Although I had never gotten around to trying it, the idea behind Diskwars - miniature combat without having to paint the troll legions - appealed to me. Now that the line has merged with Twilight Imperium, the game of politics, economy and strategy has been distilled into a ship-to-ship format that should be a great intoduction for board gamers like me to miniatures/disk games.
TIA involves players building a fleet with four different types of disks: First and most importantly, of course, are the ships: Carriers, Flagships, Escorts, Gunships, etc. Oddly enough, there are no designated cruisers or dreadnoughts as found in the TI board game. Next are squadrons, which differentiate between fighters and torpedo-carrying bombers, another departure from the board game. Third are the Crew disks, which range in importance from security and boarding party grunts to line officers which have the ability to repulse hits or allow their ship to fire multiple salvos, among other tricks. Lastly, we have the tech disks, wich allow for things such as tweaking of a ships' engines or a little more kick to the torpedoes.
After each player has spend a previously agreed to amount of "credits" on fleet construction, what follows is like a galactic cock fight. the ships and squadrons fly towards each other while tech and crew disks are displayed along with the ships' status panel. Ships' moves, shots, speed changes and other assorted and sundry commands are set up secretly in advance by threes, leaving an air of suspense aroud each turn. Unless an officer's special ability is called upon, a ship can only perform a single task in a phase: change speed, OR direction, OR fire, OR repair shields.
Such restrictions are not, however, incumbent upon the squadrons, which may exercise multiple commands in the same turn. This leads to the single greatest flaw in the game: The bomber and fighters are far too powerful in this game especially fighters. In fact, a bomber can only deliver a limited amount of torpedoes before needing to reload, while fighters need no such maintenance of thier beam weapons, which can be almost as powerful as the bombers' ordinance! a little tweaking here or there to make the fighters more vulnerable and/or less menacing.
Another flaw is that the control panels, which are needed for every ship in play, are only available in the starter sets, requiring at least two or three purchases to get enough for a decent fleet (according to FFG, tournament games consist of 100-point battles, which usually involve 2-3 ships.) The booster packs allow for more ships, squadrons, techs and crew for your fleet, but no control panels.
Marketing problems aside, the game is easy to pick up on (TIA is one of those games you learn faster by playing rather than reading the rules), and becomes very fast-paced after a while. This game is everything that Star Trek:Red Alert could have been, but I'm starting to warm up to the Twilight Imperium universe a little more now.
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