Over the last couple of weeks there has been talk of folks switching from playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles on Tuesday evenings to playing Firestorm Armada. This game came and went a while back when it was first released (much like its cousin, Uncharted Seas).

I decided to take a leap of faith and buy my first fleet, the Aquans. I like the look of the ships and from what I understand about their tactics, I liked that as well. It seems one tactic is to move through the enemy and drop mines along the way so when those squads activate, they set off the mines. The other tactic being moving into the middle of the enemy and firing all weapons in all arcs along with torpedoes. Sounds cool to me!

I spent a good part of the weekend assembling the models and installing magnets in their belly with magnets on the stem of the bases as well. This operation wasn’t as troublesome as I first thought.

So I showed up at the store last night with my fleet where Sean (the Slaan) challenged me to a game with his Sorylian fleet. We decided to play with just the starter (Battleship, 3 Cruisers and 6 Frigates divided into two squads of 3) and a Carrier with full compliments of Wings. We worked our way through the rules pretty quickly as both of us were already mostly familiar with them either through reading the rulebook or having played Uncharted Seas. I liked how most of the rules flowed pretty easily. I routinely forgot to fire all my weapons and I didn’t learn until the middle of the game that all ships can be moved through (representing the three dimensional nature of space). The one big event happened in the second turn where my Cruisers fired at his Carrier surrounded by three Frigates. I rolled my dice and came up with a result that caused a critical hit on the Carrier. The roll on the Critical Effect table was a “2″, which saw his Carrier explode, taking all three Frigates with it. Of course, this gave me a pretty big advantage for the rest of the game, not to mention how hot my dice were. In the end we called it when I had lost a single Frigate (and Fighter) and he only had one Cruiser and his Battleship left. This left time for a couple of other folks to get in a game as well.

All in all, I enjoyed the game. I can see where tactics and positioning are advantageous, but I also see where one person’s incredible luck with the dice can turn the game on its head. This latter puts the game into that “beer and pretzels” level of game (even though I hate that term). If there were some way to mitigate a person’s luck with rolling so well, then I might not put it there. However, I did find it to be fun and will eagerly look forward to playing again.

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