BATTLE FLEET REVIEW SERIES
This series of missions introduces the main rules a few at a time, giving you a couple of games to work out the basics, before realising two games in you were doing it all wrong, getting the hang of it, then throwing in the rules for fleet commanders, attack craft and so on. It’s not all bad though, during my playtesting I was rescued by my saviour, The Fall of Reach campaign guide.
Problem is, anyone green enough to need that explained to them is going to be hopelessly lost in the gaming design mire that follows, and more experienced gamers are just going to want to get to the meat and get playing, without the handholding. The use of dice means that you can never completely predict the outcome of any tabletop action, and that, even in the darkest hour, there is always hope…” The use of dice generates exciting random outcomes that simulate the chaos of battle, the varying skill levels of crew members and much more. “Halo Fleet Battles uses dice to generate results for actions. I’m also a little confused as to what level of player this is aimed at, in some ways it seems as if Spartan Games want to attract Halo players who may be new to the tabletop, for example there’s a lengthy, adorable section towards the beginning of the rulebook, explaining what dice are for, that I’m now going to quote, This means referring back to the rulebook is a bit of a pain, in fact, and I may be wrong, but there’s at least one rule that I couldn’t find in the book anywhere, that I’ve only seen on the reference sheet. It’s not badly written as such, but it is written in a way that makes learning the game very difficult, hiding the essential details of basic game mechanics behind unnecessary fluff or in separate sections, with one crucial nugget of information tucked away, chapters apart from it’s friends in the movement phase, or whatever. Otherwise know as the riddle of the sands… The way it works is not a million miles away from X Wing and Star Wars Armada.and pretty intuitive once you’ve got it all figured out.Īnd there’s the rub, a fairly major snag which seriously got in the way of my enjoyment of this game at first, and it centres around this little fella. The mechanics of the game are pretty straight forward, your fleet is split into battlegroups and the players move and attack with alternate battlegroups until all their ships have been activated, there are also mechanics for launching fighters, bombers and attack craft, all of which boils down to gathering great handfulls of special dice and rolling for hits, with modifiers for speed, intervening terrain, special weapons and so on. I was keen to get my hands on a Pillar Of Autumn (that’s a Halcyon class cruiser folks) and while there are similar ships in the set (Marathon class heavy cruiser) that exact class of ship seems to be coming in a future expansion, along with representations of The Master Chief, Cortana, Captain Keyes, and truly MASSIVE models of the Infinity and covenant supercarrier Long Night Of Solace, so there’s lots to look forward to, if this game performs well. The UNSC fleet centres around a Epoch class heavy carrier, a ship apparently designed by someone at Bungie many years ago, but never seen by normal humans until the release of this game, a nice bit of deep background there.
Opening the box the first thing that struck me is how much you get, for roughly £80 you get rules, two huge fleets (the models are shown actual size on the side of the box, nice touch),cardboard scenery in the form of planets, asteroids and such, and an absolute mountain of counters, reference cards and special dice, compared to similar games this is pretty good value, and the models are made from appropriately coloured plastic, so they don’t even require painting (unless you really want to, I’ve always thought it a real chore for anything based around ships or spaceships), and they look fantastic, Halo fans will recognise the covenant ships from the games, and the human frigates such as good old Forward Unto Dawn are represented by a horde of teeny models each about the size of a 20p. The Epoch Heavy Carrier, never before seen outside of Bungie/343 archives. What we’ve got here is, The Fall Of Reach set, which acts as a starter set for Halo: Fleet Battles, giving you everything you need (except for a tape measure) to play a pretty decent sized game, or campaign right out of the box, based on that famous losing battle from Halo history. Halo: Fleet Battles enables you to fight space battles set in the Halo universe, either as the human’s UNSC Navy or The Covenant, on a scale roughly comparable to Star Wars: Armada, largely focused on the movements of capital ships.
BATTLE FLEET REVIEW MAC
Newly minted studio Spartan Games brings us Halo Fleet Battles, translating the all-conquering Xbox game franchise to a tabletop near you, Spike Direction spins up his MAC and gives it a go…