The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Sometimes you buy a game that you desperately want to like even before it arrives at your grubby little hands. You cant wait for it to get to you so you can tear into it and digest it and love it. Usually that means that it's going to be terrible and you know it - you're just trying to convince yourself that everything will be alright, really. That's what happened with me and my ill-fated dealings with Noble Armada, the starship miniatures game that Holistic Design put out in the same universe as the excellent (but plagued by problems) role-playing game Fading Suns. Normally I really have no interest in miniatures, and I should have stuck to my original intention of not bothering with the game. I managed to for quite a while, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for pesky eBay and its meddlesome sellers too. So, for about $30 (you think I would have paid the MSRP of $55 sight-unseen with never playing it when it was a type of game I usually don't enjoy?), I picked up the basic boxed set.

Opening it right up when I got it (I even woke up early and went to the post office before work to pick it up), I found a few dice, some plastic ships and stands, an uncountable number of cardboard counters, a rulebook, some big blank hex-sheets and page after page after page of starship sheets. I was initially disappointed by the ships because they were both plastic and damn small. I used to built a large number of plastic airplane models as a kid and those game with a much larger volume of material for the dollar. The ship designs themselves were rather underwhelming as well. The Decados ships seemed to jump right out of the Klingon Empire and the Hawkwood's apparently held flying bricks as the most ideal shape for a starship. Understanding that this is a high-priced hobby, however, and thankful that the price hadn't been in the $70 range, I moved on. To the rulebook, specifically.

The book has the same style of layout as the role-playing line, using the same borders and artists, but it took more of the faults than the strengths. While John Bridges' art is usually superb and he listed in the credits, I cannot find anything resembling his work in the book. Instead the book is illustrated by John Poreda, who simply does not have the same image of spaceships and clear artwork I have. I've seen some of his later work (most recently in the Changeling: the Dreaming book Denizens of the Dreaming) and it's much better, but I've never like Poreda's work for Holistic Design. Combined with a disjointed-but-otherwise-okay fiction story strung over the book, it all adds up to a rather ugly rulebook that it hard to navigate. The writing and organization further complicated this, as rules were difficult to understand and placed oddly at times. When I was actually playing the game, most rules were downright impossible to find, forcing my friends and I to come up with something on the spot. The very essential nature of charts to the game was annoying as well, considering that all the appropriate charts (as well as useful "cheat sheets") weren't nicely separated from the book on cardboard sheets or anything. I've read the rules at least twice and spent a great deal of time referring to them during the playtest of it I tried, and I still cannot say that I have a clear idea of how they work, let alone a solid grasp on them. That's really not a good sign. The rules had a few really good ideas, the main one being a combination of ship-to-ship combat as well as boarding actions on each ship and the idea of scenarios they gave in historical context, but they are lost in an overall bad rules set and a convoluted and confusing rulebook.

Enough of the way it looks though, on to how it actually played. I managed to con a friend into playing (after another friend had fled when I told him to bring a pencil and some scratch paper, since we'd need it) and after we sat down to try to puzzle out the game. After settling on which scenario to use (we decided to simply use a one-on-one ship duel) we ran through a turn step-by-step, trying to get a feel for the game before we got into firing range. Unfortunately, this ended up causing general misunderstandings about the rules which lead to more confusion before they were resolved to any degree. What followed was a short, sad little battle that ended (after several hours of play) when another friend stepped in to take over for my original opponent (who was now only capable to twitching and drooling) and ran his ship off the board, forfeiting. Several times, both sides were seriously debating the tactic of presenting damaged and weakened flanks to the enemy in the hopes of a quick death. While watching a close friend degenerate into a gibbering mess convulsing in a chair has it's own certain mysterious charm, I can't rightly say that I enjoyed play Noble Armada, it wasn't really worth it. Slow, complicated, infuriating and sometimes boring in play, the game is deeply, deeply flawed - either that or I am simply not the man for miniatures games.

