MAGGI PICAYUNE

To close this year’s May the Fourth, I want to throw in the tabletop game I recently got hooked on, X-Wing. Normally I’m not big on games that are exclusively minis driven but my local store (Rogues Gallery) did a really good discussion about it on their weekly podcast. Selling the core game (shown above) for 15% off on the day the first issue of the new Marvel comic came out didn’t hurt neither.

It’s a pretty quick-paced and relatively easy game to play. Trust me, if Wil Wheaton and Seth Green can get in a fun skirmish, you too can master it. Sometimes I watch the episode again as a refresher/tutorial.

How does it work? Every fighter has a specific dial mapping out which maneuvers are at its disposal: go straight, do a 180, 90°-angle turn, etc. The model of fighter determines its abilities, not the pilot like a role-playing game tends to do. Pilots with the lowest skill rating move first followed by the rest in ascending order. Afterwards, the pilot with the highest skill rating fires first and we go back down in descending order. Should there be a tie, the Imperials move and fire before the Rebels. The core game includes the movement and firing rulers so you don’t have to play the game on a grid or hex-based map. There’s other stuff to arbitrate: collisions, debris, missiles, bombs, so on; they don’t happen very often unless you have the expansion packs containing fighters capable of these (TIE Bomber, B-Wing readily come to mind).

Determining the firing outcomes use these customized eight-sided dice with symbols/blanks on them. The red are are for attacks, green for evading. Whenever the red dice show an explosion, it’s a hit with the hollow explosion representing a critical. The defender responds with the green dice hoping for either an evade or focus icon. Fighters which have run out of hull points are destroyed. Obviously standard TIE Fighters doe this pretty easily, hence why you encounter more of them.

I do enjoy this game. It reminds me of the fun I used to have playing Blue Max with my sensei Lester. Another way I see it, X-Wing is the analog counterpart to the over-complicated computer games without a kajillion buttons and socially retarded opponents online. This also brought back the memories of my numerous space battles I orchestrated as a kid with my Legos supplementing the few official Kenner toys.

The game isn’t perfect. One enormously missing element is the third dimension. I figure FFG excluded this for simplicity. My other gripe is the basic game. It only includes one X-Wing and two TIE fighters. To really have a decent battle you need hunt down additional minis. Thankfully FFG’s recent shortage at the beginning of this year was relieved. Diehard Star Wars fans know, Imperial wings are composed of four TIEs and Rebels are three of the same (X, Y, A or B).

More expansion elements are out there too. Larger vessels such as the Falcon, Slave I and the Rebel transports from The Empire Strikes Back. Even larger starships have joined the game to change up the battles’ dynamics: the Tantive IV and an Imperial raider to balance the scales. X-Wing is getting sucked into what I call the Warhammer trap with the recent introduction of a third faction representing bounty hunters and crime syndicates. I only bought the modified Headhunters and Y-Wing for their neat paint jobs.

The good outweighs the bad by a huge margin but I would throw in the caveat about how expensive the game can be.

Next up in my mind…how to get it to integrate somewhat with WOTC’s roleplaying game.