As mentioned in a previous post, I have joined a community of tabletop gamers playing X-wing Miniatures.
Since that time, the game itself has undergone a number of changes. There was at first a new points and balancing system with a number of introduced features, and the game increased from 3 factions (Rebels, Empire and Scum) to 7 factions (adding Resistance, First Order, Republic and Separatists) which created much more diversity in games and gameplay styles in the dogfight format.
In the early part of 2022, the game underwent a significant change. Asmodee moved the miniatures game from one child company, Fantasy Flight Games, to another child company, Atomic Mass Games (referred to as AMG), in 2020, and they worked to resolve a lot of the stagnancy, and negative play experiences that the game had developed in its competitive scene.
Their solution was to introduce scenario play, change how player order works and adjust the way list building is conducted.
List building has been a shock to the system for me. Ships now have a separate point cost and then a loadout spend depending on pilot/ship. As someone who liked to build lists light on upgrades to reduce the load on my brain, it is taking some adjustment to get used to. It also seems wasteful to either not take upgrades when points allow, or worse, forget to use them in combat.
I am still yet to get to a point where I am confident in my list building without referring to resources to see what other players are doing.
Scenarios are great, it has prevented a lot of issues people had with fortressing and stalling to prevent players holding up gameplay until the optimal moment. The scenarios themselves are not perfect and already we have seen one tweaked from 5 objectives to 3.
The objectives themselves are standard fare; Assault on the Satellite Array (king of the hill with 5 hills), Chance Engagement (dog fighting whilst remaining within the centre area of the board), Salvage Mission (oddball with 5 balls) & Scramble the Transmissions (a flick the switch control type with 3 switches).
Since the change to points and scenarios, I have felt that scenarios are not a way to win, but a way to not lose a match. Yesterday that opinion changed for me.
Playing in a tournament, I was having terrible dice luck. It did not matter what I did, I was failing to defend a lot of damage. As for my attacking, I dealt a total of one critical damage (a direct hit which deals 2 damage total) the whole game.
About 3 rounds before the game ended, I realised that rolling dice was not going to be the way I would win this match. I made the conscious decision to compensate by picking up objectives and by positioning firing arcs to encourage my opponent to avoid being in range of the objectives.
When the match was over, I had lost one ship, managed to avoid further ships dying with creative positioning and taken more objectives to win by a point, 12-11.
I still have so much more to learn about this game…
If you would like to learn more about playing X-wing, I am happy to point you in the right direction. You can start for yourself by checking out AMG’s documents, my preferred list builder or my main X-wing communities (Perth Jawa’s & Fly Better).
Farreg 