I recently picked up Star Wars Armada. It’s a pretty major departure for me as this is really the first Sci Fi I’ve done since all the way back to a role playing games called Traveler and Star Frontiers. Both were great fun and did have the ability for star ship fleet type battles.
Star War Aramada looks to be a nice combo of Fleet battles, pre-painted miniatures (save for the really small ships) and what seems to be a decent set of rules. It’s been out for a year and given what seems to be more and more interesting it it, figured it was worth a look and spending some gift money on.
So first a look at the pretty pretties. The major capital ships for the game are in 3 size classes, small, medium and large. Then there are fighters which cover everything from x-wings, y-wings you name it all from the Star Wars universe. The fighters are generally organized as squadrons with 3 (unpainted) things mounted on a tree like structure.
Individual ships like Bobba Fett, or the Millennium Falcon, are individually mounted. “Hope that old man got that tractor…” 
On the bottom of the mounting structure there are dials for shields and in the case of fighters the amount of hits they can take. For each ship on the side of the table, there is a base card and in addition you have some number of “add ons” you can include with your force.
My daughter as it turns out is turning into a big Star Wars fan so for the first try of the rules it was just her and I giving it a simple run. Will try it out with the game group over the Christmas holidays to give it a really good shake out.
The mechanics of the game are interesting. Each ship has a set of command circles. You have to stack a certain number of commands in advance. There are 4 basic commands, navigate, repair crews, activate fighters and concentrate firing. So for some ships you have to stack 3 commands in advance, and others just 1. When a command is revealed after a ship is activated, you can convert to a token and “store” the command or you can execute it. No matter what, you always activate a ship, fire then move, then the other play does the same for a ship. The navigate command is used to adjust your speed or a get a little more maneuverability out of your ship.
If you don’t use an order and instead convert to a token to use that same order later, the orders become a little less effective where each loses a little something.
Fighters are activated after the capital ships, so they basically fire and move last, unless a capital ship activates a squadron through it’s own command order.
Shooting is pretty straight forward, it’s d8 based, with 3 colors of dice. The different colored die have different outcomes on there to represent different weapon efficiency. Umm ok, kind of a bummer when standard dice can’t be used. Just adds to the cost of the game. It’s a nit.
There are 4 arcs of fire for capital ships. They can fire off up to 2 arcs assuming they have a target. The dice used drop off as a function of the distance. At short range you might be rolling blue, black and red dice, but at long, only red dice.
Results are miss, hit, accuracy and critical. Critical hits are resolved through a deck of cards where you draw and face up next to your ship, suffering the results. No book of boom to look up which makes it straight forward. Hits either affect shields or go on your hull.
As you’d expect capital ships have a bit of a harder time firing at squadrons and squadrons of little ships can do big things against a capital ship if it’s a bomber. 
Will report in again with future games but overall, like what I see. It is different than the usual faire of horse and musket or WWII. Still it’s pretty and with decent game mechanics.
Seems to play somewhat fast, I could see ~2 hour for a game. It is also built for 1×1 or 2×2, going larger than that, I think the 1 ship per activation will show up play too much for something big and out of control.
I do like the way the game does have a point based system for building out a fleet and that does seem to lend itself to tournament play or one off games.
There have been 2 expansions with new ships so plenty of things to draw your eyes and suck some of your gamer budget. Still, with the “basic” game, there’s plenty to get started and actually play without having to run out and get more… More … MORE.