A month or so ago I was chatting with Shawn through text and he mentioned that he had purchased a new game for him and the Gamer Bros to try, Star Wars: X-Wing. At the time I wasn’t too intrigued as I knew it was a miniature game and our first foray into the genre wasn’t exactly a rousing success. Heroclix had proven to be rather slow-paced due to our inexperience with the rules and all of the different powers. Relax, all you Heroclix fans out there, I do think the game is probably really, really good once you get a feel for the rules, and opening up booster bricks is a blast. Maybe one day we will revisit the game and give it another go. We had also talked about trying Warmachine/Hordes but the price point is nuttier than squirrel crap and the rules seem a bit..intricate, yeah, we’ll go with that. I do believe Shawn bought a starter set however so that’s something we will try as well. So many games, so little time.
Where was I? Ah, yes, X-Wing. Well, Shawn had told me that the games were essentially quick for the most part and that him and his boys really enjoyed it. At the point my interest peaked and I made the comment that he should bring his starter set over the next time we had a nerd night. I watched a couple tutorial videos on the game and was surprised at how much strategy was involved and yet the game mechanics were fairly simple. Last Friday, Shawn stopped over and true to his word, brought the game with him. I had honestly forgot about it and had my bag of Dicemasters rarin’ to go. Once I saw the little Tie Fighters I was sold. The detail on the ships is amazing and with Dicemasters now a distant memory, we quickly got a game underway. I chose the Tie Fighters because, well, they’re frigging’ Tie Fighters and he took the X-wing. Since it had been a week since I had watched videos on the game, my head was still jammed full of budgets and accruals from work and I remembered a fraction of the information. After a few turns I had the hang of it and was feeling pretty confident, until Shawn started referencing the rule book and we realized that we were playing with maybe half of the actual rules and were ignoring special abilities and maneuvers. Which would explain why it took so long for us to really get into any sort of meaningful combat. I mean if I had known about Barrel Roll, I would have absolutely…still lost the game. But to be fair it would have went faster. We had basically flown past each other the first 4-5 turns with little to no action, but this would have been remedied by using all of the rules.
After he creamed me and left to go home, I hopped in my car to run an errand (ah, adulting, so much fun) and thought about the game on the way. Truthfully, I wasn’t all that impressed with the game. Then I found myself reflecting on some of the maneuvers I had made and realized the misplays I made. It was at that point that I realized the potential the game had. It was actual pretty entertaining and something I wanted to try again. I ended up spending some time on Youtube polishing up on the advanced rules and then went on EBay to see if I could get any decent deals on some pieces for it. Unfortunately, while it doesn’t have the price point of games like Warhammer and Warmachine/Hordes, it’s still on the pricey side. I’m still eyeballing the Slave-1, but it’s $30 for a little model; a very cool, detailed little model, but that’s quite a bit to drop on one piece. I’ve told myself, as well as my bank account, that I’m going to wait to play a few games using all of the rules before I decided to buy in. So will X-Wing make it into our regular rotation? Well only time will tell, with so many good games out there and not a ton of time during our nerd nights, it takes a really solid game to make a repeat appearance. However, from my time with it, X-Wing is a contender for a spot.