HOW TO: The New players guide to Star Trek: Attack Wing

Welcome back! For those who are new or interested in the game i will go over everything you will need to play and a brief how to.


First things first.
You will need a starter kit which comes with 3 fairly decent ships
U.S.S. Enterprise-D/ Galaxy Class
I.K.S. Maht'ha/ Vor'cha Class
I.R.W. Kaza'hara/ D'deridax Class

along with a variety of captain, crew, weapons, engineering, and medal upgrades.

It comes with everything you see here.
You get your attack and defense dice, Attack range measure, movement measures, a variety of tokens.
your rulebook, some items that can be used as field obstacles and the Damage Deck.

This is going to be long winded but I will try to explain each set of items in brief detail.

Starting with the tools you have...

These are not standard templates.

Movement Measures: you have 3 types of movement measures Straight 1-6, Banking (soft turn) 1-4, Hard turn 1-3 these are how you measure your movements certain ships can only take certain types of movements. Notice the u-turn symbol on the straight measures, some ships are capable of such maneuvers.

Again these are not standard.

Attack Measure: This is how you can tell if your in attack range, there are 3 ranges of attack on the
measure, at range 3 your opponent receives 1 additional defense die and at range 1 you get 1 additional attack die. on the opposing side of the measure you will see photon torpedoes on it it will be blank of the +1 dice images because secondary weapons do not receive bonuses for range.

Attack/Defense Dice: These dice decide how much damage you deal/receive or defend against.
They are 8 sided dice with 3 hit symbols, 2 Battle Station symbols, 1 crit symbol and 2 blank sides for attack dice. 3 manuver sides, 2 battlestations sides, and 3 blank sides for defense dice.

Damage Deck:  These cards are dual purpose, on there back side they show hull damage as an image on the obverse side  shows critical hit results such as warp core breach, jostled navigator, and communications failure.




 Disable Tokens: These are used to help you and others identify upgrades that have been used and require disabling for use. Such as weapon, crew, engineering and medal upgrades. bear in mind a card that says discard cannot be reactivated so there's no point in placing a token on it.

Shield Tokens: Theses simply show how many active shields you have on your ship remove them as they are destroyed or flip them over to show they are disabled.

Ship Action tokens:
- Evade Token: If you take the evade action you  place an evade token next to your ship which gives you one free evade from an attack.
-Cloaking Token: Identifies a ship is cloaking, cloaked, or coming out of cloak green identifies as cloaking or cloaked red shows your coming out of cloak. while cloaked your ship has +4 defense dice.
-Battle Stations Token: Signifies your ship is at Battle Stations and you may spend it you change the battle station icons on your attack or defense dice to hits or evades.
-Scan Tokens: Signifies your ship is Scanning, while scanning opponents roll one less defense die.
there are also several upgrades that benefit from a scanning ship.
-Target Lock Tokens: a pair of tokens which share an Letter (red and blue) which shows you have target locked a ship you place the blue icon next to the ship target locking and the red next to the target locked ship.

Adverse effect Tokens:
-Auxilliry Power Token: Identifies your ship has taken a stressful movement or action, or has been hit by a particular weapon. If you have to take this token the afflicted ship loses it's actions until you take
a green maneuver.
-Critical Hit Token: these are to show a ship has a lasting critical hit effect on it. (the least used token in the game.)
- Minefield tokens: these are used in relation to mine weapon or engineering upgrades.

There are many special tokens you will receive with ship expansions that will have rules included.

Cards! yes this is not just a table top game it is also a deck build game as well!
Cards are broken down in to several groups based on there role as follows.

