With the immense success of Star Wars X-Wing it was only a matter of time before the flip side of nerd coin would get its own mini game.
That’s right boys and girls, Star Trek takes it first walk into the space combat miniatures game (least I hope so cause if I’m wrong I’m so sorry) with the sci fi Star Trek: Attack Wing.
Original name for sure. And don’t worry, this isn’t gonna turn into a thing about both games or into a Star Trek only thing. I’m not the biggest Star Trek fan (if at all.) so I’ll stick to my fun nerd thing and they can stick to theirs. I merely wished to test it out and do a little compare contrast sort of thing between the two. Cause in the end, we all know which one is the ‘good’ franchise.
Heh… Also like to give a thanks to my friend Travis Hodges for helping with this little excursion as he supplied me all the ships and things.
So lets start out and take a quick look at the factions available. It comes out strong with 4 factions to play.
Already they got a nice 1 up on X-Wing’s two factions. So if you prefer to play or like those races, awesome. We got our Federation guys, so the Enterprise and Piccard’s dreamy bald head are all there. Klingons are there with their cool swords and really stupid sounding language.
The Romulans, which I know nothing about except they’re supposed to be space elves. And finally the Dominion.
I also know nothing about them and doing a small bit of research here to just spell some of these its not part of the core factions. So I’m going to assume they have something to do with their campaign thing that’s happening right now. I was just told they’re a faction.
Ship wise these babies give off a resounding…meh. With Attack Wing actually being a completely different company the ships themselves differ from X-Wing’s. X-Wing’s ships are pretty. Kind of.
Table top quality for sure if anything can be said. These Attack Wing ships are just kind of poopy.
They look like they’re just plastic molds with a little bit of flat paint on them. Given a little wash on them you can make them look pretty I’m sure, but they definitely aren’t that great out of the gate.
But they do got a lot to choose from so again, another nice thing. Some of the ships also have interesting things to them. Stat wise the ships are the same, having attacks, agility, hull and shields. A cool thing though is a few ships have rear firing arcs, though they can only use secondary weapons from them. And a few ships also have a front firing arc of 180 degrees.
Now that’s pretty cool, I’ll give them that. The bases are a little different two. I’m not to big of a fan, preferring my pegs to an indentation, but hey, preferences right?
Now lets get onto the game play part of things, as I’m sure that’s what most people would want to know. First and fore most, if you’ve played X-Wing, grats, you can pretty much play Attack Wing. So lets dig into the fleet building aspect. First and foremost you’ll see these babies get expensive. You start with a ship, then you get your pilot.
You read that right, you buy a ship then you have to pay a few more points for a captain. And you’re required to have a captain no matter what.
Thankfully there are a few pilot skill 1 guys who cost nothing. But as you can expect, the higher the pilot skill the more they cost. Also some difference is the pilots do come with their own unique abilities, and the ships also have their own stuff. So you can start having a lot of effects going on at once, which can get a little confusing. I’d say X-Wing is nice and stream lined with the pilot and ship cost being 1 and the same.
Then you can take upgrades, which like X-Wing are at the bottom of the ship card, these include crew, secondary weapons, tech upgrades and other things that I more then likely missed in my 1 game of it.
Another thing to note though these cards are definitely different from X-wing’s, being full sized card. Sadly, the quality looks a little low on them, least in my opinion. Not sure what it is, but it maybe because they’re pictures from the show and not some cool artwork. But whatever right?
Looks aren’t everything if the game plays good. And like I said earlier, its pretty much X-Wing. Now though from what I was told by the lads who were around watching the game, Attack Wing is slightly unbalanced. With all the ships they’ve been releasing, some of which are prize supports, things get a little crazy. Also unlike X-Wing which has their factions straight up, with somethings requiring you to play a certain faction, Attack Wing goes balls to the wall letting you put whoever you want in whatever you want. From what I’m told you can throw Kirk into a Klingon ship with a Romulan crew member. Least, that’s what I was told. This could be wrong, so again, just going by what I’m told.
Token wise the games have about the same, minus a few new things like cloaking. But target locks and focuses are around, though focus being ‘Battle Stations’. Shields are a bit different though, having both a active and disabled side to them. Disabled you say?
Well apparently some abilities require you to disable your shields to use, for example cloaking. If you cloak you lose your shields, BUT, you gain 4 agility die, which if you haven’t noticed these ships are not the most agile things. Also a huge upgrade are the movement dials. While I was confused at first cause they’re labeled based off the ship class, not name, they are very very very awesomely labeled on the backs as well as the fronts. And not just the ship name, but the faction type too.
No more confusing dials which others, least, for the most part. Unless you mirror match it, it shouldn’t be to bad. But hey, its nice to know you picked up the right dial for a ship instead of going ‘My X-Wing is gonna…whoops, A-Wing dial.’
Now lets get straight into the game play aspect. Which, as far as i can tell, it’s X-Wing. I’m sure if i got a
bit more into it and learned some of the more technical bits, i can find a ‘different’ game in it. But at the end of the day its pretty much the same. So doing a normal 100 point game, my friend Travis decided to ‘keep it pure’ and we picked factions without going to silly.
Giving me first chose I went with the Klingons. I mean, hey, they’re the one cool race from Star Trek, next to the Borg anyways, but they ain’t playable are they?
Travis decided to go Federation, so we had a classic Star Trek space battle. Least, I think its classic. As as I said for the 3rd or forth time, the game felt exactly the same. I set up stuff, he set up stuff but then the whole move first shoot first things all kicked in a different way.
Forgetting slightly, it was a order or things where Federation is first, then Klingons, then Romulans, then Dominion. So a bit like the classic X-Wing style where Imperials always had the initiative, till tourny rules kicked that in the face. Another little thing that I saw that I felt I should say, if you’re gonna do a round about turn in Attack Wing, it goes pretty much the same as X-Wing, where you stop if you hit someone. BUT, you don’t get stressed because you stopped short. So, while you still lose an action, no needing to remove stress or things. Also a interesting thing. Secondary weapons like the Photon Torpedo, aren’t spent when you use them, just disabled. So it’ll take you a turn to reactivate them, which takes an action, you can use nasty death dealing bombs over and over. So some small things differ, but again, for the hundredth time, it’s just like X-Wing.
So, with that being said, which is worth your time and money? Personally, play both! I mean honestly, if you can why not. If you can’t, just pick your favorite franchise and nerd it up with your buddies and like anything Star Wars/Star Trek related, we can argue which is better till we start trying to Vulcan nerve pinch people trying to slap us with plastic colored sticks.
Hope this helped, thanks for reading and have a great day! -Super Kaiju
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