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. It’s both immediately understandable and fast, made even faster by players not taking turns. In other words, these are games of manoeuvring, trying to put your opponent in your sights and staying out of theirs. 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. 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. But these games are so good precisely because they pare down a fustian genre into nothing more than tension and agonising decisions. The traditional image of a miniatures gamer being an older man stoically nudging toy soldiers across a river, this might be hard to believe. The contents of the Star Wars: Armada core set. So why do players drop so much money on these games? There is an easy answer: they’re breathtaking fun. Not only is Armada’s first wave of new ships on its way, the second has already been revealed. With X-Wing, new sets of tiny spaceships arrive in waves, kind of like TV seasons, with each new ship costing around £15. 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. 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. 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. And these are just the toys that’ll catch your eye. 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.Ī 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”.

Clone wars space battle