Ship cards: These cards give you stats for your ship, any special abilities, basic ship actions and your
allocation for upgrades.
Captain cards: these are your ships captain which is a required card you have named captains and
blank captains. 
Crew cards: crew have special uses which are either actions, reactive, or static abilities.
Weapons cards: These are your secondary weapons which are not affected by range bonuses.
Engineering cards: these are cards that act as augmentations to your ships or weapons.
Medal cards: These are special cards which require a named captain with the medal icon on your
ships captain. if your captain doesn't have the icon you cannot use these upgrades.
Special rules cards: These will only show up when a ship has an upgrade that requires token use or some other special tidbit.
Mission cards: these are just fun little scenario cards that you can use to play missions instead of just playing a normal game.

Ships
Your ships come with several parts that you need for play.
Model: The actual ship which is not always very well painted so I encourage you to paint your models!
Pegs, Base and Base Plaque: these are what you ship sit on the the Base Plaque fits into the base and is double sided it has the named ship on one side and and the standard ship on the other. the pegs fit into the center and hold your ship. you can place several pegs on one another to raise your ships height.
Movement Dial: Your dials will need to be assembled but they allow you to plan your movements in planning phase.
Captain icons: there are two for each captain the fit into the slots on either side of the peg to show which captain your using.   

Okay I'm pretty sure that covers everything you need. on to basic play.
There are 5 basic steps in the first turn and only 4 for every other round after.
the 5 rounds are as follows.

Deployment Phase: this phase is unique to round one this is when you place your ships on the field.

Planning Phase: this is when you plan your movements on your movement dial and use any cards that might be useable during planning.

Movement Phase: this is gonna sound tricky. there is an order to all these steps that go by captain levels and faction. so captains levels are 1-9 in movement lowest captain moves first and during attack phase highest captain fires first. if you have two captains of the same level it boils down to faction you move in the order of Dominion, Romulan, Klingon, Federation. they fire in reverse order.
make your movements and hope you don't bump anyone or anything.

Action Phase: This phase happens immediately after every ship moves. make sure you take your action(s) if you end your movement and do not take your action you will lose it.

Attack Phase: this is when everyone begins attacking if there is proper range. if you have the proper range and attack arc you may fire at your enemy.

This is the basics of game play. there is a lot of different stratagems you can work with but that's more advanced and you will figure them out as you play. I will go over faction based  strategy in future posts with help of people who play said factions. if you have questions feel free to ask players in the store or on the site forums!

As always we will see you again!
(i will add more pictures later.)

Store Event: Battle for Wolf 359!

Event at The Dragon's Den

This was a really fun and innovative event that was developed and fine tuned by staff and players. A Play version of  Wolf 359 involving 10 players and one Borg cube. For those of you who are not familiar with this battle you can read about it Here. Some rules where bent for ships to participate allowing Dominion ships to aid in the fight. But things got kind of silly with 5 Captain Jean Luc Picards on the table Ranging from the Cardassian Kraxon to the Actual Enterprise-D (I was Running The Valdore With Picard...) So in the future side events it will be set up so that everyone will need to take a different captain in the spirit of reality and innovation, taking captains that can help others Rather than one that allows your ship to run to highest efficiency. This I believe will do a good job of keeping things fresh. On to the event!

The initial Fleet Deployment.

   

I know the Borg "cube" is naught little more than a square but that should change by the next Borg event!

The defending Fleet Consisted of the following ships in the top picture from left to right:
I.R.W. Valdore
U.S.S Enterprise-D
I.K.S. Maht'Ha
5th Wing Patrol Ship
Cardassain Battle Cruiser Kraxon
Breen Battle Cruiser Gor Portas
Cardassain Battle Cruiser Kraxon
I.K.S Kronos One
U.S.S. Defiant
Cardassain Battle Cruiser Kraxon

From this point onward only one named ship of each class will be allowed to be entered in these events as well since clearly there are too many kraxons on the board!

BATTLE REPORT!

