Board game publishers Fantasy Flight already make some of the most high-end tabletop games in the world, but Star Wars: Armada is something else entirely.
A two-player celebration of the fizzing lasers and swooping squadrons of Star Wars, this is a deep box packed with pre-painted miniatures, tiny dials, custom dice, even an intimidating snake-like thing called the “Maneuver Tool”. And these are just the toys that’ll catch your eye. As you pick them up to start fiddling, you’ll reveal still more stuff to play with –bound packs of cards, endless tokens, flatpacked asteroids.
The price for this opulence? £60. But that’s not even the hard sell.
Really, to have enough ships on your table for Armada to work as intended, you need both players to bring a set of their own.
This isn’t really a surprise. Armada is a collectible game, adopting the business model from Fantasy Flight’s hugely popular 2012 release The X-Wing Miniatures Game, which is like Armada but on the scale of dogfighting rather than outright war. With X-Wing, new sets of tiny spaceships arrive in waves, kind of like TV seasons, with each new ship costing around £15. Not only is Armada’s first wave of new ships on its way, the second has already been revealed.
So why do players drop so much money on these games? There is an easy answer: they’re breathtaking fun.
The traditional image of a miniatures gamer being an older man stoically nudging toy soldiers across a river, this might be hard to believe. But these games are so good precisely because they pare down a fustian genre into nothing more than tension and agonising decisions.
The thing ships in the Star Wars films do most often is fly forward and shoot lasers, which it turns out is perfect for an accessible war game. Rather than facing players with cloying questions like when to advance or retreat, the X-Wing Miniatures Game simply asked how fast you want to go and if you want to bank left or right, with players ideally doing so without careening into an asteroid, another ship, or soaring heroically off the table.
In other words, these are games of manoeuvring, trying to put your opponent in your sights and staying out of theirs. It’s both immediately understandable and fast, made even faster by players not taking turns. You actually issue orders at the same time, by assigning a little face-down dial to each of your ships, which has the added bonus of seeing players trying to second-guess one another. Each round ends with a clatter of dice as ships take their shots, and the dealing out of evocative damage cards that tells you whose targeting computer is malfunctioning and who has a fire in the cockpit. “Luke! No!”
What makes Armada an interesting release, then, is that while X-Wing enjoyed great success in trimming the rules from miniatures games, Armada is adding them again. Along with the bigger price tag, its bigger ships are accompanied by a bigger manual.
Armada adds rules for how tiny squadrons of X-Wings and TIEs interact with bigger ships, and those same big ships are now divided into front, left, right and rear hull “zones” (hint: don’t get shot from behind). Every single rule in the X-Wing Miniatures Game has been stripped out and replaced with something ever-so-slightly more complicated. X-Wing’s hour-long bouts were best accompanied by a mug of tea; Games of Armada have become two hour sagas, best served with a beer or a bottle of wine.
It’s bad news for livers the world over, then, that Armada’s new systems all feel fantastic, adding more interesting decisions to the game rather than simply increasing the granularity of its simulation. Besides, within designer board games, good games are the ones worth suffering through a rules explanation for. But the very best games – like Armada – look or sound so obviously exciting that your friends end up begging you to explain how this exotic thing works, regardless of their complexity.
All of which is the reason I committed to collecting this game. It’s great. But we’ve yet to cover the reason I’ve become obsessed.
I played my first full-sized game of Armada (using two of the £60 core sets) on a hungover Sunday. Over coffee, eggs and gentle headaches, my friend and I pieced together all the rules we’d forgotten, positioned our fleets and set our first, hesitant orders. We were stunned at what happened next. This absurd game of toys and lasers playing out on the table was – there’s no other word for it – balletic.
The way Armada models the momentum of the biggest ships sees them moving slowly, and turning even more slowly, leading to a fascinating inevitability. You can see them brutalising other vessels entire turns before it’s happened. The smaller, more fragile ships are faster, and cut impossible curves into the battlefield, slipping around debris fields and behind enemy ships. All while the tiniest fighter craft skim the empty space between these vessels like mayflies.
Armada is slow enough that you get excited by mistakes and opportunities not just when they’re in front of you, but when you spot them on the horizon, 20 minutes away. For all the miniatures on the table between you, the real beauty and fun of Armada is being sat with a friend, both of you in this meditative state of mind, not watching the game but imagining the hypothetical table that will exist in the future.
That’s a wonderful connection to share with someone. So wonderful, in fact, that I’m looking forward to the next time I drink, just because I’ll have a good excuse to play hungover Armada the next day.
I’m not denying I have a problem. In fact, I thoroughly recommend that you acquire the same problem for yourself.
