Title: Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game
Players: 2
Play Time: Varies
Designer: Jason Little et al
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Year: 2012
The review below is based on multiple years of experience with version 1.0. Once I have enough experience with 2.0 I will review that as a separate post.
Overview
The game supports two players (although multi-player variants are available / documented multiple places online). Each player builds a squad from a particular faction (Rebel, Imperial, Scum are the primary factions). The first part of your squad is your list of pilots; pilots are paired with ships and cannot be moved. Luke flies an X-Wing, Han files the Falcon (although Chewie and Lando are also options) and so on. There is a base cost for each pilot/ship combination as shown in some of the sample cards below.
Each pilot has a Pilot Skill (PS, in orange) which determines their movement and shooting order. (In case you’re wondering, yes, Han shoots first.) Each ship has four characteristics that designate attack strength (red), agility or evasiveness (green), hull (yellow) and shield (blue). If a ship loses all of its hull it’s destroyed. I told you something always gets blown up…
Squad building is one of the main attractions of the game for some, not so much for others. I like reading about different squads on the Internet, but I also like trying out things that could be completely crazy (and often are). For the most part though people just want to put ships on the table and make “pew-pew-pew” noises when they shoot.
Squad building is the passive part of the game. You can do it at home, or talk strategies / killer combos over with your friends. Putting the ships on the table and plotting out your movements, that’s where the interactivity comes in. There are casual games, tournament games, even a world championship if you can believe it.
Overall the game is a combination deck-building + tabletop miniatures game. It benefits / drawbacks of each of those types of games.
Components
Unlike many miniatures games the ships for X-Wing come painted out of the box. (That doesn’t stop people from re-painting them though!) The cards have a nice texture and are strong enough to stand up to use. Of course Fantasy Flight is more than willing to sell you protective sleeves in various sizes to help keep them that way. 😉 The other components are punched out of cardboard and hold up reasonably well. The one item that everybody seems to wear out is the “1-straight” maneuver template because it’s used for movement, boost, barrel roll, and even for temporarily marking a ship while someone else does a fly-by.
I think the components are good for the price. There are 3rd party replacements made out of laser-cut wood or acrylic which are really nice. You can also win officially produced alternatives if you’re good / lucky enough to win a tournament, or at least place high enough.
The one complaint I would have is the base game doesn’t have enough dice. It’s not a problem for two people to share the movement templates, but you only get 3 green (defense) and 3 red (attack) dice. At close range an X-Wing should be throwing four red dice, and at long range a TIE Fighter should be throwing four green dice. It would have been nice to see that many in the box.