      As you can plainly see by the damage the Cube took early on, there is some fine tuning to be done to strengthen The Cube, this is merely round 2 or 3 of actual combat. The hull points left on the Borg Cube are dismally low from its starting 40 Shield and 40 Hull. Some abilities people used where IMPRESSIVELY well taken but will likely be modified so that a Borg Cube can't be devastated like that again. There where of coarse some issues with allies bumping into one another. With 10 ships it is difficult to coordinate every movement. Most where smart enough to break away from the rest of the fleet but some people insisted on crawling on top of one another (for example the Valdore's fondness for the Maht'ha.)

      With battle in progress we noticed we where doing between 20-30 Damage per round on the Cube overwhelming it's ability to regenerate its shields. The Cube did hang in for a good while however and nearly reached it's objective. What really caused the bulk of the damage was the 5th Wing's  ingenious deployment of the Klingon tech upgrade "Projected Stasis Field".

Tactical Spotlight

Action: If your ship is not cloaked,
disable all of your remaining shields
and discard this Upgrade to target a ship
at range 1-2. That ship must disable all
of its remaining shields and cannot
attack this round. your ship rolls 2 less
attack dice this round.


(This Card can be obtained by purchasing an
 I.K.S. Garoth)





A maneuver the Borg will not soon forget I assure you. With that card the Borg Cube's hull points where dropped from 40 to 11 in one round of fire! The Cube spent the duration of the match on the defensive and did not have the opportunity to do much in the way of damage. However it did manage take down two ships before it was decimated.

A moment of silence for those who fell in battle... We pay our respects to the brave Dominion 5th Wing Patrol Ship who laid down it's life to allow the fleet to inflict heavy damage ultimately becoming debis in the wake. And to the I.K.S. Maht'Ha who dealt out a devastating 8 point assault on the Cube making it a target as well. You both died so that the rest may live. We salute you.

You will notice ships sitting on top of the cube. This is because it was decided by unanimous vote that we live in a three dimensional universe therefore you are either above or below the Borg Cube. that way we
didn't have a ton of ships scrambling to get out of the way of a massive cube or a massive cube mowing over a bunch of ships. Makes sense right?





Ship in the Spotlight

 Cardassian Battle Cruiser Kraxon

This Ship proved to be a wonderful support ship as it has the ability to absorb damage for it's fellows, giving ships with a greater attack the chance to fire again. It is literally a flying brick however... as was put by the Captain of the Kronos One.
This little ship can only take banking or "soft turn" movements normally. All hard turns are stressful movements. This makes it abnormally hard to maneuver back into firing range without losing your actions. However it is for now the only Dominion Ship with a 180° firing arc, and only one of three ships which currently have a standard 180° firing arc. A good ship to take with you if you have the points to take it for its support ability, not to mention it does have 4 standard attacks, on par with highest shields and 4 hull. 





All in all a fun Experience. In Star Trek fashion it brought insight, comradery, tactical thought, and enjoyment for all involved. The Borg will be back, and with the gathered information they will be a much larger threat. The Races of the Alpha Quadrant will have to be ready to fight or be prepared to face oblivion. Keep your eyes out for more articles, The next installment will be a "How To" module for the game so that anyone interested can read up on how to play! Let the Dragon's Den be your source for fun and games!

Here are more pictures from the event.

The mighty Captain of the Kronos One.

Heavy assault on the Cube.

the Cube is surrounded not that it matters to the Borg.

Our Borg "Queen" (John) taking off shield points from a brutal assault!

The Borg Cube making a break for the Planet it wishes to assimilate.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! NO! It's a FLYING BRICK! Silly Kraxon trying to turn.

Eye level shot of the action because you know... it's at eye level.

The final moments of battle. The Valdore Dropped the shields and the Kronos One delivered the final blow!

The 10 Captains (names added later)

Travis Hodges 2013 
In association with Dragon's Den Gaming
Short Pump, VA

Star Trek V.S. Star Wars!

