Renegade a Twin Cities gaming Con was the weekend before Thanksgiving. Once again they held a couple of very fun Star Wars Armada tournaments. Saturday was the standard 400 point 3 round tournament and Sunday was a small format tournament with a number of special rules. No Large ships, 200 points, no squadron limits and score a token if you hit a named squadron, are a named squadron and hit a ship, that kind of thing.
Ian Cross ran it, had a great set of prizes, more than the usual FFG prize kit which is always awesome. Between rounds raffles with encouragement to buy tickets as the proceeds were going to toys for tots.
This was my haul from the 400 point tournament, I ended up with 2nd place. I was hoping for the last round to be matched up with Nathan but at that point I didn’t quite have the tournament points for us to meet on the top table.
First round was almost a mirror match against Tae. Squadron build was different and he had 1 more Gazanti than I. I was player one.
In this one, terrain and flying turned out to be pretty important. The Gozanti being moved here ended up being a bit in the way and that kept his ISD at bay allowing me to focus fire down his Quasar and squadrons.
Here the scrum was fully engaged. It ended up being a 7-4.
Round two was a fun one where we were doing blockade run. Given my opponent was running JJ as his admiral those Raiders and Arq had the full ability to pick where they were going to dash to escape. No surprise we were playing Blockade.
I decided to do a sweep across the field. I figured the points were in the ISD so if I could bring that down I could probably make up for what would be a loss in tokens.
As you could expect his ships went for the far edge to slide through while my squadrons and ISD concentrated on his ISD, pew pew pew!
I did end up blowing away his ISD at the cost of several ships escaping. It ended being a narrow 6-5 victory. A somewhat surprising result, a fleet with lots of ships can definitely afford some losses with this one.
Finally for round 3 I was matched up against a Rebel. Seems like the Twin Cities meta is pretty Imperial heavy at the moment. George was running a fairly standard and very powerful squadron build with an AF, Yavaris, and the usual transports.
I decided to sort of turtle up and gear up for an alpha strike with my squadrons. We were playing Fighter Ambush which inspired me to not fling my squadrons forward as part of setup but instead stick back in activation range since I didn’t have a shuttle.
Wish I would have taken a few more pictures of this match in that it was all down to some hot dice as my squadrons went in for the alpha strike. I dropped 6 squadrons in on Ten nub, Wedge and Keyan with Howlrunning and Flight Controller boosts, rolling 6 dice sure can land damage quick.
My ISD went after his guppy and the poor thing didn’t last long. Likewise Yavaris took a bunch of flank fire and it went down.
I ended up with a 10-1.
On Day 2 for the small format I went with a hammer head rebel force. I wanted to play Imperial again but Ian joined me and was using a bunch of my aggressors which I needed. Since I couldn’t make my list work I dropped back to a collection of rebel rogues. 
In this match I ended up winning by essentially going for it and blowing away his raider.
The next two matches featured an interdictor and a kitted out VSD as the main ship. Both ended very badly for me. I ended fairly down in the standings tho Ian ended up taking 2nd.
Mighty fun time. Really appreciate the Renegade crew for including Armada with all the other games going on. From Warhammer to batman, to bolt action.
One of the batman tables… that kinda .. well … I wonder how that plays?!? 🙂
The other thing that Renegade had which was pure awesome was Star Ways Legion as a demo game you could walk up and play. It’s not released yet. It’s not the full rules. It’s not the full experience but it was at least enough to get a sense of what it’ll be like.
The table setup wasn’t exactly inspiring, it was kinda more table top paintball with some barriers to kinda hide behind and some Star Wars buildings.
It was a good demo of how the basics work. It had a hit/crit concept and a blocking concept in dice. Two actions per unit activation. Mostly you go, I go. No overwatch concept . Terrain cover modifiers or just interacting with terrain seemed to be unexplored in this early version of the rules.
None the less, it’s Star Wars and we’ll see what’s ahead. This is one I’m eagerly watching for.