Star Trek Attack Wing - Unboxing

Last year I was, for sure, very brave and good, so Xmas time was full of nice presents for me :)

One of them was the core set of Stark Trek Attack Wing

The game comes with three different ships, one for each initial faction on the game, the humans, the romulans and the klingons.

Five cardboards with all the tokens and movement templates are also in the box. I must said that I still did not play the game, only read the rules and listened to some podcasts about it, so I cannot give an opinion on the actual use of some of the tokens.

 As you can see, the humans got three possible commanders  for their starship whereas the klingons and romulans only two.

Also in the box is the ruler for range measurement, the dices, cards for the three factions and damage cards and the planet token, a huge piece of cardboard which could be great as Death Star for the X-Wing.

There has been already too much discussion on the web concerning the quality and merits of both games, this and the X-Wing. One of the main critics to this one being the poor quality of the models.

I have to say that I am forced to agree on this. The ones on X-Wing really look like painted miniatures, you know, with the shadows and dirt and this feeling that they are almost real. The ones in this game have a monochrome plastic color with some highlights in other colors, they really look like toy starships.

As I was taking a look to the components, a non-geek, non-gamer friend was present and when confronted with the two boxes, the Attack Wing and the X-Wing, there was no doubt which ones qualified as "toys" and which ones as "models". This friend of mine was scared about touching the ones from the X-Wing, they looked more delicate to handle :)

This will be my only critic concerning this game, because even if it is true that it is heavily based on X-Wing (no surprise here, Wizkids got the right for this particular game system and design from Fantasy Flight Games), they are really two different games.

Before I continue, I must again said that I barely played X-Wing and that I never played (yet) Attack Wing. However, from what I experienced on my few X-Wing games is that the game seems to be designed to involve several ships, and by several I mean two or three squadrons on each side, so we are talking about two imperial squadrons each one having two Tie Fighter and one advance Tie Fighter (like in Star Wars, the movie, when Darth Vader goes rebel hunting) and maybe one rebel squadron consisting of two X-Wing and one Y-Wing. Of course depending on the final points. My gaming groups was playing even four players games and seems to agree with this. Several ships are the scale of this game. Some people on the web also seem to support this idea.

Attack Wing includes not two but three factions with specific rules for it already on the rule book and the scale seems to be focused not on several ships but on one or maximum two ships per side. The included missions seem to reinforce this impression as they are based on sending crew members outside of the starship (away teams) to pursue the mission objectives. Also the crew aspect seems to be a heavy component of the game play. Again, not direct experience here, only my first impressions based on the rule book and what I was able to find on the web.

Hope to be able to find time to play soon to test the game. It looks very nice.