So I've been looking at some kickstarter games, being tempted by them lately, like this new one by Monolith that has huge miniatures towering over smaller miniatures... but I'm easily pulled out of that trap by remembering how amazing Armada is.

I've been playing FFG games and other tabletop games now for only a few years, but it's long enough to have tried a ton of stuff, and I honestly think Armada is probably the best game I've ever played, at LEAST the best game where each player brings his or her own stuff. Obviously a big part of it is the gameplay and game design. The movement tool is awesome, the defense tokens are a great mechanic, and the objectives make the game unpredictable and always changing....

But arguably my favorite part of Armada is the miniatures... and the SCALE of the miniatures. Seeing an ISD tower over a Victory, which itself is towering over a Raider, which itself is towering over Squadrons..... it's just beautiful! Granted X-Wing kind of does this a little with it's Epic play, but Epic is so seldom played that Armada is just a better solution.

I really want a ground-based war game with AT-ATs marching down the battlefield eventually, (I expect an X-Wing ground variant at some point). I love Huge miniatures, and I really want to see Epic Scale ships for Armada too. I really hope we eventually find ourselves in a place where we can see SSDs like the Executor and the Eclipse make an appearance here.

My only complaint is that there is currently too much of a development focus on squadrons and new squadron tactics, in a game that only allows a MAXIMUM of 1/3rd your fleet to be squadrons. I'd like more of a focus on ships than we currently have, and maybe the next 2 waves to be all about ships... but I suspect that's just wishful thinking on my part.

But in summary - the gorgeous battlefield of Armada is what makes it the best for me.

Is Armada YOUR favorite game? if so what makes it the best for you?

Armada is the only miniature game I am willing to out money into. It is by far and away my favorite game I play right now because the balance feels great. What ever I put down on the board, I feel I have a chance to win with it. There are no auto includes, despite what people think. There are hard and soft counters to everything and I enjoy finding the balance in a list that really makes it work.

It's a well designed game, one that rewards the player at several stages: meta analysis, fleet building (incl. initiative considerations and objective selection), deployment, maneuver - and an element of luck.

The building to deployment/maneuver to luck "ratio" is about right IMO. Of the two it's your placement and maneuver skills that matter the most.

It's also (according to my 40k scale of such things), cheap and fast.

It's also very varied - a wide range of builds are viable. Truly. It's more about skill than netlisting.

What "OP" stuff exists isn't really OP, just a tad bit too good (and mostly limited to Titles, which is self-limiting). So the cheese factor is very limited (although not quite non-existent; 8 YTs, for example, is pretty cheesy).

Armada is also the only miniatures game I will put money (I mean pour every last nickel because we don't have pennies in Canada) into. I love Star Wars and I love the models. I think I'm not alone in saying I got into Armada once I saw an ISD model.

The emphasis on Squadrons lately doesn't bother me because before they didn't seem important enough to consider taking more than 4-6 squads, now they are becoming a real threat and I like that because I see a lot of fighters on screen during the movies.

However one of my favourite aspects is the Corellian Conflict. I love depth and purpose in my conflicts (I lose the battle but I may still win the war). My favourite game remains to be Twilight Imperium 3Rd (any Winnipeg players give me a shout) because of the long term planning and strategic decision making so finally seeing purpose brought to my fleet engagements is going to be awesome!

I love Star Wars and I love this game! May we live long and prosper Er I mean....may the Force be with us.

I love how even if you are going to lose badly - the beginning of the game is still cool. Positioning fleets, moving them out.... it FEELS great to me! This game isn't ONLY about winning and losing - especially in terms of tournament points - a 5 point loss is really a tie. But so many interesting things happen during games that it's about having FUN more so than being the victor.

Because it died before the designers took it downhill with stupid power combos?

The game was the best strategic game that I have ever played. The combination between those all migthy ship and the squadrons is superb. The way you have to think how the placement of your ship at the start of the game and the selected objective will influance everything. The way everything have a counter. The way you move your ships and your squadrons. The quality of the product. Etc...

All those reasons put that game to the summit for me but something was missing after a great victory or a loose. What next??? The campaign! Thank's to the Corellian Conflict, all what I was hopping for is coming

BEST GAME EVER!!!

Lets recap:

When X-wing was released I bought a large/fair amount of stuff, Including the Corvette and GR75.

But it took a whole year before I had my first game of X-wing game.

In the following month or two I then played a few games of X-wing, no more than five in total, I think...

