"At its heart, Star Wars: Armada will always be a two-player experience. However, when a group of friends gets together, there are times that everyone wants to play the same game, instead of splitting into groups. As fans of many different miniature games, we know that one thing we tend to enjoy are group “megabattles” with multiple participants. And Take the Station was born after we set out to see if the group "megabattle" was something we could introduce to Armada.
One thing we realized early on was that the alternating ship activation of Armada could, with some minor tweaks, work really well in a game with three or four players. Generally, one of the big problems with a multiplayer game is the downtime as you wait for three other players to finish their turns so that you can go again. However, with each player activating one ship at a time, downtime is substantially reduced. With that in mind, we decided that our first multiplayer scenario would be multiple players competing against each other, not two teams of players working together.
As we looked deeper into the idea of creating a multiplayer scenario, a few substantial changes stood out.
- First, rotating initiative becomes a must, so that the same player isn’t stuck going fourth every round.
- The scenario is also very different than the usual objectives. We had to design something that would play outside of the normal two player dynamic, so we came up with a scenario where each player had the same goal, but the sooner you accomplished the goal, the greater the reward would be.
- Finally, we decreased the size of each player’s fleet. We wanted to make sure that the playing time for this game wouldn’t balloon substantially, and we also wanted to make sure that all four players had enough room on the game board to maneuver their ships.
The result is a smaller, fast-paced scenario in which you'll field one or two ships that have to stand alone against multiple foes. In this scenario, you don't find the classic head-to-head engagement between two fleets. Instead, you find a very different experience, and one we hope you enjoy!"
–Sam Stewart, Michael Gernes, and John Shaffer
Multiplayer Scenario "Take the Station"[]
22 April 2016 FFG presented a scenario for 3-4 players to be played at 3'-6' play area. Each player builds a 150-point fleet without Commander upgrade cards and without choosing objective cards.
Each fleet setup area is within 1 range ruler length at a corner of the play area. Initiative alternates in clockwise order. Each fleet chooses one ship to be the objective ship. The first objective ship to reveal its dial at distance 1 of the station at the center of the play area gains 50 pts, the second 40 pts, every objective ship later 30 pts. At the end of round 6 each player gains points for all of his ships and squadrons still in the game plus the points for receiving at the station.