Hey all! I'm thinking of making a big push for Armada in my area. We have a club that meets once per week, so that will be a good starting point. But with the huge appeal of Star Wars thanks to Force Awakens, I'm also considering a big weekend event. Armada intro games, trivia, that kind of stuff. I'm a former GW staffer, so I definitely know how to run exciting intro games, but Armada is a bit of a different one. At GW we used to have an expression, the Four F's - fast, fun, furious, fours. The game should take less than ten minutes, everything hits on fours, and it's all about getting the person rolling dice and having a good time.

Let's be straight about it - Armada has a lot of rules. Those rules are easy to understand and pick up, especially if you have experience with tabletop games, but it's a lot to throw at a person and the intro game can take a good amount of time. I'm experimenting with just how much you can take out of the game while still giving the person a good taste for it. I ran an intro game for a friend of mine and we played without defense tokens or commands, and focused instead on the moving and shooting aspects. It definitely simplified the game and shortened it, but we eventually came to a point where the Nebulon-B was behind the Victory, and neither could quickly come about to re-engage without the Navigate command. I just fudged it and told my opponent that he could issue a command to his ship to make it turn more sharply, which seemed to work.

What has other people's experience been with recruiting new players? Again, with how popular Star Wars is right now, you're not just looking to recruit tabletop gamers away from other systems. Armada and X-Wing have a broad appeal. They're pre-painted, you can learn the rules quickly and they're Star Wars! So a lot of people that might show up could be people that have never played a tabletop game before. And that makes an hour-long intro game with all of the rules daunting.

My basic thoughts are what I did before - remove defense tokens and command dials, maybe limit the number of squadrons (the starter squadrons aren't going to make a huge impact anyway), and keep it all about the base rules. Then, if they're interested, offer a second intro game including all of the basic rules (still leaving out objectives and upgrades, of course).

Thoughts? Comments? Questions?

Honestly if the person is really interested in it play it similar to the normal Learn to play scenario. If you can take out anything then you can take out squadrons. Defense tokens and commands are important aspects of the game. Plus you got those small cheat sheet cards you can use for them.

You could have a game where it starts halfway through. Set up the board and fleets ahead of time, placing the ships at medium range. That would cut out the first two turns of moving towards eachother and get into the action.

I think part of the games appeal is really capital ships with swarms of squadrons so i would suggest keeping them in.

Hope this helps!

The game itself is simple to learn but hard to master. As such I don't think there is much to be gained by minimising the rules as you would for a group of kids in a GW store.

What you may want to do is run some naked ships rather than upgraded ships, and some vanilla squadrons. So this way the choices and decisions are reduced. Then in subsequent games add in a few cards here and there that won't create problems with timing.

Dive in, have cheat sheets and keep the initial games small with limited points. Besides, more important to have fun learning and not worry that a few mistakes are made during game play. That's the kind of stuff you clean up later as people go back re-read the rules.

I'm not sure you can trim it down to 10 minutes... half-an-hour might be more reasonable. Definitely use oddeye and Amanal's suggestions of naked ships/squadrons starting already at engagement range. I might limit every ship to a single command dial just to keep the strategic planning to a minimum.

Maybe a Gladiator -class vs. 2 CR90 Corvettes? A Victory -class is closer on points, but not as maneuverable in a smaller space.

I think squadrons are quite important, they're very simple and it also looks AWESOME for someone coming in who has never seen Armada before to see 10+ Tie fighter squadrons supporting some Vic's sitting on the table.

The hardest part to explain are always the commands and the defense tokens, but they are essential. I'd probably just let them assign commands each turn to simplify it a bit.

Give each player a ship and some fighters and simply GM the game, explaining their options and what to do as they go, just keep objectives and upgrade cards and obstacles out of it, I'd say admirals would be fine.

Depends on the crowd probably, if they're experienced wargamers I'd probably suggest a game with objectives and deployment and obstacles will keep their attention.

Start in a 3x3 Area (that anticipation factor and 'cool battle layed out' factor is important, I feel) and do something like two Vic II's with plenty of Tie Fighters against three corvettes and a Neb or Assault frigate and some X-wings. I think skewing the list slightly to the rebels is cool both for the "good guys winning" factor and the fact that new players tend to just roll those corvettes right into the Vic Steamroller.

As someone who has never played (my core set and first batch of expansions should arrive this weekend), I think what's been stated so far all sounds great. I'd also like to add that if the people you are "recruiting" have experience with CCGs, be sure to spend some time talking about the upgrades and various ability combos available for fleet customization. I used to play Magic a while back (20 years?) and what really hooked my interest was the idea of crafting highly customized fleets, similar to deck building... that and of course the thought of directing a fleet of star destroyers!