Then Armada hit the shelves like a ton of bricks and I've basically not looked back since

Please bear in mind, that I do find my X-wing stuff usefull, when I paint all my small Rebel Armada squadrons.

Took great satisfaction in painting the Millinium Falcon in Armada with the same markings as the one from X-wing

For me (still learning Armada and still playing X-wing) I find Armada like making and enjoying a good cup of tea - a civilised affair - whereas as X-wing is like a can of pop - fast and dirty. I think they've captured the admiral's view in Armada and ace pilot's view in X-wing perfectly.

After super Nintendo I got fairly disgusted with the console wars and being sold systems worth hundreds of dollars every couple of years... it pushed me into the more expensive pc games market and I never looked back. .. quake, Diablo, star craft just were lightyears ahead of anything cheaper consoles could offer at the time and the multi player element was massively entertaining. .. fast forward a decade and pc games are pretty much becoming console ports... fallout 1 and 2 on pc for instance contrasted with 3 and 4. ..it's not even recognizable to me. .. as a result I've been fairly disenchanted with pcs lately as a result. ..then I see an article on ars technica about armada and I'm intrigued... few hundred dollars later and I'm playing my very first game. .. no time for intro rules, I've got 400 points worth of ships and Squads and I'm all in baby. ... it wasn't even after the first dice roll that I was hooked! This game is a blast plain and simple. .. everything I could ever want, balance, changing meta, skill, luck, heft,complexity, community, it's all there! Coming back to pc's, my only questions when upgrading recently was can it run vassal, and how fast does it notch the maneuver tool

I find it impossible to name the best game, or even my favorite game because they all scratch a different itch. I play a number of board games, depending on mood and who I'm with. I also play a number of miniatures games. I love X-Wing for quick, insane, tactical "think fast" dogfights, and I love Armada for the more strategic, big picture gameplay. Ground skirmish I go Infinity because of its deep gameplay, and amazing mechanics. And then there's Dreadball, because teleporting dinosaurs playing sports. I love them all. It's like your asking me to pick my favorite child.

Armada is my favorite competitive game because of the "balance" it has, making the outcome more reliable on skill than anything. It feels like an actual competition between people, where it matters not what you bring but what you do. I put balance in quotes because there is an aspect of the designers observing the meta and creating expansions based on performance, but I view it more as them providing us with so many different variables that it's literally impossible to guarantee good performance. Just look at Green Knight's list of variables. Impossible to account for all of that—without oodles of practice to hone SKILLs.

But for casual games I do prefer Xwing. Played 8 games this past weekend in the same span that I would have played 2 casual Armada games.

I love miniatures warfare. Armada doesn't take time to assemble and paint, it's FFG and therefore mainstream enough to find players for, it's Star Wars. It's capital ship warfare that makes captial ships matter, but not be so time consuming.

The only thing that gives me pause is how so needed fighters are. Just today I took my imperial capital gunline back out for a spin to get whalloped, in part, by fighters. I want a game about battleships, not carriers. I want the pendulum to swing back.

The only game that competes for Armada's dominance in my brain is Rebellion, another FFG title, zooming out to the Galactic civil war as a whole.

I someday want that ground combat game too, because it will be awesome to play Rebellion and factor out the space and ground battles with large-scale wargames like that. X-Wing and Imperial Assault feel...lacking.

Armada is also my favorite though I am getting into board games to at home. Easier for the kids to play xwing too (minus the upgrade cards).

its aight.

I got into this game foremost because of the Star Wars IP and the models are absolutely superb. Yes the models aren't always perfect replicas of the movie variants, ISD's are slightly wider then they should be, but such discrepancies don't really bother me as they're minimal compared to the overall quality of the product. Ultimately i'm buying this game because of the models.

As for the game? Win or lose I still feel awesome playing especially if i'm running a Two ISD fleet. This game really feels like SW with the dogfighting and slightly intricate maneuvering of the Capital ships. I had a moment in one game where my two ISD's were chasing separate targets in opposite directions and they nearly collided with each other just like the scene where the three ISD's are chasing the Millennium Falcon and they all nearly collide. I don't care that I lost the game, that single moment and sensation of playing out a movie scene was too awesome!

I also enjoy just flipping through my card binder and looking at my collection. It's kinda addicting. Ultimately Armada is three addictions in one. The models, the cards, and the actual gameplay itself. Armada is a game i've gladly spent $600 into. This is a game I intend to keep and play the rest of my life.

