Armada Independence Day

It's your friendly neighborhood Truthiness here. While most Armada bloggers and commentators are eulogizing or mourning, I have a sliiiiiiightly different take on the latest news. The title of this article probably gives this away, but if I had to pick one word to describe my feelings of late, it would be “freedom.” I am probably more excited for our community right now than I have been for some time. I'm sure that's an odd notion to many of you at this particular moment for the game, so let me break down my bit of optimism.

Definitely not crazy. Definitely.

Unlike most of the BIG crew, I have stayed very engaged with the Armada community. Where Biggs, Shmitty, Snipa, and Geek have all seen a drop off in their local communities, I have always been a primarily online player. I started playing online when stationed in Arizona. That continued in the DC area because I never had a FLGS with much gaming space. I played on the table as much as I could, but between life and distance to the rest of the area’s players, it was never frequent. Instead, my main enjoyment has come through the online community, first on the FFG forums and then through the various discords. I wasn't able to consistently attend Worlds until 2019. For me, the high level play every year was the Vassal World Cup. So while local communities have dried up for the rest of BIG, my primary community has done nothing but get bigger. The pandemic era brought in a huge influx of new blood, most of it experiencing the game for the first time online through TTS and Vassal. I think that's why you'll find me to have a pretty different perspective from the rest of BIG. While they were seeing their specific groups phasing out of the game, I was seeing their local shifts as part of the larger trends. What was happening around 2020-2023 wasn't the game slowly atrophying, but instead a passing of the guard in the United States and some rather spectacular growth in Europe.

The Armada Community since 2020

The 2023 Worlds tournament was the largest we had seen to date. It was a mix of old guard, expecting it to be the last Worlds, and younger players, experiencing the spectacle for the first time. Even crazier, 2024 Worlds was bigger. What's more, it was chalk full of even more newer players to the game than 2023. The skill of the players and the ever evolving meta of the game remains engaging and fun. I credit this largely to the foundation FFG left us in 1.5. That has combined with a community, as Biggs said in his post, that has remained top notch. Worlds has become a must-go event for me. The rush of 3 days of absolutely top notch Armada is like nothing else. Even had I not made this year’s top 8, an incredible honor and experience, the inaugural World Team Championship sounds like it was equally fun and exciting (shout out to the Polish sweep!). So while the game itself is wonderful, this game’s larger community around the world is something truly special. That, above all, is the root of my optimism: a thriving, welcoming, and engaged community.

How we should have greeted AMG

Why then is “hope” or “optimism” not my word of the moment? That, my friends, has everything to do with the tyrant in our lives. While the community was growing and thriving over the last four years, the game itself has been largely stagnant. That lies entirely at the feet of AMG. They could have done cardboard only expansions. They could have increased prices to compensate for the supposed “increase in cost” for pre-painted minis. Hell, they could have pivoted to un-painted miniatures, which I think the community would have largely accepted as a cost of changing supply chains. Instead, they did the bare minimum required, despite being handed development ideas on a silver platter by FFG’s old miniatures department. To echo Biggs again: fuck AMG. They never bothered to learn the game or cared about its development. More importantly, though, is the fact we don't need them. This game is alive and well in spite of them. I'm not saying we are definitely going to be the next Battlefleet Gothic or Blood Bowl, games that have held their communities together in spite of GW’s negligence. I do, however, think we have a real shot. We have former playtesters coming back together to form the Armada Rules Collective. We have Adepticon’s official backing to continue to host community-organized Worlds tournaments. We have community leaders linked together, determined to help each other make the best events we can. And we don't have to care what AMG does anymore. We. Are. FREE. Let's make the best of that.

You knew where this was going