Attack Wing Faction: The Borg
The spin maneuver is a nifty little trick that makes our ships move differently from everyone else. Before you move with a spin maneuver, you rotate your ship facing that side and then move straight. So basically, your ship moves like a rook in chess (or a bishop if you angled your ship upon deployment). No need for all those bank and turn templates with such a ship. Combined with our 360 degree turret weaponry, the spin helps us get in the perfect location to fire upon someone’s blind spot.
The tactical cube also possesses the ability to take an action even if it runs over another ship with 6 or less hull. Likely a large ship rule for Attack Wing, rather than a Borg specific one. However, well worth pointing out.
Most of the potent Borg upgrade cards possess a specific icon letting them only be equipped to Borg ships. No ablative armor on a Bird of Prey or Borg tractor beams on the Enterprise sadly. A bit shocking from a rules perspective, as everyone else can rampantly steal most of the best cards from other factions, but fluff-wise it’s perfect. Borg do NOT play nice with others after all.
The big rule for captains of a Borg ship is that they’re actually controlled by the hive mind. Each captain starts with a number of drone tokens ranging from low (the drone pilot) to quite high (the queen). You can spend these drones to activate abilities on your captain card, and several upgrades require them to be spent to activate their effects. As your drone tally goes down, your pilot skill goes down with it. The choice is yours, either stay at a consistently high skill level, or drop down to unleash devastating abilities such as double actions or bonus target locks.
The Borg tractor beam upgrade that comes with both the tactical cube and the sphere is wordy enough it gets a rule card for itself. A nasty upgrade that slows down the target’s max speed and prevents it from cloaking or raising shields. The huge downside to this is you have to be at range one to make it, as well as maintain the lock. Unfortunately, a high speed move can still be executed the turn you make the lock, so they might still slip out of your grasp. Pair the tractor beam with a high skill pilot so you can lock them after they move that round. If you manage that…
Yep. Cutting beam. A TEN DICE attack. Only useable on a tractor beam locked target, but devastating when you pull it off.
(Note that the Borg type 03, AKA the Soong, lacks several of these abilities: the regenerate action, spin maneuver, turret, and drone tokens. Fitting, as it happens to be crewed by foolish ants who don’t want to be part of the collective.)
Why would you play anything else, when you could command the almighty power of the BORG?