At full price, this game would have been insulting. Although it has a neat idea or two, it comes with too few (and too small) cheap plastic ships and stands (several of the stands broke the first time I used them) and an over-complicated and painful to use rules set that almost impossible to understand. It is wedded closely to Fading Suns (you can even put player characters in there to work as pilots and gunners) and the idea of the ship boarding and having to actually travel through the ship and fight is worth looting for another science fiction minis game, but Noble Armada is simply not worth the effort, time or money to buy and learn.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Noble Armada
Author: Chris Wiese and Ken Lightner Category: Miniature Company/Publisher: Holistic Design, Inc. Line: Fading Suns Cost: $55.00 Page count: 48 page booklet and a whole lot of shit sheets ISBN: 1-888906-50-2 SKU: HDI 500 Playtest Review by Derek Guder on 04/29/00. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Far_Future Space	Sometimes you buy a game that you desperately want to like even before it arrives at your grubby little hands. You cant wait for it to get to you so you can tear into it and digest it and love it. Usually that means that it's going to be terrible and you know it - you're just trying to convince yourself that everything will be alright, really. That's what happened with me and my ill-fated dealings with *Noble Armada, the starship miniatures game that Holistic Design put out in the same universe as the excellent (but plagued by problems) role-playing game Fading Suns. Normally I really have no interest in miniatures, and I should have stuck to my original intention of not bothering with the game. I managed to for quite a while, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for pesky eBay and its meddlesome sellers too. So, for about $30 (you think I would have paid the MSRP of $55 sight-unseen with never playing it when it was a type of game I usually don't enjoy?), I picked up the basic boxed set. Opening it right up when I got it (I even woke up early and went to the post office before work to pick it up), I found a few dice, some plastic ships and stands, an uncountable number of cardboard counters, a rulebook, some big blank hex-sheets and page after page after page of starship sheets. I was initially disappointed by the ships because they were both plastic and damn small. I used to built a large number of plastic airplane models as a kid and those game with a much larger volume of material for the dollar. The ship designs themselves were rather underwhelming as well. The Decados ships seemed to jump right out of the Klingon Empire and the Hawkwood's apparently held flying bricks as the most ideal shape for a starship. Understanding that this is a high-priced hobby, however, and thankful that the price hadn't been in the $70 range, I moved on. To the rulebook, specifically. The book has the same style of layout as the role-playing line, using the same borders and artists, but it took more of the faults than the strengths. While John Bridges' art is usually superb and he listed in the credits, I cannot find anything resembling his work in the book. Instead the book is illustrated by John Poreda, who simply does not have the same image of spaceships and clear artwork I have. I've seen some of his later work (most recently in the Changeling: the Dreaming* book Denizens of the Dreaming) and it's much better, but I've never like Poreda's work for Holistic Design. Combined with a disjointed-but-otherwise-okay fiction story strung over the book, it all adds up to a rather ugly rulebook that it hard to navigate. The writing and organization further complicated this, as rules were difficult to understand and placed oddly at times. When I was actually playing the game, most rules were downright impossible to find, forcing my friends and I to come up with something on the spot. The very essential nature of charts to the game was annoying as well, considering that all the appropriate charts (as well as useful "cheat sheets") weren't nicely separated from the book on cardboard sheets or anything. I've read the rules at least twice and spent a great deal of time referring to them during the playtest of it I tried, and I still cannot say that I have a clear idea of how they work, let alone a solid grasp on them. That's really not a good sign. The rules had a few really good ideas, the main one being a combination of ship-to-ship combat as well as boarding actions on each ship and the idea of scenarios they gave in historical context, but they are lost in an overall bad rules set and a convoluted and confusing rulebook. Enough of the way it looks though, on to how it actually played. I managed to con a friend into playing (after another friend had fled when I told him to bring a pencil and some scratch paper, since we'd need it) and after we sat down to try to puzzle out the game. After settling on which scenario to use (we decided to simply use a one-on-one ship duel) we ran through a turn step-by-step, trying to get a feel for the game before we got into firing range. Unfortunately, this ended up causing general misunderstandings about the rules which lead to more confusion before they were resolved to any degree. What followed was a short, sad little battle that ended (after several hours of play) when another friend stepped in to take over for my original opponent (who was now only capable to twitching and drooling) and ran his ship off the board, forfeiting. Several times, both sides were seriously debating the tactic of presenting damaged and weakened flanks to the enemy in the hopes of a quick death. While watching a close friend degenerate into a gibbering mess convulsing in a chair has it's own certain mysterious charm, I can't rightly say that I enjoyed play *Noble Armada, it wasn't really worth it. Slow, complicated, infuriating and sometimes boring in play, the game is deeply, deeply flawed - either that or I am simply not* the man for miniatures games. At full price, this game would have been insulting. Although it has a neat idea or two, it comes with too few (and too small) cheap plastic ships and stands (several of the stands broke the first time I used them) and an over-complicated and painful to use rules set that almost impossible to understand. It is wedded closely to *Fading Suns* (you can even put player characters in there to work as pilots and gunners) and the idea of the ship boarding and having to actually travel through the ship and fight is worth looting for another science fiction minis game, but *Noble Armada* is simply not worth the effort, time or money to buy and learn. Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)