Firestorm Armada: Master Rulebook Review

As a lifelong fan of large-scale space battle games, I was drawn to Firestorm Armada like a moth to a flame. Like that moth, I was truly hoping not to be burned by the bright, shiny new game book. As it turns out, not only is the game system good - it’s brilliant. In fact, it’s so well designed, accessible, and fun that it has coasted to a close second in my list of “best non-collectible space battle games ever”, behind Star Fleet: A Call To Arms. The interesting part is that I read the first edition rulebook and found it to be lackluster, and slightly confusing, but this latest edition has cleared up all of the rough patches, gotten rid of the less well-designed mechanics altogether, and the result is a streamlined, easy-to-learn and easy-to-play battle game.

Despite the game having as generic a setting as humanly possible, the game has a substantial number of unique factions and sub-factions, as well as a nicely written backstory which serves to help you understand how all of the factions fit together. The very short version is that shortly after colonizing the solar system, all of humanity split into several factions and started killing one another. Like here on earth, but on a galactic scale. Some alien races caught wind of it all, and decided to join in the fun. Thus, you have several human factions, some alien ones, and then a bunch of sort of hangers-on who are minor factions with limited ships but these will fight on behalf of one of the factions as if they belonged to that faction without penalty.

The only part of the game that I don’t really fancy is the fleet building mechanic. There are rules that require a disproportionate amount of time doing math. This is complicated even further by the fact that ships do not generally deploy alone but rather as a squadron and there are three tiers of ship types. After deciding what “Maximum Fleet Value” will govern the battle, each side must then look to a chart indicating how many points of which kinds of ships may be used together, based on that faction’s chart and the battle size. An example is that an Aquan fleet must have at least one squadron from each tier in an 800 point battle, but it can contain up to one tier one, two tier two, and three tier three squadrons.

All that’s fine, but each ship type has various and sundry bolt-on upgrades, so you need to add up all of those costs, then multiply them by the number of ships in the squadron, then multiply that by the number of squadrons of that ship you’re fielding. If you want to play in a tournament, it gets even more tedious, because you then are burdened by only being allowed a certain percentage of your total points to come from any given tier. The part that really rustles my jimmies, in a huge way, is that the charts themselves aren’t even printed in the main rules, nor are most of the ships’ statistics, because that information is listed in individual fleet books, which are downloadable from the Spartan Games site. All of this is a pain in the ass, but it is navigable, and to be completely honest, it’s almost worth it because the bolt-on options add so much depth and character to the ships.

It’s almost as if the designers decided early on that the game would be a “living game” like Warhammer, where the rules are constantly in flux, so they compartmentalized all the little bits of information in individual books so that when things change you can simply download the book on your own. It’s not a bad idea for this kind of game, actually, because it avoids the Warhammery drama that unfolds every time a rule change occurs that causes you to have to go spend fifty dollars on a new book. It also allows them to be creative in their model production, because it doesn’t cost them anything but time to update a fleet book when a completely new style of ship comes out, which has happened several times since the 2nd edition released.

Gameplay is a totally positive experience. I absolutely adore the speed of turns, the options available on your turn, and most importantly the sheer amount of fun you can have. There are a host of opportunities for white-knuckle moments, where you’re praying to whatever deity you pray to that the opponent will roll very poorly. Despite being a D6-based game, combat is very simple and reminiscent of the THACO system from D&D. Essentially, each ship has a damage resistance rating and a critical rating. If you roll enough successes, which are almost always fives or sixes, to exceed the target’s damage rating, you hit it for damage. If you exceed its critical rating, you do critical damage, which results in a roll on a damage table and that may result in the destruction of a ship subsystem, crippling it. The game also employs the “exploding six” mechanic, meaning that every six you roll counts for two successes, and on top of that, you gain another die to roll and add to the original score. What shocks me is that the game has a high level of detail, but a very low barrier to entry. Everything is streamlined in such a way that it’s very easy to understand, and there’s not a ton of record keeping required, making this a very low-overhead game.

In my experience with these kinds of game, the designers have to make compromises while developing them, and as such, there are some things which get abstracted to make the record keeping simple while keeping the feel of the game intact. This game is no exception, because the three-dimensional nature of space has been abstracted into “just don’t place your ship touching another”. There are several inclusions of this kind of compromise, but I simply don’t see them as anything but clever ways to allow great detail while not adding complex or extraneous chrome barriers to entry. The game has point defense, fighters, bombers, battle stations, planets, gravity wells, arcs of fire, and dozens of other little rules, but at the end of the day, the system goes out of its way to be very easy to understand.

The models are a bit on the expensive side, and this is not cheap to get into, but I’ve put my money where my mouth is and I’ve bought over 150 ships at this point, because it’s that good. My only hesitance to really recommend this wholly is based upon my experience with Spartan Games, and their unwavering ability to change the rules often, meaning you may feel like you’re continually needing to “catch up” because the game is continually being revised, line by line. The good news is that the game is still played, still supported, and that it’s always getting better.