Hello FFG forums,

I want to share a dilemma I'm having with all of you for opinions on the chance that some of you have knowledge on what I would like to do. We have a convention coming up and I would like to host a massive event for lots of players to come and enjoy the game I'm running. In the past this was X-Wing for something like a 3-4 hour event and up to 16 players. Now I'm thinking about doing the same for Armada.

Thing is, I'm concerned about time.

I have eight rebel ships and six Imperial ships (with more on the way for Wave 2, I hope). That's fourteen players. What I'm unsure of is how much time this kind of event will take up where everyone is running one ship. Will another hour be necessary to allow table-talk between the players, for instance?

So I'd appreciate anyone offering any thoughts or experience running similar events. This will be for Dundracon 2016, for any possible bay are players out there.

It depends. If you have a scenario in mind, it can last two hours or less. If your just having a large scale battle that keeps going until one side is crushed, it could go for much longer.

My game club put on some Armada games at Hurri-Con '15 in Orlando Florida in September. We had one scenario where 6 Imperial ships plus fighters fought 6 Rebel ships plus escorts. The scenario was for the Rebels to escape with minimal damages while the Imperials were supposed to capture a specific ship. Even with 4 players who never played before, the game was under 2 hours. We did have two refs though.

The second game was an all out fleet action slug fest. 9 on 9 with ships getting destroyed and re-introduced as reinforcements. The game continued until one side got 300 pts worth of destroyed enemy ships (fighters didn't count). That game went longer, maybe 3 hours.

The thing that kept them short were multiple refs and multiple movement tools so players didn't have to wait to long. Lots of dice helped too. We also had a system of "dashboards" were we put ship cards in plastic sleeves on a metal hand held tray. We have magnetized "jewels" to cover defense tokens when used and dry eras pens to make hash marks as a ship takes hull damage. The dashboards made he game much smoother and we didn't loose an tokens.