Recently picked both of these up.  Was interested in them a while back, but never seemed to get around to them.  For those of you who did play them, how was it?  Thanks.

I ran a few sessions of LoA a few years ago when my group was trying out Fate. We were fresh off a six-month Dresden Files campaign so we weren't complete amateurs to the system. The biggest part of whether you'll like them or not comes down to if you like Fate. If you do or can stand it (like me), then I think you'll be happy with your purchases.

The game we played was in The Hither Kingdoms, the generic fantasy setting included in the book. Combat was smooth and fast, and there was a ton of character options. Some of my players liked the simplified Stunt-like magic system LoA uses compared to Dresden, though one preferred Dresden's free-form magic for the versatility it gave him. The overall game was very simple, and the only real hiccup I saw was Aspects as those can be tricky to teach people new to roleplaying. The inclusion of giving each character a long-term goal to work toward was also a nice touch, and while we didn't play long enough for those to really come into play I could see them being useful for motivating players, especially those that have a harder time stepping into the spotlight on their own. And while I didn't get to use it, I thought the rules for running things like factions, organizations, or even cities/states could be really fun, but I didn't dive too deeply into those.

The bad? My biggest complaint by far would be the book's organization. It's not player-friendly at all, not when I look at other products like Godbound. It took a lot of page flipping to find things in that big tome (I can only imagine how bad SBA would be). And the layout/color of the pages didn't help things at all, either. I'm sure that's a problem that would have resolved itself with time and more experience, but early on it was a pain.

I did a little playtesting of Starblazer Adventures but never really got into it. However, my name is in the book.

I reviewed both of them, you can find the reviews somewhere in the Reviews forum.

Besides that, I ran Starblazer for about a year. It was a lot of fun.