Star Wars Armada is a miniatures Wargame by Fantasy Flight Games based on Star Wars and the capital ship battles therein, as well as the sister game to X-Wing Miniatures. Focused on the Galactic Civil War from the Original Trilogy, the player takes command of either the Star Destroyers of the Galactic Empire or the ragtag fleet of the Rebel Alliance and does battle to claim command of space. The game was released in March of 2015. Since then, it has received 6 "waves" of upgrades, each adding additional imperial and rebel ships and squadrons from the movies and the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
Fantasy Flight Games has a website for the game.
This game exhibits the following tropes:
- Ace Pilot: There is at least one named pilot for every type of squadron. These Aces, such as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Boba Fett, or Soontir Fel, have unique abilities and defense tokens.
- Asteroid Thicket: Improbably dense swarms of space rocks are a type of obstacle for the game. Fighter Squadrons can move in and out without any difficulty, while large ships take collision damage.
- Critical Existence Failure: Ships and Squadrons fully function until they lose their last hitpoint, at which point they simply stop existing. Critical damage effects, however, can impede navigation, combat, or repairs. The Rebel commander Admiral Rieekaan can avert this, keeping destroyed ships on the table until the end of the turn.
- Crossover: The game mixes characters and ships from both Legends and the Disney continuity.
- Death of a Thousand Cuts: Larger ships can be taken down by swarms of fighters, albeit with difficulty.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Quasar Fire Carriers are an exclusively Imperial vessel, even though both examples from canon are Rebel ships.
- Ramming Always Works: Ships can (purposely) fly into another ships, dealing minor damage to the other ship and themselves. As seen in Rogue One, the Hammerhead Corvette introduced in Wave 6 specializes in this. It is more durable than a standard corvette and can be upgraded to deal additional ramming damage.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Par for the course in Star Wars, but also played straight by the game itself. For gameplay reasons, Armada uses a sliding scale to represent ships. If it didn't, the Victory Star Destroyer Model would have to be six times the length of the Corellian Corvette instead of twice as long. The board is also small enough that accidental collisions are a serious problem for new players.
- Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: There are three weapon categories — turbolasers are long range (red dice), ion cannons are medium range (blue dice), and torpedoes are short range (black dice). Logic and the diffraction effect would ordinarily dictate that autonomous projectiles have a longer range than lasers.
