What makes me so excited about Squadron Strike, you ask? I'm an inveterate game tinkerer, and my friend S. and I have begun countless attempts, almost all of them abortive, to build various game systems. We realized our efforts most successfully with a limited 3D Renaissance-y magical airship game and a limited 3D fantasy naval system that centered on fleet actions between drake carriers. Note the recurring theme here, “limited 3D”: no matter the setting or game, our greatest challenge has always been trying to model 3D combat in on a 2D plane; the ships couldn't bank, pitch up or down, or roll, and most importantly, firing arcs either had to be abstracted to the point that they no longer felt 3D, or they became incredibly complex. Squadron Strike fixes practically everything that was wrong with what we were trying to do, taking the limits off 3D combat modelling. Representing ships as they dive, roll, and twist to establish firing solutions and evade hostile missiles and torpedoes is, if not a breeze, then far easier than I ever could have imagined with the help of tilt blocks and a novel record-keeping-cum-maneuver-aid called an AVID.
All ships in Squadron Strike use one of three movement modes, which cover the vast majority of drive systems in science fiction. They're numbered according to how many of Newton's laws of motion they follow: Mode 0 is basically Aristotelian, and allows ships to effectively teleport across the battlefield without concern for momentum; Mode 1 is Lucasian motion, familiar to anyone who has seen Star Wars or Trek, with ships moving like airplanes or modern freighters, conserving momentum; Mode 2 conserves momentum as well, but independent of a ship's facing, allowing you to play proper rocketships, or even do the classic BSG viper flip-end-for-end-and-vape-a-cylon maneuver. If you want Mode 3 movement, where the changing mass of the ship as it uses reaction mass affects its acceleration, I'd suggest playing another of Ken's games, Attack Vector: Tactical.
That sounds wonderful, you say, but how do the accurate physics and 3D combat affect play time? While we never managed to get our turn time down to the 5-15 minutes advertised by the designer in the two games I played, a friend and I were averaging 20-30 minutes a turn, with each of us controlling two or three detailed warships. Since turns are simultaneous, there is next to no downtime - rather than waiting for your friend to finish gnashing his teeth as she plots a 3D thatch weave, you'll be gnashing alongside her, trying to figure out just how on earth you're going to bring your dorsal missile launchers to bear on that dreadnought without exposing your crippled port shields to the light cruiser lurking below.
In fact, almost the entire game is run in parallel. Turns have four phases - Plotting, Movement, Combat and Crew Actions. Most of the decision making for maneuver is made in Plotting, most of the decision making for shooting is in combat. The only place where the game runs sequentially, rather than in parallel is in combat, where the order you declare your weapons in is the order they're resolved in. Even the die rolling convention for shooting weapons is designed to "package" all the information for a successful hit into exactly the information the defender needs to hear. This creates a lot of interesting decision points. Should you intercept missiles, or hull the enemy ship? Is it likely the enemy is going to drop your shields letting the boarding shuttles through? If so, better kill the shuttles. Otherwise, better kill the mothership.
While this may sound quite confusing, especially when 3D fire and movement plotting is added in, Squadron Strike’s rule book makes it all fairly easy. The manual is full of detailed, step-by-step illustrated examples, a good index, and a helpful appendix that demonstrates how to record various positions of your ship (for example, yawed 90 degrees to port, pitched up 60 degrees, with a 30 degree roll to starboard). The recommended tutorial involves placing chocolates on the map that you can eat every time you successfully shoot a bearing to or move through one. There are also numerous sidebars that explain controversial or odd design decisions, putting them in context, or providing suggestions for how the game might be modified to suit your table. The physical play-aids (like the tilt blocks), likely help streamline play a great deal too - the rulebook can be purchased separately from the box set with the play-aids. I managed to have a good couple of games using ad hoc tilt blocks made of cardboard and duct tape, but I imagine it would have been much easier with the proper bits and pieces. The rulebook, however, unlike the box set, doesn't come with any pre-made ships, so unless you get into a playtest (like I did) or are willing to design ships right out the gate, you'll be better off buying the box set.
Unfortunately, Squadron Strike can't emulate absolutely everything. It can handle five different kinds of shields, tractor beams, mecha, transporters, assault shuttles, fighters, cloaking devices, phasers, ion cannon, and a lot more, but all weapons are abstracted into Beams, Missiles, and Torpedoes, meaning things like Kinetic Kill Vehicles (small, armed suicide drones) must be shoehorned into one of those categories. Custom settings can be built, but require the use of a 6.6 megabyte spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is, quite frankly, daunting - weapons are easy, but there's a involved in designing ships (and it's got campaign game support). The free documentation is quite good and Ken sells a PDF version of the documentation that is lavishly illustrated with screen caps and additional examples. That said, this spreadsheet is clearly pushing the boundaries of what spreadsheets can handle, and a dedicated program might function with greater... aplomb. There are contortions to the design process which are awkward - both because of the campaign support and because there are so many options from which to choose. All that aside, the spreadsheet works even if it isn't always pretty (some of the color combinations are eye catching, to say the least), and has a bunch of novel features, like a bidding system for allocating different technologies to players, decreasing the likelihood of two players designing incompatible ships (there's not much point in having a primary ship-killing weapon with damage 3 if your enemy has armour 4, for example. Merrimack vs Virginia is fun history, but deeply boring gameplay). This ship design system is entirely integrated with a card driven strategic level campaign system, for those of you who like context for your pew-pew-pew. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks fairly solid, even if it seems to sit in an odd place between too complex for fast play and too abstracted to be fully satisfying.
If you're interested in a detailed space combat game with more sophistication than Starmada or Full Thrust, that plays faster than Star Fleet Battles despite the full 3D movement, I would highly recommend Squadron Strike. I don't promise you'll pick it up instantly - there is a learning curve - but with one or two learning games, you should be able to competently fly and shoot with a pair of warships in the inky depths (and lengths, and breadths) of 3D space.
