So, Friday morning, I was wandering through the Dealer's Room when I spied FFG's upcoming release, the
X-Wing Miniatures Game on one of the vendor's shelves. "Hey," I remarked, "is that the new game from Fantasy Flight Games? I didn't know it was out yet!"
"Oh, it's not. We just came from Celebration VI last weekend, where we were able to pick up a few of the early releases," the vendor told me.
I didn't hesitate to drop $60 on the base game and two expansion ships (I selected the Y-Wing and TIE Advanced since the base game comes with an X-Wing and two TIE Fighters; I'll pick up the TIE Fighter and X-Wing expansions when it hits general release since they include additional pilots like Wedge), because I've been quite interested in this thing's release.
My step-brother and I were able to get about five games in over the course of the weekend in the tabletop/board/card gaming room -- I was shocked that we weren't able to recruit a second pair of players to play teams, despite getting a lot of walk-by interest and answering a bunch of questions from folks.
I made the executive decision, upon seeing that the full rules also contained a recommended starting pilot roster (pitting Luke Skywalker solo against one Academy Pilot TIE Fighter pilot and the smaller-point-valued named TIE pilot), that we would tell the quick-start rules to screw off and skip right to the full rules. Reading them aloud and pointing out diagrams and whatnot on the tokens while we punched stuff out took around an hour to get us set up and read-through. I imagine that now that I know what's going on, I could probably introduce a new player to the rules in fifteen minutes or less. Not bad for a miniatures game.
We played two games with that recommended roster, swapping sides between them. I won both, so it seems like the sides were relatively evenly matched. We did some squadron building to include the expansions for the other three games, I won 1 (or rather, my step-brother forfeited after I killed two of his three ships with no losses) and lost the other two, again, with victories on each side of the Force (Vader's a beast, but I came a die roll away from taking him down the last game).
So here's my review.
What's in the box?The base game comes with three miniatures, six dice, eleven movement templates, three maneuver dials, a deck of damage cards, three bases with six sections of stands, one range ruler, twelve (? I think, I'll confirm when I get home) pilot cards with matching base markers, around eight upgrade cards, four mission-related tokens, and an assortment of asteroid tokens and action markers. In addition are a 4-page quick start rule set, and a ~20 page full rules.
The miniatures are painted plastic, and surprised me with the detail, both in the molding and the paint. They end up being quite attractive for mass produced pre-painted miniatures, and would probably take a little extra detail nicely if you wanted to do things like decorate the plain silver dome of the X-Wing's astromech or add some weathering. The stands are segmented into two sections per model, so that if you run into model collision issues with larger ships (like the recently announced upcoming Millennium Falcon and Slave One) that are larger than the square bases, you can adjust the height of some models to compensate without disrupting the placement of the model.
The movement templates, base covers, and tokens are all thick card stock (2 mm thick?) that was well perforated and punched out of the boards they came in easily and with no face tearing. My only concern is whether or not the movement templates' edges stand up to long-term use, since their crisp flat edges are kind of essential to precise movement. Only time will tell, here, I suppose.
Pilot cards are slightly larger than standard playing cards, and include art, stats, and either special ability text (for "named" pilots) or flavor text (for "generic" pilots) relating to their starship.
How does the game work?If you're familiar with Wings of War, most of this is going to sound quite familiar. Surprise!
So they recommend playing 2-3 ships on a side on either a 2'x2' or 3'x3' playing space. We marked it out with scraps from the punch-out cards our first session, and drawing on the plastic table cover the second session. You get out your ships, and select pilots for each. The pilots are locked to a specific ship type, so, for instance, Luke Skywalker's pilot card includes the stats for an X-Wing.
Said basic stats include Attack Power (shown in red), Agility (shown in green), Hull (shown in yellow), Shields (shown in blue), Pilot Skill (shown in orange), and a points value. Everything but the points value and the pilot skill is specific to the ship, so all X-Wings have, for instance, 3 Attack, 2 Agility, 3 Hull, and 2 Shields. In addition, there are two sets of icons and sometimes text describing additional rules that apply to the pilot.
Each ship also has a maneuver dial. Again, these are specific to the type of ship, and define what maneuvers the ship is capable of performing.
The turns break down into four phases. Planning, Activation, Combat, and Cleanup.
The planning phase sees both sides set the dials for their ships to indicate the type of maneuver they wish the ship to perform that turn. Dials are placed face down next to the ship. When maneuvers are plotted for each ship, we segue into Activation, where each ship's maneuver is revealed in turn and executed.