This is purely an Introduction to the blogging I will Hopefully be doing directly for the Dragon's Den
Game store in Short Pump, VA! This is the First truly awesome event I was able to be apart of and got going on November 15, 2013. It was going to start out as a simple 4 way one ship battle at 50 points per person. 3 Star Trek players and 1 X-wing Player lead to a 5th player then a 6th and it turned in to a 3 on 3 Star Wars V.S. Star Trek battle! When it began the planning turned to 75 Points a player which made things more... Interesting. There was a great deal of discussion amongst allies about Stratagem as they selected there ships, upgrades, starting positions, and me ad not yet started thovements. Before we knew it, it had been over an hour and we had not yet started the actual game yet! But finally everything was planned and the game was set into motion!

                                 (Star Wars <--------------------------------------> Star Trek)

 Star Trek's Team!
- U.S.S. Enterprise (Center)
- I.R.W. Valdore (Bottom)
- I.K.S. Neg'Vhar (Left)
- I.K.S Gr'oth (top)

U.S.S- United Star Ship
I.R.W.- Imperial Romulan Warbird
I.K.S.- Imperial Klingon Ship

Star Wars Team!
- Rebel X-wing Luke Skywalker (near back left)
- 3 Imperial Tie Fighters (front left, middle front and back)
- Rebel HWK 290 "The Moldy Crow" (back left)
- Imperial Lambda Class Shuttle (right)
- Imperial Slave one Boba Fett (far Right)

The battle was slow going  at first with the distance being so great between the ships but it lead to a lot Strategics amongst the teams what with a rather daunting obstacle in the center of the map.

Notice the oval shaped obstacle in the picture that is an unstable worm hole any ship coming within
Range 1 attack of it had to roll an attack die, should it land on a critical hit it would deal 1 damage to
hull regardless of shields. as you can see once the distance was cleared battle was heated.

There are some balance issues within the game most of which where easily resolved examples being...
The Star Trek ships generally have a higher number of attack dice (red) and while cloaked (select ships...) have a lot more agility dice (green) but while uncloaked those ships could hardly defend against the brutal assaults the Star Wars ships could unleash and the same was generally true in  there
direction as well, The Star Trek ships have more attack dice but the Star Wars ships typically have more defense die in general. The increased number of ships the Star wars players could take at 75 points helped them a lot too where it is easy to spend 75 points on a ship for the Trek players you could easily take 2 or 3 ships for The Star Wars players. (I grant the fact the Slave One can eat 75 points relatively easily.)  The only other issues that arose from the play of these two games together
where simple rule clashes which came down to 3rd party mediation and in the event where one rule  gave an advantage to one team and not the other, it was decided the more beneficial rule would take president over the other. So there where rules from X-wing that where used over Attack wing rules and vice versa.

First blood was drawn by the Star Trek team! that Lambda class shuttle had to go! With the Pilot and upgrade set up, it was making target locks rapidly and giving them to it's team mates which is very useful for team Star Wars and scary for team Star Trek. There was focused fire upon it and it was brought down! Shortly after the I.R.W. Valdore (My ship...) was obliterated by the Slave One, after it's rather lengthy stray from the battle.

First move for team Star Trek

First move for team Star Wars

In this corner Star Trek!

And in this Corner! Star Wars! 

 The Senario

Two battles in two Galaxies... A worm hole opens and The skirmish between the Rebel Alliance and The Imperial Army are spirited away though a sudden worm hole and are dumped into unfamiliar stars... Suddenly on sensors and screens more weapons fire is apparent! Four wholly unfamiliar ships
are seen firing amongst themselves. Hostilities cease and the two groups begin to examine one another... All of a sudden enemy is now ally for self preservation. the newly opened worm hole is throwing off  violent radiation, both sides decide it is best to avoid getting too close to this strange churning anomaly, but there are new enemies to be destroyed and with some clever maneuvering it might just be possible.

... We can finish Destroying each other AFTER we have dealt with this unknown threat.


I will update this more as I receive more pictures from the other players there where camera phones snapping mad pics so there will be lots more!