X-Wing – Flying Casual

 

I’d noted in my first post about Dilution Theory that I hadn’t played the X-Wing Miniatures Game this year, despite very much enjoying the game.

One of the main causes of this (other than breaking my wrist earlier this year and missing the Regional at Battlefield Hobbies) was the fact that my main opponent – my son Josh – moved away from home. He’s now back, which is a huge bonus as we play several games together, such as Runewars, Ninja All-Stars, Planetfall, Lord of the Rings LCG and, of course, X-Wing.

We are now making a visit to the Friday club night at Battlefield Hobbies a regular part of our week, which has meant that we’ve been playing X-Wing for the last few weeks – primarily due to the fact that Josh had been inspired by watching trailers for the new Star Wars Battlefront 2 game.

As I have previously written, I’m not a huge fan of meta-gaming in X-Wing, and actually avoid it if at all possible, so I haven’t read that much about squadron building – I’d much rather think about what I fancy flying and then throw something onto the table at the start of the evening, rather than spending days or weeks carefully planning my squadron builds.

For our first game, I decided to play my trusty TIE Swarm, which was up against an X-Wing squadron consisting of the classic Luke, Biggs and Wedge formation.

I lost horribly, which was not helped by somewhat ‘jammy’ dice rolling by Josh, as he managed to roll more evades that any player had any right to…

…plus the fact that I obviously gained an ‘F’ in my ‘Formation Flying’ certification.

For our second set of games, I fancied trying out a TIE-Bomber formation supported by the beautiful Lambda Shuttle model. This actually worked rather well, and I won both games. In the first, I was taking on a tooled up Y-Wing and B-Wing, whilst the second saw me fighting a pair of X-Wings and Y-Wings.

This squadron consisted of Two Scimitar Squadron pilots equipped with Proton Torpedoes and Cluster Missiles were supported by Captain Jonus (to give dice re-rolls on secondary weapon attacks) and the Lambda Shuttle providing target locks, allowing the TIE-Bombers to take Focus actions. I liked this squadron a lot – who says that TIE-Bombers are useless in this game?

Last week, as Josh was playing around with combinations of A-Wings and B-Wings, I decided to have some fun, and played the first game with a TIE-Interceptor swarm, simply because I have 4 TIE Interceptors, and I really like the ships.

For the last game, I played with a couple of maxed-out TIE-Defenders, which was the first time I had played with these ships. It has to be said, these are nasty – although I think that the TIE/D title, and then arming these ships with Ion Cannon, almost seemed a bit over-powered (although I was only able to play with two ships). Not necessarily my usual style of play, but it was fun to play a game with them – if nothing else to see the look on Josh’s face when they performed a K-Turn for the first time and didn’t get stressed! (Like I said, we tend to ignore the meta and play this game between us for fun, so Josh didn’t know that the TIE-Defender could do this. It was like the first time Rebel pilots encountered these ships: Wait a second, they can do that?)

…although as one of the pictures above proves, I still appear to be having problems when not flying in a straight line!

Despite all this, the game came down to a single TIE/D vs an A-Wing and close range, each with a single hull point left. The A-Wing fired first, but I managed to dodge it – which proved to be the worst time for Josh’s usual dice luck to desert him.

Putting aside the whole ‘meta’ issue, X-Wing is just a great, fun game to pick-up-and-play. I’m looking forward to playing the Heroes of the Aturi Cluster campaign, which will mean that I have to buy some new ships. Oh the tragedy…