Star Wars Minatures: Starship Battles

Overall score:

When the Star Wars Miniature game first game out back in 2004 one of the first questions asked was: “When are we going to see a space ship game?” Well, it took Wizards a few years, but they’ve finally released Star Wars Miniatures: Starship Battles to the masses. Apparently they’re not the only ones to release a Star Wars ship-based game either, so there might just be something to this Star Wars thing. Who’d a thunk?

There’s a lot of different directions Wizards could have taken a game like this, and thankfully they didn’t take the easy route by using the normal Star Wars Miniature rules, basically simplified D20 (D&D) rules, and replacing the people with ships. Instead, they simply took the core attack rules of rolling a 20-sided dice, plus an attack rating against a defense rating; aside from that and some common terminology the game is refreshingly different, though I do have to question several of their design decisions. There’s a fine line when creating a game (or most things people interact with) between ease of use and depth; the result in this case is an over-simplified game, that while fun, relies too heavily on pure luck than actual strategy.

Simple rules aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Simple game play is what made the original Star Wars miniatures so popular, because anyone can pick up the game and play it after a few minutes. That’s a good thing because it gets more people playing the game and it’s more fun since you don’t have to worry about hundreds of things. However, when you over simplify, or make a game too complex like Warhammer, you actually restrict game play, as well as team building—leaving you with only one or two viable team builds for each faction. The other problem with over simplifying, and this is one of the things that hurts this game the most, is that there’s just not much to do outside of rolling dice, which leads for stale game play that people get sick of quickly.

A basic rule summery is you’ve got four ship sizes, or classes, with 1 being the largest capital ships (Super Star Destroyer) to 4 being star fighters (X-Wings), and three action phases: movement, attack and damage. For movement you’ll really only see yourself moving class 3 and 4 ships (three being the size of the Millennium Falcon) because there’s no range limits on this game for any ship larger than 4, also there’s no cover so any ship can be attacked by any other ship at any other time. Class 4 ships can only attack or be attacked when adjacent to another ship so you move them a lot. Class 3 ships usually have good bonuses against class 4 ships so they move to take out and block the smaller ships from getting to the big ones. So why bother with Class 4 ships? They’re cheap and it gives you lots of attacks you wouldn’t otherwise have, so a possibly 10 for 50 points instead of 2-3 for the same amount, plus the move far letting you take advantage of larger ships week spots—most larger ships have high defense in the front, but much weaker on the sides and rear.

Since there’s a damage phase every ship gets to attack before it gets destroyed, so even if you take out 3 X-wings they get to attack you back before you blow up, and while this makes a lot of people feel warm-and-fuzzy, imagine what any other game would be like with this rule. Not very appealing, is it? It lowers the strategy of the game, attack order doesn’t matter, which ship you attack first doesn’t matter; all that really matters is if you move first or second and 90% of that is just for class 4 ships. Since the playing field is simply a large barren map with no obstacles (or cover for that matter), every ship starts out being able to hit every other ship, so you can expect to have at least half your fleet gone in one, if not two, rounds.

Size also has little to do in terms of damage and hitting ability. While a Star Destroyer has more life then the Millennium Falcon, they both can destroy each other in the same amount of turns (2), there’s no damage or attack penalties from shooting a ship larger or smaller then you, although class 4 ships have a few for attacking ships larger than them, and class 3s for attacking class 4 ships. It's absurd that Star Destroyers can be taken down in one round (if all the attacks hit) by 5 star fighters (class 4) or two rounds from a single class 3. Now, I am basing this off everything hitting its target, but for the most parts defense ratings are so low that it’s hard to miss unless you roll really badly (like what happened the first time I played, though I did take out half my opponents' ships in the second round).

While the core game play may have its problems, there are a lot more things to this game, and they add some level of strategy that keeps the game more interesting. Class 4 ships don’t start the game in play, they have to be launched by certain ships, and it usually takes 2–3 rounds to get all your ships out. Also, certain ships have Command effects, which are the ability to grant specific classes of ships new powers or bonuses for one round; whether or not you have any of these depends on the ships you choose and each ship can only use their Command ability once in a game. These abilities are anywhere from granting bonuses to attack, ignoring damage once or allowing Star Fighters the ability to attack from two squares away. So do you choose to attack a ship that still has a Command ability, though if you destroy them they’ll just use it on their attack if they go second, or the ship that can launch Star Fighters? Or do you attack a ship like the Slave 1 or the Falcon that have a lot of weapons, but low defense?

Rules aside, the miniatures themselves are very well done, as is to be expected from Wizards. I always say this, but it’s impressive to see such small detail in something this small and many of the ships just look great (like the Super Star Destroyer and the X-Wings). None of the ships are really in scale with each other, the Tie Fighters and X-Wings might be, but that’s about it, and this is something that’s to be expected since the game would just get unwieldy with the possible sizes of the ships. The selection itself is ok. I don't know about half the ships, and there are only two factions—Light Side and Dark Side—so it doesn’t matter as much that this game covers all six movies since timelines can be mixed. Though some of the models could use better labeling, several of the fighters have “ace” versions, which is the same model, and outside of the A-Wings which are painted a different color, either rotated differently on its base or with a hard-to-notice addition to the paint job, like the X-Wing Ace, which has a stripe that’s almost the same color as the base paint on its guns. Since all the paint jobs are determined by Lucas Arts, Wizards should have added something to the figure’s base to help tell them apart from the regular versions. It’s hard to tell which version you’re using, even if you know what they look like.

Star Wars Miniatures: Starship Battles is a fun game, and if you like miniature games you should give it a try; however, its simplistic rules keep it from having much staying power, and chances are you’ll get tired of it after only a few games. The starter set is a good buy, and the only way to get the two largest ships in the game (the figures look good, so if you don’t like it you at least have something cool to display). However, considering the cost of the boosters, $20+tax, I’d find someone who already has the game and play some with their figures to make sure it’s something you want to invest in, since you’ll have to spend over a hundred dollars to get enough figures to make good fleets.

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Written by Spriggan on February 18th, 2007