Abstract:

So, what are your Armada-playing communities doing? Are you hosting tournaments on your own, or are your FLGSs making that happen? Are you engaging in other styles of play? If so, what styles of play are those?

Are there factors that you think makes this more or less likely to happen in your community?

My long-winded thoughts on the subject:
When I began playing X-Wing about a year ago, I was interested in having games that had a bit more depth than the 100-point-6-asteroid-death-match. In my fairly sizable and spread-out X-Wing gaming community, however, that mode of play was and has been the go-to style of play. There is also a thriving tournament scene, which are hosted by the game stores, but in some cases the TOs are volunteers rather than employees of those stores. That's all good in my book, but wasn't quite scratching the itch I was feeling.

To the south of my community (Portland, OR), there's a small-ish college town, where they seem to have more of the gaming style that I am looking for. It seems like they're able to make that happen by having:

1. a smaller, but more tight-knit community, but also
2. a gaming entrepreneur: a guy who has great ideas for different styles of play, and who can get his community to go along with those.

Because Armada is a smaller community by virtue of it being a new game, I thought I would try to knit it together, and try my hand at introducing those different styles of play. So far, so awesome! I've met some like-minded souls, who are even less cautious about introducing new things than I am. We've organized a couple of tournaments, which the local FLGSs have hosted without them actually organizing those events. In a week or two we will start an escalation league (with narrative commentary from HNN ), and after that concludes perhaps a narrative ladder/tree campaign in anticipation of Wave 2.

To help grow our small community I'm thinking about doing a draft style growth league. There are only a few players currently so a limited draft pool shouldn’t be an issue. The store has store copies of all the models/cards so this would also allow for people to try out those extra cards from the expansion packs before buying them.

The tentative plan is to set the events after the fall of the Emperor, where it's every Admiral for themselves Galactic civil war style.

Put all the names characters/ships into a pool that you draft out of, so there are no duplicates of named people across the players.

As of right now 3 rebel 3 imperial players due to the number of commanders.

1st draft commander 1 each

2nd draft officer 1 each

3rd draft pilots/ships 3 each

Once you have your drafting done, build your forces and play. May or may not do escalating points sizes, or have your unique’s sit out a game for repairs if they are eliminated.

Currently the Rebels do have more unique options so considering either giving them one more draft pick in the 3 ^rd draft of leaving the left over unique’s as mercenaries that can be bid for out of your fleet total for the duration of 1 round.

Example

Vader is the lone leftover Imperial Unique. Before the start of the league week all imperial players turn in a bid of X fleet points to field him. Min bid is his standard cost. Whoever bid the highest can use him for games that week at that cost. If you win the bid you must deduct the points from your fleet whether you field the model or not.

Thoughts?

I am trying to promote our facebook group in the north east and get stores to advertise their events. This has worked well in other game systems. It is going well so far. Stores try not to overlap when they run their events and it gives people plenty of options to travel to new places and meet new people. It also helps distribute things like the FAQ/Errata document.

Down here in the Southwest, we're trying to coordinate between the different game stores as well. We're trying to figure out how best to schedule it, so that each store has a specific day set aside for Armada (in addition to whatever other games they might have going on) without any overlap. Usually we'll end up overlapping the X-Wing nights as well, but that's ok as it gives us more chances to blast those crimin......err, rebels out of space.

If you're in the Tucson area, hit up the FB page here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ArmadaTucson/