Looking to expand my knowlege of Star Wars gaming as broadly as possible, I decided to participate in Little Big Wars 2016 Armada Store Championship.

As I don’t actually own Armada, I had only ever played one game of Armada before the tournament. I borrowed some stuff from the store’s owner, and another friend and jumped right into the thick of things.

There were only five players in the tournament. So right off the bat I already made top eight. So far so good.

My fleet (as best as I can remember):

Imperial II-Class Star Destroyer

-Admiral Screed

-Gunnery Team

-Avenger

Victory II-Class Star Destroyer

-Boosted Comms

Gladiator I-Class Star Destroyer

-Demolisher

-Engine Techs

-Assault Concussion Missiles

Boba Fett

Major Rhymer

TIE Bomber x3

Round One

My first round was against another Imperial fleet. My opponent had two Imperial Class star destroyers, each with enhanced countermeasures, and a butt-load of TIE Bombers and TIE Advanceds with Dengar for support.

His two star destroyers were squared off right across from mine, with my gladiator along the side, hoping to go in for a flanking move.

All the squadrons rushed out into the middle.

I was first player, and the scenario we were doing was Advanced Gunnery, which basically just means everyone hits even harder than normal.

Long story short, I blew up a few squadrons, and lost my Imperial class and Victory class in short order. My Gladiator took about five out of the six rounds to get into flanking position and did nothing except kill a squadron of TIE Advanced.

I lost that game 9-1. Which isn’t 10-0 so I could have done worse.

Round Two

Since there was an odd number of players, and I had performed the worse by far in the first round, I had the bye for round two. Which for me meant I got to go and take my time getting lunch and take a peek at all of the other cool wargames happening in the store.

Flames of War looks pretty cool.

Round Three

For the final round, I was playing against Kurt, who you might remember from our Worlds Roundup episode of the podcast. Or maybe you don’t.

Kurt was running an MC-80 with Rieekan (stupid Rieekan), an MC-30, two CR-90s, two YT-2400s, some X-Wings, and Jan Ors.

I was once again first player, and our scenario was… um… the one where you hvae to dog-pile onto the space station for points. That one.

This was a pretty quick match by Armada standards.

Things were looking good, as Kurt had a deployment goof and ended up ramming his MC-30 with his MC-80.

I sent all of my ships full speed ahead towards the space station in an effort to get as many objective points as possible.

In my mad rush, i even managed to bring the MC-30 down to one hull with my Gadiator, making use of the Demolisher title and Engine Techs.

The MC-30 then died, and moved in front of my Imperial Class. Stupid Rieeken meant even though the ship was dead, it wasn’t taken off the board until the end of the round, and therefore could still move and be a big pain in my star destroyers butt.

My star destroyer was going at speed three and ready to slow down. But slowing down meant ramming the zombie MC-30, and coming up short on the space station. The space station that gives me precious points.

So my ISD pulled some crazy perfect Tokyo-Space-Drift move, spending a navigate dial to adjust the movement template, and landed perfectly between three ships, and on top of the space station.

It was glorious. And also the beginning of the end for the ISD.

I should have just rammed the MC-30…

Faling to drop down to speed two, meant I was going much to fast to avoid a collosion course with oblivion. My bombers, Gladiator, and Victory managed to mop up some Rebels, but my ISD couldn’t slow down.

With only one navigate command in the pipeline, I was only able to slow it down to speed two, not enough to save me from flying it off the board, which eventually it did, though not after taking out the MC-80 with my rear guns.

The dead MC-80 however, got to stay on the board because of Rieekan, and killed my Victory. (The Gladiator was long dead at this point.)

My bombers and Boba Fett took down a CR-90, leaving my ISD one move from the void, our squadrons, and one CR-90 left in the game.

Mind you my ISD had taken one hull damage only at this point.

So my ISD flies off the board and the game ends.

What could have probably ended in a victory for me, ended in a defeat because I got too excited about avoiding a collision with a baller space-drift.

So I ended the tournament (now having a lifetime total of three games of Armada under my belt) in fifth place (TOP 8 woot).