Game Play / Rules / Complexity
As I’ve mentioned, squad-building is a big part of X-Wing and there are a ton of options. As I write this there have been 14 waves of ships released for version 1.0 across three (well, really five) factions. There are hundreds of different upgrade cards that interact in various ways. When something does really weird and unexpectedly powerful stuff, Fantasy Flight might issue an errata (card update) that changes the wording on the card, or even the way a ship works. The most famous of these in the early days of the game was the nerf (weakening) of the TIE Phantom. It used to be incredibly difficult to kill a Phantom so FFG changed how the de-cloaking process worked. It changed the game significantly. In the more recent years the Jumpmaster was killing everything in site, so FFG decided to completely rework the stat line for the ship. Palpatine is an example of a crew upgrade card that was changed. As an aside: it was the progression of errata that was given as a primary reason for reworking the game as 2.0.
Board Game Geek users give X-Wing a complexity rating of 2.48 / 5 but more people have weighted it a “2” than any other number. In my opinion I think it’s closer to a 3, simply because of the way the game has grown in complexity over the years.
Once you have built your squad you get to start moving ships around and shooting stuff! There are a variety of movement templates ranging from 1 to 5 in length. There are three types of movement template (straight, bank, and turn) giving you up to 11 different choices for your maneuver. The actual choices you have are limited by the pilot/ship combinations you have selected (and sometimes upgrade cards as well). You set up all of your moves in secret, before you know what you’re opponent is going to do! Anticipating your opponents moves based on his or her squad composition, current ship state (is a ship flying with just one hull left, or is it full strength…does it have an auxiliary weapon that requires it to be at a certain range…does it have a turret) or even the personality of your opponent (aggressive or cautious)…all of these things go into planning your next set of moves.
Each ship has a basic personality (TIE Fighters are fast and nimble, X-Wings a bit slower, the Falcon can turn on a dime).
Once you’ve dialed in your move and everything is ready, the ships are activated. Ships that are Pilot Skill 1 go first. The ship reveals its hidden maneuver and executes it. As long as the ship didn’t bump into another ship (or worse, an asteroid!) then they probably get to do an action. Actions include things like Focus, Evade, or Target Lock. Most ships only get one action at a time (Darth Vader’s ability is that he gets two, which doesn’t seem fair at times, but hey…evil 😈 ). As the ships complete their moves, the next level of pilot skill moves, all the way up to level 9.
Why do lower level pilots move first? Shouldn’t the better pilots get to go? It turns out it’s a real advantage to move last, because you can see everything else that has happened before you. That way you have a lot more information to help you decide what your actions are.
Oh, and the higher pilot skills get to shoot first. Han Solo is a 9. 😉 After all of the PS 9 pilots shoot it goes to 8 and 7 and so on down to 1. If any PS 1 pilot is still around at the end, even he (or she) gets to shoot. It’s a fairly elegant mechanic, and I like how it plays out in the game.
Shooting ships is done by rolling dice. My red attack dice go up against your green defense dice. If I roll more hits than you can cancel, damage occurs.
At the end of the round is the clean-up phase where you pick up expired tokens and figure out if anybody blew up or not. (Someone always blows up. Eventually.)
In a casual game, you play until you kill everything, or until you decide to quit. In a tournament game there is a specific time limit and other restrictions that I won’t bother going into here.
As fun as that sounds, it gets better. 🙂 There is a fan-made expansion for X-Wing called “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster.” It’s amazing, and I’ll have an entire series of posts just about that. For now, just know that instead of setting up ships and blowing each other up, you start as a lowly PS 2 X-Wing or Y-Wing pilot flying from a remote hidden rebel base, trying to keep the Evil Empire from taking over the Aturi Cluster. As you blow stuff up (something always blows up) you advance in pilot skill, much like leveling up in a video game.
I can’t tell you how much fun it is. Well, I can, just in another post. 😆