Star Wars Armada, First Game!

Lea asked me if we could play the game when I had it ready for going through the starer scenario, and I of course agreed right away.

This is NOT a step-by-step AAR, just a quick report, I shall have to do a full break-down of a game at a later point, as the game had to be packed away to give place for X-Wing.

The first 3 game rounds I used trying to circle the Star Destroyer with the two smaller Rebel vessels, while letting the X-Wings deal with the swarms of TIE-Fighters.

Up to this point, everything went smoothly according to plan.

As can be seen, at this point odds were fairly even, perhaps even in the favour of the Rebels, as the X-Wings are more than a match for the TIEs one-on-one.

While the fighters were busy duking it out around the Star Destroyer, I was trying to get into attack position behind it.

One thing that is VERY differnt from X-Wing is that in Armada you attack BEFORE you move; that takes some practise to get used to.

This means that it is rather difficult to get into range when trying to catch up with a ship moving away from you - which the Star Destroyer was ordered to do, ploughing its way through the fightet swarm.

Most of the time, we both forgot the possibility to attack nearby fighters from our ships, but as it turned out, the X-Wings were overmatched after all, and most dog.fights took place near the Star Destroyer, anyway.

I kept trying to circle the Imperial vessel:















At this point, my plan had worked perfectly, but I was running out of time to start hitting the Star Destroyer from behind; Armada is played with a set number of game rounds, 6, and as can be seen from the picture below (the small round tokens at the edge of the board), we are now in round 5.

Then, Lea revealed the 'Squadron' command, which allows the ship employing it to immediately, out of sequence, activate a number of squadrons equal to its 'Squadron-Value' (if they are within command range), which meant that, suddenly, 3 TIE squadrons got a shot without my X-Wings being able to respond, which tipped the balance in favour of the Imperials.

To make things worse, the Star Destroyed seemed to home in on the last remaining X-Wing squadron, while the Rebel Alliance ships kept circling it.

As it were, we managed to play a full sequence of 6 game rounds without dealing any damage to the ships, but Lea won the game because she destroyed more points in fighteres than I did.



Next time I play the Rebel Alliance, I'll try a more direct approach, and make sure I use every opportunity to target the TIE squadrons with my ships' attacks.

For now, I just had too pack up the models and get my X-Wing stuff out instead.