Star Wars Armada: Clone Wars Upgrades Sneak Peak

Let’s take a look at the first cards we’ve seen from the Clone Wars expansions for Star Wars Armada.

Oh boy oh boy. This has been a long time coming, but the Clone Wars is really, for real, coming to Star Wars Armada. Now we did get promised this would happen a while about, but then there were delays and a lot of nothing (which fans of Armada are kind of used to by now). Then there was a lot of uncertainly with FFG ending some games and of course the current…. disturbance. So people started to get worried. But FFG kept saying that it was going to happen, and we kept believing, well now we have proof! Over on the FFG forums one of the FFG reps dropped a sneak peak with some of the upgrade cards we can look forward too. Lets take a look.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Everyone’s favorite Jedi General, and smooth talker, Obi-Wan comes in, of course, as a fleet commander. Overall he’s got a pretty rad ability, letting you reduce suffered damage to a ship when it spends a readied shield token. Now how good he is in reality will depend on the defense tokens of his fleet and the Republic Fleet in general. Most ships have between 1-2 shield redirect tokens, which if you could use them every turn, would be the equivalent of adding an extra 12 or so hull to each ship. Of course you won’t get to use them every turn and accuracy can mean you don’t get to use them all. Overall he is fairly similar in concept with Motti (and only 4 points more) in that he makes your ships more durable. While Motti gives your guaranteed extra hit points Obi-Wan promises nothing, but offers greater rewards. In particular light ships could easily see their effective hull points doubled. I think this is a super well designed card that rewards certain play styles yet has logical counters.

Kraken

Speaking of counters to Obi-Wan, we’ve got the droid commander Kraken. Kraken allowes friendly ships to change dice to a facing (with one icon) of their choosing if there is another friendly ship near the target. This is a pretty neat power, and serves as a counter to Obi-Wan as you can make sure to get accuracies in your die pool. Again I think this is a nifty ability and rewards playing a lot of small ships that you use to swarm the enemy. One downside I could see is that the CIS doesn’t traditionally have a lot of small ships, being more medium and large focused. This is an ability that really wants to have a lot of ships on hand to make sure it goes off, and you get the most out of it. Still pretty nice.

Clone Gunners

Here we have our first Republic upgrade card, the weapon team Clone Gunners. The first interesting thing to note is that it is locked to “clone only”. Is that short hand for the Republic Fleet, or will there be Clone and non-Clone ships in the fleet? We don’t know yet. Now while Clone Gunners has the potential to be alright, I think its pretty complicated. If I’m reading it right you have to be doing a Concentrate Firepower attack, and then use an additional token on another friendly ship, if you do that you get an extra blue die set to the accuracy face in your pool. Getting extra dice is always nice (and even better if they are guaranteed to do something) but I’m not sure I’d take this over say gunnery teams. It’s complicated and costs a lot to use, at least two tokens, for an OK effect.

Wat Tambor

Oh baby Wat Tambor looks hot! (Due to the heavy suit he is wearing of course). Tambor’s got a pretty cool ability as an office upgrade allowing you to spend shields on either your ship or a nearby friendly ship to get extra engineering points. This is an extremely flexible card as it can let you spend excess shields to help repair hull or critical damage, or in effect transfer shields from one ship to another. I really like this card and placed on a tanky ships, like a Trade Federation Battleship, you can really extend its life. Alternatively put it on a more glass cannony ship near a tank and you can borrow from the bigger ship. Overall I just really like it.

Final Thoughts 

As you can tell I’m very excited to get our first look at the Clone Wars cards. They seem generally well thought out and cool. One thing I noticed was how much they seem to rely on other ships; three of the four had effects that worked off of having friendly ships near by. Overall it seems like the Clone Wars fleets reward working together, like a fleet, a lot more than later era fleets might. If this is the case across the range I think it will be a cool way of setting the era’s apart. Also, the art on those cards is great. Can’t wait to see some ships!

Let us know what you think of the new cards, down in the comments!

Author: Abe Apfel

Abe is that rare thing, an Austin local born and raised here. Though he keeps on moving around, DC, Japan, ETC., he always seems to find his way back eventually. Abe has decades of experience with a wide range of tabletop and RPG games, from historicals, to Star Wars to D&D and 40K. He has been contributing to BOLS since almost the start, back when he worked at and then owned a local gaming store. He used to be big into the competitive Warhammer tournament scene but age has mellowed him and he now appreciates a good casual match. He currently covers 40K tactics and lore, as well as all things Star Wars, with occasional dabbling in other topics. Abe remains in mourning over the loss of WFB to this day.