Experience
One of the best parts of playing at a local game store is that the X-Wing crowd — at least in my experience — is one of the friendliest groups I’ve ever experienced! That being said, I do think that the game can be fiddly to teach. It has lots of moving parts and modifiers and chained actions…a lot of stuff to keep track of. With the right coach you can pick up the game fairly quickly and be blowing stuff up in no time. Stuff always…you know it by now I guess. 😉
If you want to get deep into squad building there are a ton of resources on the Internet. You can find out which lists are winning tournaments, or maybe more importantly which ships are not winning (I’m looking at you, TIE Punisher). There are even web sites that provide statistics as to the best action to take in a specific situation. (Do I focus or target lock? My opponent has 2 green dice and an evade token. No, sorry, he has a focus token. What do I dooooo?)
If you are part of a crowd that is hard-core and you’re a casual gamer, you’re probably not going to enjoy X-Wing, or any other game for that matter. I’ve been fortunate in that I have a great group to play with, plus since I live in a major metropolitan area in the United States I actually have about a dozen game stores in my area that all sponsor X-Wing Night.
Overall Score
I love this game. At the time I am writing this post, this is one of my “desert island” games. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on the game, more on game accessories and storage containers, and even more on accessories for fan-made expansions to the game. I don’t regret a bit of it.
I gave this game a 9/10 at Board Game Geek. Wait, what? 😕 After everything I said about how much I loved this game, how can it not be a 10? It’s really hard for me to give anything a perfect score. Even when I review stuff on Amazon I mostly put 4 stars (out of five). It’s enough to say that for a game that I initially thought looked like a waste of time has become a weekly event for me. We’ve been through the Heroes campaign three times, we’re going through Battlestar Pallas next (it’s a fan-made-expansion for a fan-made-expansion), plus we’re playing Risk Wing which is a mash-up of Diplomacy, Risk, and — of course — X-Wing.
And next month 2.0 comes out. My credit card is already warmed up. 😎
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