Via Thegaurdian.com:

Board game publishers Fantasy Flight already make some of the most high-end tabletop games in the world, but Star Wars: Armada is something else entirely.

A two-player celebration of the fizzing lasers and swooping squadrons of Star Wars, this is a deep box packed with pre-painted miniatures, tiny dials, custom dice, even an intimidating snake-like thing called the “Maneuver Tool”. And these are just the toys that’ll catch your eye. As you pick them up to start fiddling, you’ll reveal still more stuff to play with –bound packs of cards, endless tokens, flatpacked asteroids.

The price for this opulence? £60. But that’s not even the hard sell.

Really, to have enough ships on your table for Armada to work as intended, you need both players to bring a set of their own.

This isn’t really a surprise. Armada is a collectible game, adopting the business model from Fantasy Flight’s hugely popular 2012 release The X-Wing Miniatures Game, which is like Armada but on the scale of dogfighting rather than outright war. With X-Wing, new sets of tiny spaceships arrive in waves, kind of like TV seasons, with each new ship costing around £15. Not only is Armada’s first wave of new ships on its way, the second has already been revealed.

So why do players drop so much money on these games? There is an easy answer: they’re breathtaking fun.

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