Attack Wing
Last day of school teacher-facilitated goofing off! Unpacked my big Wave 1 + core set and gave it a few goes.
I haven’t played X-Wing yet but apparently it’s pretty similar. Looking forward to it now because Attack Wing was fun! Sorry haters, it’s a good game, deal with it.
We played three times total. Once with the demo game (One dragon each, a couple upgrades), and twice we did “adventure 1.” There’s some campaign mode, I’m not really sure how it works yet. Controlling the dragons is easy and intuitive, there aren’t too many abilities yet, and each side felt pretty different.
The game is explicit about not allowing pre-measuring. Yikes, but it’s an interesting challenge. Lots of eyeballing and bad guesses in the early games.
Wave 1 doesn’t seem like it really added a ton of variety: a band of hobgoblins, a band of elves, a giant, a couple wraiths. Or I may just be dreading the inevitable rollout of the endless array of D&D critters and races. But each expansion also comes with its own adventure (campaign) setup.
This is just about the perfect deployment in my mind of what makes D&D interesting at all to me: badass big monsters, signature troops, mechanically detailed spells. Low on awe and wonder, high on production values.
This is probably the only minis game I’ve ever seen that I’ve wanted to play.
Because dragons.
Travis Scott DRAGONS!
Joe Mitchell no joke, definitely possible for the game to be a total money sink.
If I had it to do over again I miiiight not have gone all in. But it was a great deal and I’m hoping it’ll be a nice treat for many years.
X-Wing is fun for sure. Money pit problems are very true. I stopped somewhere around wave 3. It just becomes too much
I play Star Trek Attack Wing.
NCC-1701 vs Bronze Dragon, anyone?
“No pre-measuring” is such a weird rule. Like, I get what it’s trying to accomplish, and when combined with things like scatter dice I think it works well (as long as the gap between an okay eyeballer and a good eyeballer is smaller than the random element), but when you’re measuring a deterministic move, it bugs me like crazy. Are people with better mental/visual rulers supposed to have an advantage here? That doesn’t seem like it’s meant to be part of a wargame design philosophy, but there it is…
Yeah,I think the ultimate impact is that it rewards experienced players. I can appreciate what they’re trying to do (introduce uncertainty either via bad guesses or surprise plays).
That, and also it avoids that thing where you have to measure every unit in relation to every other unit every move. (I had a friend who ran an Epic army with like a ~30-strong Ork mechanized detachment that he would individually position to make sure no arty strike would ever hit more than two of them. It was maddening.)
I’ve toyed with some fixes for that, like you’re allowed to plant a ruler vertically on your unit’s base and eyeball it, which should help newbies without rewarding endless fiddling, or maybe something with templates if there are a few common move distances. That, or a Torchbearer-inspired obligation to provide and/or fetch all snacks desired during your movement phase(s). So maybe don’t take a million years.