Update: An admiral is never late

 

My last post was back in April, so a quick personal update: I’m in a much better place health-wise. My back is never going to get “fixed,” but I can now lead a normal life, as long as I’m a little careful and keep doing the right things exercise-wise. I’ll take that. 🙂

Now, on to the spaceships.

ARC and Legacy have merged into Armada Community Edition (ACE). The two supposedly “competing” projects are now formally working together, with merged leadership and Legacy’s released content folded into the Community Edition ruleset.

And I think that’s great news.

Last August, I wrote quite a bit about this in Amity, Concord, or Unity?. At the time, I felt cooperation needed to come first: shared planning, coordinated testing, and time for the relationship to develop. A merger was a possible destination, but there was no need to rush it.

Well, here we are. The announcement says the teams have been working together behind the scenes for a long time, which is exactly the kind of foundation I hoped to see.

So I’m claiming at least partial credit for predicting the direction of travel. My hopes came true, and I get to be a little smug about it. Yay. 😁

I know some people see the merger as a bad thing. Personally, I struggle to see why bringing these efforts together is bad for Armada, but to each their own. We have a finite number of people willing to spend their free time designing, testing, organizing, and maintaining things for this game. Giving them a shared direction makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes life easier for players trying to work out which rules and content go together.

That doesn’t mean I’ll agree with every decision ACE makes. I suspect this blog will still find the occasional card to complain about. Possibly two.

But I’m hopeful. There are still ships that could use some love, gaps in the factions, and plenty of interesting design space left to explore. Having people actively working on that future is something worth being excited about.

And if you prefer the last official rules and components, you can absolutely keep playing with those. There are fleet builders supporting that version of the game. Your collection still works, and you and your opponents can carry on enjoying it.

For those of us who feel this kind of game needs to evolve to stay alive, though, ACE is very good news. New possibilities give us reasons to build fleets, revisit old favorites, and get games on the table. That’s the future I want for Armada.

Which brings me to my own rather obvious problem: I still haven’t played a game since last October.

That’s the biggest reason the blog has stayed quiet. It’s hard to keep writing about Armada when I’m so detached from actually playing it. Fleet builders and Discord only get me so far.

To get back into the admiral’s chair, I need to get some games in!