In my opinion, there are some strange design decisions in Star Wars: Armada.

First, the dials on the shields. Why didn't they use tokens on ship cards or some equivalent. Why did they put small round dials built into the stands. It seems like it would become kind of fiddly and handsie to knock shields off your Star Destroyer without accidently moving the model. These shield dials almost mean that the miniatures have to sit on a custom plastic table with legs just so that the dials will fit.

Why? Why? Why?

The same applies for the squadrons. Why push a "tab" to indicate that the squadron has moved? You would have to use two hands -- one to hold it down so that it doesn't move, and another to push the tab through assuming it doesn't stick. As X-wing players, we seem to manage keeping track of how has moved and activated pretty easily. I don't understand the decision to put tabs on the model bases. Seems very fiddly for no good reason.

I've played a few miniatures where stats and such were on the models. Heroclix comes to mind. It was always a pain lifting up your model off the table to mess with it's dial. It seems like we will be getting more of that PITA here.

Kind of disappointed.

I agree with your entire post

Way easier than token.. and its a common theme in many games like this too.. nobody want s to fuss with all those tokens...

In a game like this that is.. for x wing it's fine...

For the shields, I think it is because they want your opponent to be able to easily see at a glance the condition of your ship. If tokens were on the base it would be harder to count without bumping the ship, and on the ship card would be difficult to see across the table. We also don't know if those dials have any more information, and imagine needing 20 tokens for each of 4 ships in your fleet.

For the fighters, yes, we can keep track of which of 3-8 ships has moved. Can you do so for 20+ identical models?

We'll have to see how it all works out.

Give it a chance.

Everything here seems fresh to me. FFG is a pretty innovative company. I trust them.

I see absolutely no issue. One of my biggest gripes with x wing is that you have twenty or thirty tokens lying around. Boo. I would rather something that really reduces record keeping and makes the game easy, visually, to follow.

And yeah, in x wing you move three or four ships. When you have ten or twelve or twenty it will be a lot more difficult... And I don't think pushing a tab through is that demanding.

Most images look like renders at this point. I'm hoping the bases are smaller in the final product. The smaller ships look like a big rectangular base with a ship stuck on top. I'd prefer all bases are smaller than the ship that's mounted on them. Right now your eye is drawn to the base.

Lots of innovation overall and an exciting announcement. I'm thinking of going to Gencon just to play the demo.

My only real problem with all these design decisions is that they are responsible for the huge price. They look great but I would have settled for less if the price was lower.

OP, the points you criticize were actually points i really liked about the announcement. I don't like a table cluttered with tokens, even X-Wing has too many of them for me. Also, the tabs on the squadrons seem an excellent way to mark units that you can't tell apart easily, so you have no confusion about activation. I really like it.

OP, here.

Thanks for everyone's opinion. Most of my disappointment is that it's not "X-wing but bigger." There's some things that I'm not a fan of, especially the squadron minis.

That being said, I'll be hopeful and keep an eye out for the final product. And of course, I'm going to buy the crap out of it when it comes out.

All the original reviews of X-wing identified the same draw back. X-wing has a ton of tokens. I love X-wing, But when you have lots of ships Target Locking it can get pretty (I won't say dificult) distracting to manage all the tokens.

I am one of those guys who doesn't use crit tokens, in an effort to reduce the number of tokens I have to manage, and it does lead to forgetting about crits from time to time.

Even focus tokens when ships are close together can get a little messy. (Not that we can't handle it)

I think since each ship is going to have multiple shield ratings, the dials will be fine.

The problem I have with tokens in x-wing is forgetting to remove unspent ones at the end of a round.

Also occasionally forgetting to move them along with the ship, so I get "hey, who does this blue TL go with?"

Shield dials make a lot of sense when ships have multiple shield facings. If it was tokens, youd have 4 separate sets of tokens just for shields to keep track of.

This is not an HO Scale diorama.

In my view Armada is an elegantly designed game with very smart and highly functional mechanics which are facilitated by convenient swag.

This is looking to be a masterpiece of design. I need two sets come January!

This is not an HO Scale diorama.

In my view Armada is an elegantly designed game with very smart and highly functional mechanics which are facilitated by convenient swag.

This is looking to be a masterpiece of design. I need two sets come January!

I don't know if I would call it elegant or a masterpiece until I had played it. But I will admit that it looks like it has great potential. Add that to FFG great track record of making super fun games, and I am very optomistic.

As for the shields I have no problem with that provided they are easy to see and turn when needed, which in my mind means bigger bases otherwise we get the issue with the falcon and the decimater, assuming since it is the largest big ship, it can be hard to see the ship's stats. So no problem there, however for the squadrons are hard plastic to prevent them braking as each fighter is separate and has to be pegged in from the looks of the photo. And my second concern is if the table is too thin that it might break after a number of play sessions, though hopefully we will know about that better after gencon. And if it is brittle I hope that we get the chance to have tokens to indicate which squadrons move then.