The maneuvers are indicated by a paired arrow and number combination, along with a color code. The number and arrow type (which can be a straight arrow, two different degrees of curved arrows in both left and right flavors, and a U-turn arrow) indicate which template should be used. The curved templates indicate 90 degree and 45 degree arcs of a circle, and larger numbers (ranging from 1-5) correspond to longer templates. Each template's end fits in between nubs on the front and back of the ships' base. So in order to perform a declared move, select the appropriate template, line it up along the front edge with the nubs to center it, then hold the template in place and move the ship so that the back edge lies on the other side of the template. The ship has now moved and, provided it didn't overlap another ship (in which case its movement is brought up just short enough for the edges of the two ships' bases to touch), it now gets to make an action. Each maneuver has a color code. Green maneuvers are easy, red maneuvers are hard, and white maneuvers are neutral. If a ship performs a red maneuver, it gains a Stress token. If a ship with a Stress token performs a green maneuver, it removes a Stress token. Ships with Stress tokens cannot perform red maneuvers or take actions in the Activation phase.
Ships' movement is performed in ascending order of pilot skill, so the most skilled pilots move last. This is to their advantage, because they get the benefit of seeing the movements and actions of ships that moved ahead of them, which can better inform their actions. Each ship gets to perform one action a turn, and the actions that are allowed to it are indicated by one of the sets of icons on the pilot card. Actions include Barrel Roll, Evade, Focus, and Target Lock. Barrel Rolls are executed immediately, and are performed by lining up the shortest straight template against one side of the base, and then moving the ship so the other side of the base lines up against the other side of the template, performing a minor (but situationally significant) move roughly perpendicular to its final facing. You can tweak a little forward or back movement in there depending on how you line up the template along the edge before and after, too.
The rest of the actions have tokens associated with them. Drop the token next to the ship, and consume it later. Target Lock has two tokens of different colors, paired by letters so you can match them up. Red goes on the target of the lock, blue goes on the ship acquiring the lock. Target Lock also requires you check range between the locking ship and the target ship -- they must be within the third (longest) range increment (the range ruler is divided into 3 segments). Target Lock has no fire arc requirements.
Once all ships have moved and acted (if they're able to), they take turns shooting. Attacking is done in descending order of pilot skill. The attacker may declare a target if it is within range of its weapons (basic lasers are 3, the full range of the range ruler) and within the fire arc indicated on its base (90 degrees, centered forward). Once a target is declared and checked to be valid, the attacker rolls a number of attack (red) dice equal to his ship's Attack Power score. If the ship is within one range increment, he rolls an extra attack die as a bonus. The attack dice are d8's with four facings: blank (no result), hit, critical hit, and focus. All focus icons in a roll can be converted to standard hits by spending your Focus Token if you made a Focus Action. Alternatively, you can expend your target lock tokens for that pair of ships to re-roll any number of attack dice.
Once the attack roll has been made and modified, the defender rolls a number of defense (green) dice equal to his ship's Agility score. Defense dice are d8's as well, and have three facings: blank (no effect), focus, and evade. Each evade cancels a hit or critical hit, leaving the crits to be cancelled last. If the defending ship took an Evade Action that turn, it can expend its Evade Token to add a free evade to his roll. It can also spend a Focus Token, if it has one, to convert all dice that rolled focus icons into Evades.
For each un-evaded hit an attack does, it inflicts a point of damage. This is indicated by drawing a card from the damage deck and leaving it face down next to the pilot card. Critical hits get turned face up, and include special penalties that affect the ship's performance. Once the number of damage and critical damage cards equals the number of hull points, the ship is destroyed. Shield tokens, if any remain on the ship, can be discarded instead of drawing damage.
At the end of the turn, all tokens except for Target Lock tokens and Stress tokens are removed from the board, and then the turn sequence starts over.
And that's the game in a nutshell. There are a few more complexities, like some mission-specific rules, details for resolving overlap with obstructions, etc. But the rules are pretty streamlined, and they tease a lot of ship "character" out of things like which maneuvers are easy/hard/unavailable, what actions they can take (TIE Fighters can Barrel Roll and Evade, X-Wings can't; TIE Fighters lack Target Lock; etc.), what upgrades are available (astromechs, proton torpedoes, concussion missiles, squad tactics, ion cannons), and so on. When you get into constructing custom squadrons, there's a nice variety of pilots and upgrades for different points values...
Once we were accustomed to the rules, we were burning through games in around an hour with 5 ships on the table. If you guys look at the game and think it might be fun, I can report that I found it to be quite so.
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