Noble Armada

Published by Holistic Designs
Designed by Ken Lightner and Chris Wiese
$55.00

When it came out, Fading Suns was heralded as one of the coolest role playing games of that year. Here was a game that had everything -- solid game system, solid writing, exciting universe, great package, and room to grow. Now Holistic has used that room to grow the line in the direction of ship-to-ship combat. And they've done it in style.

Noble Armada is a game of ship to ship combat set in the Fading Suns universe. Players control one or more ships in a battle across space that can even include boarding actions!

Noble Armada includes a lot of stuff in the package, and one look shows you that they didn't skimp on this one. The box includes a 48 page rulebook with a color cover, 32 plastic ship miniatures (4 of each of 8 different ships), a counter sheet, ship display sheets for everything from explorers to dreadnoughts, and even interior deck plans. The game also includes a wonderful booklet designed to introduce people to Fading Suns. This book is a great read for anyone interested in the game, and I'm hoping they'll make that book available outside the release of Noble Armada.

The rulebook includes complete rules for maneuvering in space, as well as ship to ship combat. Add to that the rules for boarding actions, ship construction, a 5 page example of play, 6 complete scenarios and optional rules and you start to get an appreciation of what they've managed to shoehorn into . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: August 14, 1998

Copyright © 1998 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.