Game Night! Part 1

Last night my good friend came over for our usual game night. I was quite excited about this game night as my friend had recently purchased Star Wars Armada. This is made by the people that made X-Wing but uses the bigger capital type ships from the star wars films such as Star Destroyers so every thing is on a bigger scale.

I played the rebel fleet and my friend took charge of the imperial fleet. He had one star destroyer (an absolute beast of a model) and six squadrons of Tie fighters.

My fleet consisted of two capital ships. The CR 90 Corvette  (famously in the first scene of the 'first' star wars) and a Nebulon B frigate (I believe it can be spotted in Return of the Jedi) escorted by 4 squadrons of X-wing.

Nebulon B Frigate

CR 90 Corvette

The game looks quite foreboding when you are getting all the bits and bobs you need out but once you start playing it runs smooth and you can see all the little things they have done to aid the speed of the game. Squadrons of fighters have there own section of the time and are super simple to use but add so much to the game. This makes moving squadrons fairly quick and allows you to concentrate on your capital ships. The capital ships is what the game is all about.  Theu have order dials like x wing  but depending on the ship you have to go stack them up and plan ahead. So a slow strong ship like the star destroyer has 3 order dials and at the start of your game you have to choose orders for all 3 which will be revealed one at a time over the next 3 turns. Each turn you add another order dual to the bottom as you take and activate the top one. This means you need to have a good think about what you plan on doing ahead of time. The dials allow you to speed up or slow down (if you don't choose this on one turn you move at your selected speed), charge your weapons,  make repairs to shields etc and finally order near by squadrons to move and attack.  Next up you attack with up to 2 weapons from different arcs. The ships have various weapons, the strongest being at the front and they have anti fighter weapons to fend off nearby fighter sqaudrons also. After the attack you can manoeuvre  (we did this the opposite way round before realising but finished the game the way we were playing as we were nearly at the end). To move you get a cool movement tool that is spilt into 4 sections which can move left or right a certain number of clicks.  Depending on your ships movement and speed determined how you can manipulate the movement tool.

So after getting set up we used the first scenario type game the book suggests to learn the rules.

Not really knowing the game I set up quite basically giving each ship 2 squadrons of x wings as support. Looking over the star destroyers stats I knew a frontal assault would end badly as my ships lacked the shields to hold out against the big guns for ever so my plan was to spilt my force and circle star destroyer (my ships were far more agile than the star destroyer). The first turn was spent advancing towards each other my ships spliting and going  for either side of the star destroyer.

One capital ship with x wing escorts

The Corvette leaves it's escorts behind!

The two frigates went round the sides while their escorting x wings engaged the tie fighters. My Corvette did manage to get ahead of its escorts and was hit quite a bit by a Tie fighter swarm.

Both rebel ships flanking the slower but more powerful Star Destroyer

The Rebel capital ships Strip the star destroyers rear shields while the x wing squadron goes on a bombing run

My frigates managed to get round to the rear of the star destroyer and a few lucky long range shots stripped its rear shields. Then a plucky x wing squadron took a shot at the star destroyer now lacking shields. Thanks to a handy special rule for x wings attacking capital ship I could potentially cause a critical hit. ....which I rolled! ! The star destroyer ended up with a thruater fissure meaning wverytine it changed speeds it gets one damage Go X wings!!!!!
The next few turns had the star destroyer stuck moving at a speed to fast (remember the orders were set a few turns ago) putting in an awkward position soon it took the damage and slowed down for better control. Using the space given by the star destroyers move my remaining x wings finished off the tie fighters . The game ended (you only play 6 turns) with my capital ships and remaining x wing squadrons chasing after the star destroyer which to be fair had plenty of hull points left and could have repaired shields so if the game would have carried on I think I could have took it out but I would have lost a capital ship.

The rebels chase off the star destroyer!

Victorious Fleet

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