Holy fucking hell there’s a lot of stuff available for Imperial Assault.
Kind of in the mood for something like this (assuming they’ve fixed the field commander problems of Descent), but damn. Like 20 little…bits. Maybe more.
Maybe I should be looking at Armada instead.
http://www.coolstuffinc.com/main_search.php?pa=searchOnName&page=1&resultsPerPage=25&q=Imperial+assault
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Published by Paul Beakley
I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.
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Played a few games of both! Scratches two different kinda itches for me. Can’t decide which to buy in on yet.
I watched SU&SD’s playthrough of Armada and they worked their magic on me. But I know better than to bed two collectible games at once. That path leads to destruction.
And more tiny spacesheeeeeps.
There’s a lot of noise about how both Armada and IA are basically pushing the X-Wing Nationals Tournament out of GenCon this year. (They are on wednesday with final round on Thursday and they are still expecting 250 people)
Adam Day There’s a reason I stopped after Wave 2 of X-Wing.
I’ve managed to keep my three faction collection expenses under… Uh…. Let’s not talk about how much X-Wing I have.
MadJay Brown basically I don’t ever see playing a head to head tabletop game, like, ever. I’ve got shittons of Mage Wars staring at me as proof. Also Tide of Iron.
But if Imperial Assault is all field commander-y it’ll never get played. So…Dunno.
PK Sullivan may be helpful here.
http://pksullivan.com/2015/01/star-wars-imperial-assault/
I’ve played all skirmish mode – because I’ve got a skirmish game fetish. But from talking to folks and PK Sullivan, campaign mode maybe more RPG-lite than field commander.
What do you mean by field commander-y?
PK Sullivan I mean where one player can tell anyone else how to play (that’s the field commander problem). Or, practically speaking, there’s no difference at all between one player running all four heroes and every hero being played by their own player.
In Descent, there was literally no incentive at all to act on your own, to pursue your own sub-goals, whatever. I think the campaign expansion gave everyone their own advancement, which at least then gives everyone an incentive to play their own game, and maybe sometimes disregard the instructions of The Smart Player and take a gamble.
Ooh I like the sound of the game from your review, PK Sullivan! The xps and side missions sounds like they go a good way toward getting players to play their own games.
Hmhmhm.
It’s a fully cooperative game on behalf of the Rebels, so it’s hard to curb the social challenges of an assertive field commander. Without a traitor mechanic (like Battlestar Galactica), I can’t think of a way to do that mechanically.
Oh, and thats what I thought field commander meant but I’ve always heard it called quarterbacking.
Well, perhaps the draw of individual XPs is enough.
Siege of the Citadel solved it back in…1992 or so. Everyone is there to beat the bad guy player, but everyone is also chasing individual victory.
You could also just not play with overly-assertive douchebags, yeah?
J. Walton holy impractical advice.
Armada is really good. Unlike X-Wing which is primarily a “optimize your point buy fleet and then you win” game with fairly weak/bland at-the-table mechanics; Armada is a legit good minis game.
It stands on its own even without using any of they cards for boosts and each card offers just a minor buff that (at least with the cards released in Wave 1) you aren’t going to swing the odds much based brain burning your card buys.
Plus, there aren’t that many ships in the wave and you don’t need very many of them. Although storage will be interesting. So far I haven’t even tried to put the ships away yet.
Paul Beakley Just whining because I haven’t gotten to play any of the new SW stuff yet. Wait, I guess I got to play the starter set of the smugglers RPG.
Argh and then further muddying the waters is this pretty amazing overview of three of this style of game:
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1298222/so-you-want-level-character-comparative-reviews-mi
…and this guy finds Imperial Assault coming up short in the ways I would not want it coming up short. Augh.
Ralph Mazza I adore the idea of Armada, I really do. I really, really do. But it’s a head-to-head game and that’s just not a format I ever host here. I have no idea who I’d play with or when.
by “head to head” you mean 2-player?
Cuz you can easily do it as teams. And other than the fiction (which can be freely ignored) there’s no reason it can’t be played as a free for all ye olde Silent Death style.
Yyyyyyeahhh… I mean two sided fights.
I’ve always had a dumb hangup about the fiction when it comes to games like this. I kind of enjoyed Silent Death back in the day but it always felt uh…silly, I guess, that we’re all just beating on each other in this volume of space that we’d designated as an arena.
Tide of Iron
can also totally be played 4-player right outta the box. Jus’ sayin’.And that gets thrown out the window by mere seconds/minutes. Gotcha – two-sided fights.
Don’t get me started on what needs fixing in Descent…