Star Trek Attack Wing Vs. X-Wing

As a quick break from the sculpting posts I am going to look at Star Trek Attack Wing and it's sister game X-Wing.

 
I initially resisted jump on to either Star Trek Attack Wing (STAW) or X-Wing, as I felt the cost of building a meaningful fleet was prohibitive. However, due to my gaming pals having picked up those games it seemed only right to give them a try. We tried STAW first, and the simplicity and effectiveness of the system really caught our attention. I do have Wings of Glory, or to be more precise Wings of War, it's predecessor, which is the origin of the system and is a World War One fighter game. So the basic concept wasn't that new, but the execution in this instance is very well done.

I have played a few different star ship combat systems over the years, and I must admit that they usually leave me cold. They are either far too complex or have nonsensical rules that just don't attract me. However with STAW I found it gave a reasonably quick game that had a enough complexity to be interesting, but didn't get bogged down in endless tricky rules. The thing that really struck us was the effective way that the rules gave the feel of large capital ships taking on each other in a slugging match.

X-Wing on the other hand, using very similar rules, give the feel of fighter, or small ship combat, very well.

At this point I had pretty much about faced and decided I wanted to break into one of these games. Now, it has been a long time since I considered myself to be either a Trekkie or a Star Wars fan, so I didn't have any particular reason to swing either way. I had to decide on other grounds. The first consideration was factions. With X-Wing, realistically there are only two factions, The Empire and the Rebels, whereas with STAW there are many, many different races and factions, and there are the options for alliances too! This would mean that my gaming group would be able to build up our own forces without too much overlap.

Also I personally preferred the larger ship combat system rather than the fighter combat, not for any particular reason, just the way I would prefer to go!

So as you have probably already guessed I have plumped to Star Trek Attack Wing. I have picked up three Romulan ships so far. Jeff has jumped in with both and has growing fleets of most factions, but he ignored the Romulans (and the Borg to some extent). Del has gone with the Borg. It is my birthday next month and so I will be getting the basic game then. I quite fancy picking up a few Klingon ships at some point, and I am not too familiar with some of the later races from DS9 (I lost interest in the Star Trek universe when Babylon 5 started and captured my interest, oh for a B5 version of this game)...