X-Wing Returns

I gifted Ziggy a X-Wing 2.0 starter box for his birthday a couple of weeks ago. He had not yet taken the plunge and it was my little act of encouragement to push him over the edge. To accompany it, he picked up the Rebel conversion kit. Last evening we put our kit on the table and gave it a go. Instead of the typical points-buy method, we went with the quick play option of selection up to eight threat levels of ships from a list of pre-fabbed options. Here's an example:

So for the Rebels, you could take a Luke Skywalker X-Wing with the upgrades shown and that counts as a TL3 choice.

I rolled with the First Order. I just got the TIE Silencer (Kylo's ship) a couple weeks ago and really wanted to give it a go. He was joined by a Special Forces TIE and a regular TIE/fo with an excellent pilot - "Midnight."

Ziggy remained true to form and used three X-Wings - Luke, Wedge and a schlub.

I made some terrible decisions early in the match that resulted in Kylo and the SF TIE to suffer considerable damage. This had the undesirable result of making me fly defensively.

Before long, Midnight was the lone representative of Law and Order left and although he fought valiantly, his luck couldn't hold out forever.

He's a bad dude and I'll have to remember to lean on him in the future.

I also made the common mistake of spreading the damage around entirely too much. I caused a total of seven damage, enough to kill an X-Wing for sure, but it was allocated amongst all of the X-Wings, not concentrated on one like it should have been. Oh well, we had a great time and Ziggy's quite happy with second edition. It really does address the crowd complaints of first edition, adds a few nice mechanics and by keeping the points system 100% virtual, Fantasy Flight has the ability to adjust / balance ships and upgrades on the fly. As irritated as I was when they released it, I have to admit that it's a significant improvement on what was already a great game.