I'm an Armada addict.

It's been five days since my last purchase.

Which is good, since the amount of unopened products sitting on my shelf is growing.

I keep telling myself I'm going to use them for prizes. That I got them dirt cheap off the net.

But really, I'm just a low-life addict.

I had some unexpected Amazon vouchers to treat myself and was considering getting into Armada. You all convinced me.

Star destroyers, tractor beams and Darth Vader. That is the essence of Star Wars to me.

armada has brought me several new friendships. That might be why I think it's the best game. That and the fact that it is simple to play but gets more challenging the deeper into it you get.

I love miniatures warfare. Armada doesn't take time to assemble and paint, it's FFG and therefore mainstream enough to find players for, it's Star Wars. It's capital ship warfare that makes captial ships matter, but not be so time consuming.

The only thing that gives me pause is how so needed fighters are. Just today I took my imperial capital gunline back out for a spin to get whalloped, in part, by fighters. I want a game about battleships, not carriers. I want the pendulum to swing back.

The only game that competes for Armada's dominance in my brain is Rebellion, another FFG title, zooming out to the Galactic civil war as a whole.

I someday want that ground combat game too, because it will be awesome to play Rebellion and factor out the space and ground battles with large-scale wargames like that. X-Wing and Imperial Assault feel...lacking.

Initially I was of the opinion that a bigger scale ground game for star wars was unlikely, as the GCW was mostly about guerrilla warfare. But here is some speculation that may point to otherwise. Consider runewars miniatures and how it uses some spruced up systems remotely similar to our dear xwing and armada.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/8/5/runewars-the-miniatures-game/

It is possible that this game is both an entry into ground-warfare tabletop as well as a testbed for a possible star wars themed ground game. After all, with so many movies still to come out for the franchise I’m sure ffg will want to milk this cow. It is actually prudent for them to wait and not make a large scale sw ground game yet as there were not many vehicles and troop types seen in the original trilogy, so allowing Disney to first flesh out the canon is wise.

One thing that has yet to appear for the star wars ground game to become a possibility is the Epic play format for IA and a AT-AT for it. Why? Marketing. So that people will buy up an AT-AT in IA before that demand gets saturated in a ground game where you can field multiple AT-ATs.

If it does come out I hope it will be pre-painted J

Armada is a great game. I absolutely love it. Yet, I don't play it as often as my beloved X-wing. So, I guess I can't say that Armada is my favorite game. I love it, but not as much as others.

X-wing is probably my most played game.

Coming in second- a Star Trek conversion of the old B5 Wars game. (The former SFB junkie in me just loves marking off damage on a ship schematic, and B5Wars did it with so much more elegance and asymmetry than old SFB...)

Armada and a home-brewed set of rules for man-to-man superhero skirmishes tie for third; I'd like to play more Armada, but I've got an opponent who really loves his superheroes, and was delighted to come up with something better than the Heroclix rules to use for them. Gotta keep opponents happy, too, or who would we play with?

I really want a ground-based war game with AT-ATs marching down the battlefield eventually, (I expect an X-Wing ground variant at some point). I love Huge miniatures, and I really want to see Epic Scale ships for Armada too. I really hope we eventually find ourselves in a place where we can see SSDs like the Executor and the Eclipse make an appearance here.

Do you mean something like this?

ARMADA is dead!!!

I like Armada, but if it weren't for the Star Wars skin I wouldn't play it. The game itself, if I'm honest, isn't really my cup of tea. There's too much emphasis on card combinations and layered interactions IMO. I just play it because Star Destroyers and X Wings are freaking cool.

It's a well designed game, one that rewards the player at several stages: meta analysis, fleet building (incl. initiative considerations and objective selection), deployment, maneuver - and an element of luck.

The building to deployment/maneuver to luck "ratio" is about right IMO. Of the two it's your placement and maneuver skills that matter the most.

It's also (according to my 40k scale of such things), cheap and fast.

It's also very varied - a wide range of builds are viable. Truly. It's more about skill than netlisting.

What "OP" stuff exists isn't really OP, just a tad bit too good (and mostly limited to Titles, which is self-limiting). So the cheese factor is very limited (although not quite non-existent; 8 YTs, for example, is pretty cheesy).

I cracked.

There are now two more R&V pack (unopened) in my home office.

And this morning my wife came home from the night shift with another brown bundle under her arm (having picked up the mail).

That would be the Reb/Imp squad packs I ordered. In anticipation of the CC.