Thursday Night Gaming: X-Wing

Tonight at the club I'll be playing X-Wing.

FFG's Star Wars dogfighting game has proven to be one of their most successful products, and our club has been no exception.
Similar to Silent Death in that each player controls a small group of fighters, X-Wing see's each player directing their X-Wings, TIE Fighters and sundry about the playing area using a combination of punched card movement rulers, custom D8 dice for attacks and the usual FFG plethora of counters and cards.
It's a simple game to learn, plays very quickly, and comes with excellent quality models.

This being FFG, everything comes with a great glut of cards to customise your group to great effect. Different named pilots have different levels of skill (which detirmines movement and firing initiative) unique special abilities, and the ships they pilot have upgrade slots with which to improve further. For instance the X-Wing has a slot for an R2 droid and Torpedoes, and certain pilots come with slots for Elite Pilot skills.

Usual points level for games is 100pts aside (about 3 or 4 rebel ships, and usually double that for Imperials) although rules for Epic sized games of 300 or 400 (in two teams of 200) exist. Although really you play at a mutually accepted points level.

A word on list building

 One thing I've noticed about FFG games, is that they often work by linking together synergies together. Like for example, you have a Pilot who gets X at the cost of Y. So you give him a card that allows him to Z when he Y's and you take that pilot who can negate the downsides of Y in the first place.

Let me give you an example:

So Ibisalms basic skill allows her to reroll one of her dodge or attack dice if she's stressed (usually a negative condition that prevents her from taking certain maneouvers, or making actions like Focus, Target Locking or Barrel Rolls.)
Autoblaster is a range 1 attack and its basic hits cannot be dodged through rolling defence dice, but only rolls 3 attack dice (normal attacks at Range 1 roll an extra attack dice, so the B-Wing would be rolling 4 normally.)
However, Opportunist states that if a target has neither an Evade or Focus token (usually gained through making that relevant action) then she may roll an extra attack dice, but at the cost of gaining a stress BEFORE the attack is made.
So on Ibisalm, this combination allows this B-Wing to:
1) Attack with 4 dice against an enemy in Range 1 without Evade or Focus tokens
2) Any hits rolls cannot be dodged
3) Ibisalm can reroll any one dice when she makes her attack.

But Range 1 is pretty short, so how do we make sure that any target that close to her will not have an evade or focus token? Well, look up and read Wes Jansons ability, see how that would work?

There are of course other things to keep in mind. It is a matter of FFG tournement record that quantity has a very lethal quality all of it's own, with the infamous imperial TIE Swarm being a very reliable build, but requiring skills to use which are wholly different from say of a Rebel Millenium Falcon + 2X-Wings list. That's not even getting into things like the Epic play capital ships like the Transport and Corellian Corvette recently released, or the impending Wave 4 ships release which will shake the game up even further.

It's not really hard to see why X-Wing has been doing so well, and it's a great game that is easy to play, wont take up your whole evening, and looks really nice.

I'm still waiting for Imperial Gunboats though.