First game of Starmada

Saturday I had a chance to play the spaceship combat game Starmada Admiralty Edition and the Starfleet Battles conversion called Klingon Armada, which fellow gamer Holdfast brought over, along with some Starfleet Battles miniatures for some Trek gaming.

It was the first time for both of us to play the game, so we each took about 560 or so points of pregenerated starships from the Klingon Armada book.  I chose to play the Klingons, with two D-7 battlecruisers, the Razor Blade and the Knife's Edge.  Mark had two Federation light cruisers, the Hood and the Wasp, and a frigate from his Prime Directive roleplaying campaign, the Stauffenberg.  Since Mark didn't have exact models for each ship, and we're not Trek purists, we did a little proxying with a Clix mini. 

The rules are pretty straightforward, although the movement system takes awhile to get down.  The combat was very reminiscent of Warhammer, with rolling to hit, then rolling to penetrate shields, then rolling damage.  The two fleets quickly closed and started pounding each other.  My two D-7s unloaded on the poor frigate on the first turn, and since asteroids blocked line-of-sight to one of my ships, the other took the brunt of the Federation shots.

With preplotted movement, the two sides ended up at close range on the second turn, where we each managed to take out one of the other's capital ships.  All shooting in the game is considered simultaneous, and damage takes effect at the end of the turn, so each ship was able to get off its shots before exploding.

My remaining ship was mostly undamaged from the first two turns, so on the third, it unleashed enough firepower to vaporize the unfortunate frigate (the ship on which the characters in Holdfast's roleplaying game serve).  The Klingon easily withstood the fire from the remaining Fed starship, and we called the game at that point.

Starmada is a fairly simple set of rules that played pretty quickly, but we were using the basic game and (other than using shield facets) avoiding all the special rules that can bog down a spaceship game.  Still, I liked it and will play Starmada again, probably in the SFB universe.