Reader, I have been humbled. When Ken Burnside, a regular in the Wargamer Discord community, invited me to try out his miniature wargame Squadron Strike in an online demo, I thought I was prepared. "Space ship dogfighting with full 3D movement? Sounds like X-Wing with more steps!" I chuckled to myself. I was not ready. Squadron Strike is to Star Wars X-Wing what a quantum computer is to a Speak and Spell.
Burnside ran the demo via the game's bespoke virtual tabletop system. In this scenario, I - and a fellow Discord community member - were trainees at a space academy who had snuck into a training simulator to prove who was the real ace. It was an apt introduction to the game, because that VTT interface sure feels like a military simulator.
There's obviously no Star Wars license attached to Squadron Strike, but the game has a wealth of optional systems designed to allow for an incredible diversity of sci-fi styles, genre conventions, and concomitant ships. Star Wars X-Wing fans can create rules for anything in their collection, though you won't find it easy to use your base models without some modifications, because it's perfectly possible for them to spend a lot of the battle upside down.
The game uses a simultaneous plotting system, with one phase to plot and then resolve movement, and another to plot and then resolve attacks. Just as in X-Wing you need to second guess your opponent's strategy while committing to your own moves and pivots. Optional systems might give you extra abilities - my ship was protected by a shield bubble, and when in turn two I realised my weak top shields were in the crosshairs of an enemy fighter I was able to reinforce my bubble before they could fire.
Depending on your angle of attack you'll target a different facing of an enemy vessel, hoping to deal damage, knock out systems, and cripple its structural integrity. Your range to target affects both the accuracy and maximum damage of your shots. While my ship had shields, the enemy Cockatrices had armor that had a good chance of deflecting long-range hits - my shots were blessed and kept slipping through weak spots, while my wingmate was far more accurate but saw seven out of eight shots deflected.
So the system for resolving attacks is at about the complexity level of classic miniature wargame Battletech, which is high for a modern consumer wargame, but not unprecedented. There are many additional systems we didn't use - space torpedoes that have to lead the target, a subphase step called "Declare Ominous Weapons" - but this is complexity you choose a la carte.
No, the real challenge of Squadron Strike is 3D movement. It's also the magic of the game. When a whole battlefield of ships moves through three dimensions, rolling on their axes, pivoting to new facings, and the game state is transformed, with enemy ships jinking left instead of right to create a clean firing solution on your aft, you realise that it's not a wargame - it's a flight sim. Threat assessment and positioning do matter, but you'll only be victorious if you can outfly the enemy like a space ace.
But thinking in three dimensions is hard, and accurately calculating movement distances across 3D space requires trigonometry. There are tools in the physical game to calculate all this data, but look at them. I read rulebooks for fun, and this is within the limit of what I'll mess with but convincing my gaming group to do vector maths, even simplified vector maths? That's going to be a hard sell.
Fortunately, Squadron Strike is supported by a crowd-funded app which can handle all of the maths for you, and also project which of a ship's firing arcs a target is in. It's not an elegant app, but (barring user error on my part during the demo) it works.
But in order for the rules to work - whether you're using wipe clean sheets or the app - any change you make to the facing of the ship (say, rolling it clockwise, then pointing the nose upwards and to the right by 30 degrees) needs to be recorded. And that means using the AVID.
The AVID - or Attitude/Vector Information Display - looks like a ritual circle dedicated to the chaos god Tzeentch. It's actually a 2D tool for recording which way your ship is pointing in 3D space, relative to the hex map. Burnside says that only about 15% of players immediately click with this, mostly those with "relevant experience (astronomer, pilot, drove a submarine for a living)", or because they remember what wargaming was like back in 1982.
My wingmate grasped the AVID on turn one, probably because they had internalised the 600 page rulebook for fifth edition Hero System as a child, which has its own 3D vector based space combat system. I didn't get the AVID until I looked up its description on the Squadron Strike webpage while writing this article. Not to disparage Burnside's demoing abilities - I don't think this is an easy thing to teach online, and I was playing in a very, very warm office that had turned my brain to cheese.
It was incredibly obvious from the demo just how passionate Burnside is about space combat. Squadron Strike is a simulator, but it's not simulating reality, it's simulating sci-fi. The Romance of the Seven Realms expansion - which our demo took place in - is packed with allusions to Star Wars, even including mystical 'Élan' powers, so your space craft can be piloted by space wizards. The game has multiple expansions, from original space opera settings to Marc Miller's Traveller.
A love letter to sci-fi then, and a toolkit to recreate your favorite flavor of spaceship battles in full 3D. That's the promise, at least - I've not had long with the game. My first impression is mostly of the cognitive barrier I faced - but I got glimpses of what lay on the far side, and what I saw seemed really exciting.
If you want to try out Squadron Strike, hop into the official Wargamer Discord community, where creator Burnside - aka AdAstraGames - is always keen to offer a demonstration.
For far-future board games with a much, much lighter cognitive load, our guide to the best Star Wars board games is just right!