Star Wars Armada Core Set reviews

Like the Star Wars: X-wing game, Armada is all about collecting and fielding a force from the Star Wars universe. Which (lets get the negative out of the way) means that you will invariably end up buying several expansions to further expand your forces. The “core” set will provide about 200 points of forces for each side, but recommends 180 point games. However a “regular” game of Armada is 300 points, (possibly going up to 400 points later this year as more ships come out) so you can see that the core set on its own is not quite enough to field a proper battle and it really shows as the game will play out fairly similarly each time due to the limited tactics that the provided forces can effectively use against each other. I have two core sets (as the first wave of expansions have not yet arrived) and it dramatically improves the gameplay. If you have played X-Wing in the past, Armada takes everything that X-Wing did well and turns it up a notch, including fixing several flaws that have held X-Wing back as the game developed. In many ways X-Wing feels like the protoype for Armada. Armada is much more tactical and a slower pace than X-Wing though, so might not suit someone looking for a “quick fix” as such. One of the biggest differences is that Armada moves away from the “kill everything” mentality of X-Wing and towards an objectives system, where players select mission cards to accompany their forces. This revolutionalises the gameplay and motivations behind it, particularly for the Rebel forces! Whilst we wont know for sure until about a year from now when the first few waves of expansions have arrived, the game is looking extremely promising and very enjoyable so far! :)

Star Wars Armada is a great game of fleet scale combat in the Star Wars universe. It does a fantastic job of recreating dramatic movie scale scenarios of interstellar combat. Be aware that the multi segment range ruler shown in the set contents here, is a much older prototype version made of cardboard sections with plastic joints… The ACTUAL flexible range ruler is ALL plastic, quite sturdy and easy to use.

Great game, and I love the models. But as indicated in other reviews, this is just the start, and the ship expansions are much more expensive than X-Wing (unless you include X-Wings Tantive IV and Imperial Raider epic ships) Game play is reasonably rapid once you get the hang of the rules, 1–2 hrs for a battle with the included ships. I'd love to see this rules franchise expand to other universes though!!

Great service from Might Ape.