Star Wars Armada- giant sized!

 My friend Andrew is a keen fan of Armada, the FFG Star Wars, 'big ship' game ( Cruisers and Star Destroyers as opposed to zippy starfighters in X Wing).  We last played this 6 years ago (one of the advantages of having a blog is that I can check things like that) and, although I really wanted to like the game I've always been a bit Armada-phobic.

When the game came out I loved the concept and I'm a big fan of the other FFG Star Wars games (I think the only one I haven't played is Legion).  The thing that put me off is the host of additional cards giving upgrades to ships, special characters, bonus tactics etc.  These end up becoming overwhelming and there a million 'special' rules to try and remember and which inevitably get forgotten  until part-way through the game we realise we've missed something critical.

Andrew has been trying to convince me to give them another go for years and I've always broken out in a cold sweat and run away, but the other week he unveiled a secret weapon to tempt me to the Dark Side... a huge Star Dreadnought (..who says size doesn't matter!!?).  

So we decided to play a stripped back game with no bonus cards, just the ships 'out of the box'.  And it was fun...

The Empire fielded their enormous Dreadnought with an escorting Cruiser and several swarms of TIE fighters.  Against this I was commanding a plucky mix of Corvettes and Cruisers (including the Heavy Armoured Cruiser from Rogue One) backed up by some X Wing and B Wing squadrons.

 

One of the interesting features of Armada is that bigger ships have to pre-plan their orders over several turns so in theory my smaller ships should have been a bit more flexible which would be an advatage against the firepower of the big ship.

Of course that doesn't take account of my inability to manouver without crashing into things and I managed to hit the Dreadnought at least twice... not surprisingly I came off worse!

The fighters that managed to actually get past the TIE fighters did quite a bit damage but the real big hitter was the Armoured Cruiser which caused a lot of damage to the Empire ship (including by crashing into it) before being destroyed.  Eventually the Rebel Fleet was pretty much devastated with the survivors flying off after causing almost (but not quite) enough damage to destroy the Dreadnought.

As always with the FFG games the models were lovely with the Star Destroyer being particularly impressive.  So there we go, I've managed to overcome my Armada-phobia.  I still think it would be too much if we used all the cards but the stripped back version was great fun and we'll definitely have a rematch at some point.