A Long Time Ago....On A Table Far, Far Away

Imagine if you will you are an Ace Imperial Pilot, just graduated top of your from the Imperial Academy and your running a routine patrol near and asteroid field when some jerk in an X-Wing flies past, pulls off a sweet Koiogran turn and then blasts you to pieces. Now imagine if you will you are that hotshot rebel in X-Wing who just shot down an Imperial TIE Fighter; your adrenaline is running and you're feeling like your invincible but out of nowhere, whoops a squadron of TIE Defenders pastes you across the asteroid field

Grab your blaster pistols and lightsabers as we prepare to make feeble spaceship noises

Welcome to Star Wars X-Wing

Story

It's Star Wars, pick a story from the main continuity or expanded universe and crack on

Game Mechanics

Action Queue

Critical Hits and Failures

Dice Rolling

Movement Template

Player Elimination

Simulation

Simultaneous Action Selection

Variable Player Powers

Number of Players

Officially - 2

Unofficially - I've been in a 5 player game

Play Time

45 mins. Games can go longer or shorter depending on the level of play and the number of units each player has

Down Time

Planning your move during the planning phase. This is the biggest contributor to game length as you often have to predict how your opponent will move

How Does It Play

Once you get past Fantasy Flight Games and there tendency to over-complicate the Rule Book, the game is easy to play.

Each round of the game is broken down into 4 phases: -

Planning Phase

During the planning phase players will programme their moves on the "Nav-Computer" of their respective ships. Different Ships have different move sets which players will draw upon. As I said above, players will often have to predict their opponents movements especially in the mid to late game. When a player selects the move their ship/s will take they place the "Nav-Computer" next to that ship

Movement Phase

During this phase players will move their ships according to their plans from the planning phase. Now the movement phase could potentially end up as chaos on a table with players just moving their ships at once, however the designers already thought of that. In X-Wing the ships with the lowest Pilot Skill move first. The ships will move in sequential order from lowest to highest. When players move they place a movement marker in the slot at the front of their ship and move the ship along that marker. Movement markers range from 1-5 in terms of distance and come on the forms of: -

1. Straight - Players move their ship in a simple straight line, players can select a Koiogran Turn (or K-Turn) as part of their move during the Planning Phase.

2. Bank - Players move their ships along a sweeping line at a 45 degrees angle, players selecting this movement during the Planning Phase can also opt for a Segnor's Loop as part of their movement.

3. Turn - The player will move their ship in a 90 degrees motion, players can also select the Talon Roll as part of their movement during the planning phase.

4. Stationary - The player doesn't move their ship

Once a ship has moved it can take an action, providing the move did not cause any stress (stress moves are coloured Red on the ship's "Nav-Computer"). If the ship is stressed the player places a Stress Marker next to it, only a Green Move can remove stress from the ship. Some of the actions that are available for ships are: -

1. Focus - Allows you to change all Focus Icons on a dice rolls for a successes

2. Evade - Allows players to change one die roll to an evade result when defending

3. Target Lock - Allows you to Acquire a Target Lock on a ship. When attacking that ship, players can spend the target lock to re-roll any attack dice

4. Barrel Roll - Allows ships to move up to 1 movement space either to the left or right

5. Boost - Allows ships to move 1 extra movement space in either a straight or banked manoeuvre

There are other actions available such as Cloak, SLAM etc, however it is worth noting that not all actions are available on every ship in the game. Pay attention to the information on your Pilot card as they will tell you what actions that ship can perform. Be sure not to fly over asteroids or other obstacles as they can not only rob you of actions but cause damage to your ship, and stay away from the edge of the game board/table as your ship will be considered lost in the void and out of the game if it crosses the boundary edge

Note: The Segnor's Loop, Talon Roll, and Stationary Moves are only available to certain Ships only available in expansions. For an example of a K-Turn watch Empire Strikes back, the Millennium Falcon does one during the siege of Cloud City

Combat Phase

During this phase players will engage in combat where possible by use of a range stick and attack & defence dice. Unlike the Movement Phase, the ships with the highest Pilot Skill first (Remember, Han always shoots first). Attacking players will roll dice according to their Pilot's attack value (Red) and the defender will roll dice according to their Pilot's defence value (Green). The dice during the Combat Phase may show the following: -

However, be careful! The epidemic cards do 3 things; they infect a random city on the board with 3 cubes of disease, they raise the infection rate, and reshuffles the infection discard pile and puts them back on top of the infection deck. This adds to the difficulty of controlling the game because if you have 3 cubes in a city and draw that city from the infection deck it creates an outbreak. An outbreak will infect the cities connected to the city in which the outbreak occurs.

Attack Dice - Red

1. Hit - A hollow pip is shown on the die

2. Critical - A solid pip is shown on the die

3. Focus - An eye is shown on the die

4. Miss - The die face is blank

Defence - Green

1. Evade - The evade icon is shown on the die

2. Focus - An eye is shown on the die

3. Miss - The die face is blank

When determining damage, evade die cancel out hit die first. Say Lisa rolls 2 hits & critical and Bart rolls an evade and a focus. Bart uses his focus to make 2 evades which cancel out the 2 hits resulting in Bart taking one critical hit. The damage is taken from the ship's hull points and when a ship reaches zero that ship is destroyed. Critical damage not only does a point of damage but the player has to draw from the critical damage deck and apply the effect to the ship. If your ship has shields then you don't have to worry about critical damage, all damage including critical damage only removes one shield per point of damage. 1 hit and 2 crits would remove 3 shield points.

As I said above, you start with the highest pilot skill and work your way to the lowest pilot skill

End Phase

During this phase all players remove unused tokens from the board and prepare for the next phase

The game ends when there is only one player left, or team if your are playing teams

Game Components

2x TIE Fighters

1x X-Wing

Pilot Cards

Movement Markers

Obstacle Markers

6x Dice (3 Red, 3 Green)

Action Tokens

Rulebook

Quick Play Guide

Shield Tokens

Critical Damage Deck

Modification/Upgrade Deck

Theme

A sci-fi dogfighting wargame set in the Star Wars Universe

Replay Value

For fans of the game, nigh on infinite replayability when you consider the number of expansions available for the game. Most games are limited to 100 Points per Player. That means each player has 100 points in order to build a squad for the game. These points can quickly be swallowed up with pilots, and modifications. Part of the fun is being able to get the most bang for your buck running a lot of unmodified ships or building a team of 2-3 ships that can do a lot of damage.

Favourite Part

Flying my favourite ships in a Star Wars dogfight

Least Favourite Part

Rolling blanks on the dice

Expansions

Loads, think of a ship in Star Wars, it probably has an expansion for this game. With the Second Edition of the game there is even more plus conversion kits for 1st Ed ships

The Bottom Line

This is a good entry into wargaming, all the stats are on cards so there are no complex stats to remember. The gameplay is simple and the game plus expansion are ready to play out of the box as the ships are already painted.

The Force is with this one

10/10 Proton Torpedoes

Game Designers: Jason Little

Game Artists: Matt Allsopp , Sacha Angel Diener , Jon Bosco, Matt Bradbury, Blake Henriksen , Jason Juta , Lucasfilm Ltd., Henning Ludvigsen , Jorge Maese , Dallas Mehlhoff , Scott Murphy , David Auden Nash , Vlad Ricean , Matthew Starbuck , Nicholas Stohlman , Angela Sung

Game Publishers: Fantasy Flight Game

Images courtesy of BoardGameGeek

Please note my review was for the First Edition of X-Wing, the Second Edition has drastically changed the game