STAR TREK ATTACK WING REVIEW

After a long hiatus, I am finally posting to my blog again...  after playing numerous battles of STAW today for the first time with a couple of gaming buddies, here's a brief review of STAR TREK ATTACK WING.

If you're a miniatures connoisseur, you'll be disappointed, but from what I've seen on the Youtube, they re-paint quite well (Just search Youtube for Star Trek Attack Wing re-paints).

It's based on the X-Wing system, but produced by Wiz Kids. The main difference is that because you're playing with capital ships, you're able to add more upgrade cards and additional crew.

Components

Although the cloak mechanism doesn't hide your movement on the table, it seemed to do a good job representing the ability and gave it a decent feel with the additional evasion dice, displacement and loss of lock on after multiple turns of cloak activity.

Agreeing with my friend Chris Yoder, it feels the most like my favorite starship game: Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator (shout out to my old gaming buddy Silver!) since it stopped being produced. It certainly doesn't replace it, but it definitely emanates a similar vibe.

I especially like the idea that it's a system that seems to be aimed at running no more than a three ships (a squadron or wing) per player, I generally dislike the broad trend to make starship combat games aimed at clashing with massive fleets where you loose the nuance of starship to starship combat (the exception being Full Thrust, for when you DO want fleet battles, as it's a well designed classic game that seems to balance detail and numbers).

On the downside again, the miniatures are rather bland. The color choices are questionable, for example, the Federation ships are an odd shade of blue. However, the worst thing about them, isn't the miniatures themselves (save the Constitution class, see below), but the way in which they are releasing the waves. For example, they've released the Reliant (with Khan) this past fall, but the same era Enterprise isn't due out until July!? Huh!?

 Constitution class (OG Enterprise) vs. the Miranda class (OG movie era Reliant).

I'm pretty sure the Enterprise refit in the movies, was not much larger than the original Enterprise. The Wiz Kids ST:AW Constitution is ridiculously tiny. They MUST re-release this with better scaling.

I need to play it some more, but it I think I like it, maybe even more than X-Wing. It would definitely make for a perfect adaptation to capital ship combat in the Star Wars universe too (with the addition of some kind of fighter squadron rules). Another bonus, it appears to be easily adaptable to house rules (like STSTCS was).

3.5 to 4 out of 5 stars!

*** UPDATE ***

I've re-posted a slightly edited version of this review on my new blog: The One Inch General.

I'm going to attempt to reboot my attempt at gaming posts on this new blog, if you wish to continue follow just my gaming posts, please follow the new blog.