.

What I’d foolishly failed to realise was just how many expansions some of my favourite games had. The Commands and Colours games are by far the worst offenders. Napoleonics has four, Ancients has six and there are small islands in the Pacific with insufficient landmass to hold all the Memoir ’44 expansions. In buying them, I was just making a rod for my own back.

At some point among this madness I had to admit defeat. I could not, in all good conscience, tell people to play what they had before collecting more any longer. And in doing so, I found a kind of peace. All those boxes on the shelves stopped nagging me. There were still practical considerations, of course. A small house can only hold so many games. But it changed the way I viewed my games. Instead of millstones, weighing me down with the knowledge that there would alway be more games than time, they became more like old friends.

Human beings have a desire for nostalgia, for keepsakes. There’s not a person alive who doesn’t have a little collection of memorabilia from important times and places. If, as gamers, some of those important times and places revolve around gaming, what’s so odd about wanting to keep the games that spawned them? Even if they weren’t played enough, or you doubt you’ll ever play them again.

Hope is the great enemy of good sense. Hope is what’s behind people accumulating unplayed games, thinking that one day, one special day, they might see the table again. Yet for all that it can lead us astray, it can also be a precious thing. There’s a certain pleasure to knowing that if, one day, I or a friend, or a family member wants to learn more about the Scottish Wars of Independence I can pull down Hammer of the Scots and say “here. Play this”. I’ve played it over twenty times, and I’m done with it. But if ever I should want it again, it’s there.

Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, and I’m finding it harder to let go of the things that defined my past. Perhaps I’m just becoming that little more resistant to change. It comes to us all in the end. I’m sorry if I ever made anyone feel bad about collecting games. In truth, I still think it’s better to be a player than a collector. It’s just that I finally have to admit that I don’t have the strength to live up to that ideal any more. Games are lovely. I want to keep them in my life.

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to see more opinion, reviews and analysis from the author, please consider backing him on Patreon. Every dollar helps.

Forgotten Pleasures

March 27, 2015September 3, 2022 Matt Thrower 4 Comments

One of the unexpected effects of regularly reviewing games is how jaded I’ve become. It takes an enormous amount to impress me nowadays. And even for titles that make the grade, it’s rare that they grip me for a long time. Readers demand novelty, so the old makes way for the new.

Sometimes a game still gets its claws in me and demands play time in the face of all competition. The last video game to achieve that was Hearthstone, early last year. The last board games were Wiz-War and X-Wing back in 2012.

It’s even rarer, though, that an unreleased game grabs my attention. Years of exposure to marketing hype has given me a tough crust of cynicism. The advent of Kickstarter and the ensuing failed promises have just made it thicker. Nowadays, I take nothing about a game at face value until I’ve played it and confirmed it for myself.

I can’t even remember the last time I was dizzy with anticipation about a game.

So it’s remarkable that over the last couple of months, one title has managed to break through. That game is Bloodborne, the spiritual successor to Dark Souls from the same design team.

The latter game transformed my understanding of what a role-playing game should be. It was a blend of genres I’d always wanted to see, a game that felt like real-life fantasy combat combined with the salivating skinner box of experience and levelling up. It was brilliant, but often the deliberate difficulty curve got too much.

Early reviews of Bloodborne make it sound like it’s solved that problem by giving players more information and an easier time early in the game. Then ramping up to the more brutal levels expected once players have adjusted. It seems an excellent solution. Plus, the rich graphics, emphasis on offense over blocking and obvious horror theme had me hooked.

The trouble is, I don’t have a PS4. So I can’t play it. And there’s no way I can justify buying one when I’ve still got Gears of War 2, Halo 4 and Red Dead Redemption I want to finish on the 360. Not to mention Dark Souls, which I’m only half-way through.

So I’m left hanging in a trap of my own construction. It’s something I remember well from my teenage years when I just couldn’t afford most of what I wanted. There’s nothing for it but to knuckle down and carry on, trying to ignore that awful itch of desire. That’s what being grown up is all about.

I understand all that. What I didn’t expect was to find that wanting could be so much fun.

It’s the same principle as the ascetic. In denial, one learns to find satisfaction in self control. Except that this is a thousand times better because I know that at the end there will be a sweet reward. There will be a time that I can cave in, get a new console, and enjoy my game.

And when I do, I’ll enjoy it all the more for having waited.

Finding this unexpected pleasure made me yearn for the days when it happened more often. Because make no mistake: this isn’t just about being a games writer. Fans and commentators alike have been decrying the lack of innovation in big-name titles of both video and tabletop games for years. That’s what’s at the root of the malaise lingering over the current console generaiton, at least until Bloodborne came along.

While there’s plenty of creativity amongst independent designers, arguably it takes a big game to engender a big sense of desire. It takes overwhelming production values and an enormous potential play time. It takes a certain level of marketing polish, too.

Other media have already been through this. Blockbuster cinema was floundering a few years ago. That empty space summoned forth white knights to fill it, and alumni like Peter Jackson and Christopher Nolan answered the call. I’m not sure who their equivalents might be in the video gaming world, but I’m confident the increasing interplay between big studios and small developers is going to throw up some surprises.

Who, though, is going to break through the tabletop barrier? If my money was on anyone, it’d be Rob Daviau or Vlaada Chvatil. But we’ve heard nothing big from either of them for ages. I hope one of them, or someone else, delivers soon. I want to feel that sharp hope of hype about a cardboard game at least once more before I die.

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to see more comment and analysis from the author, please consider backing him on Patreon. Every dollar helps.