X-Wing Match Report

Rebel Mini Swarm vs. two big Imperial Ships

I've become quite keen on Fantasy Flight Games' X-Wing Game . A friend and I are gradually expanding the ships that we've tried out and this was the first to feature the TIE Defender. The Defender is the peak of Imperial Design philosophy, which appears to be "let's take the TIE Fighter and stick a few more wings on it". So was it any good? Well in a way we did find out, in a way we didn't...

The Rebel Forces
I've got a theory that the Rebels should work with each other, so I went for a Y-Wing that can pass on Target Locks ("Dutch" Vander) and an X-Wing that could pass on Focus tokens (Garven Dreis). I then bulked those ships out with an extra Rookie X-Wing and two vanilla Z-95s.

The Imperials
Just two ships, a Firespray and a Defender. But both were tricked out with a lot of expansions and with good, but expensive, pilots.

The Game
The forces lined up for their initial "joust", I had the Rebels while my friend had the Imperials. Both of his ships were piloted by better pilots than mine (and flown by a better player than me) so I had to place first. I placed my ships in the middle, he split his apart. I've fought the Firespray before and knew that it was a tough nut to crack. So I decided to focus on the Defender, I thought it was the slightly weaker link, all of my ships then went straight for it.

The result? One dead Defender... It did get to shoot first and did a lot of damage to Garven, my best X-Wing pilot, but it was hammered by the attacks from five ships who benefitted from the target lock passing. They should have benefited from the focus passing too, but I blew that part. It was enough, the Defender went down. This left the Firespray zooming in on my side with my ships facing the opposite direction, and my ships aren't very good at turning, so I lumber around.

The Firespray is packing a heavy laser cannon, it does a lot of damage and I loose Garven but I'm turning around... I chase the Firespray up the table...

Then I remember that the thing has a rear firing arc and one of my Z-95s gets a pummelling at point blank range from the thing. But the Firespray is running out of room... The Y-Wing has already landed one ion token on it, one more and it's ionised and might fly off the table...

I manage to ionise the ship once more but it doesn't quite fly off the table, it recovers in time to take a hard turn. The ionisation and the hard turn he has to do keeps him slow. This means that I can pick my range and stay out of that rear arc, I pour on the damage and it goes down.

A Rebel victory!

Conclusions

• A Rebel mini-swarm can hit quite hard, you're rolling a lot of dice in your attacks.
• The Defender is great at turning around, it can do a 180 without taking any stress, which had it survived the first pass would have been a great ability.
• The Defender is still relatively fragile (well compared to the Firespray), and up against 5 rebel ships it will have a tough time. It's questionable whether loading it up with so many points worth of upgrades was a good decision. A few more cheaper Defenders might have been a better bet.
• The Defender was unlucky to take so much damage in that first joust, it rolled appallingly on its evades. I still think that the Rebels would have taken it out not much after the point when it died. But this does highlight that when you have a smaller number of ships the extremes of bad luck will hurt you more than when you've got a greater number of ships to help spread it out between.

We're not dead... ok, ok I died but it was just a game!

Ok, it has been a while… but the Finely Diced Gamers are still here and attempting to get a few additional blogs written. As primarily a games group, it’s been pretty great to see a few new faces join our gaming evenings, perhaps we’ll see a few new writers and articles presented for reading on here too.

As well as being pretty open to new gamers, we’re also pretty open to all types of board games, war games, digital games and even the occasional miniatures game. I’ll be honest I’ve had a huge push to miniature game again and I’m using the momentum to paint some of my old 40K miniatures. The reason for this re-interest in modelling is because, well I recently turned 40 and as a present from my fabulous wife (Becca), I’ve been provided with a permanent space where I can model, paint and even play (solitaire) games if I so choose…

Now, primarily the miniatures that I’ve collected have been Games Workshop (a long time ago), and as such are pretty much all Out of Production (OOP) now. In fact, further back on the blog you can find an after action report (AAR) from when a few of us played Necromunda – my Van Saars are still unpainted but the plan is to get them ready for action and possibly get a rematch against Matt’s house Cawdor and Rebecca’s house Goliath gang.

However, I no longer feel obliged to purchase and collect GW, perhaps it’s the prices or perhaps I just want to try something else. Regardless, I now have two modelling projects that I’ve undertaken and neither of them are GW, but they look super cool and I’ve actually started painting some of them. Allow me to explain.

So… literally just arrived, opened but yet to be readied for use is Super Dungeon Explore (SDE).

SDE is a dungeon crawler inspired by old Japanese console RPGs. The 52 included miniatures are done in a cute / chibi / super-deformed style, which means the head is roughly the same size as the rest of the body. I’ve had my eye on these miniatures (and specifically this game) for a while – they just look super detailed and the game being a dungeon crawl sounds pretty good too. I shall not go into too much detail since my plan is to update with a blog following my attempts to get this game modelled, painted and brought out to the table – watch this space.

Now the other project is a fairly new war game called Dropzone Commander.

Now this is a joint project between Jay and myself. Both of us wanted to get into a miniatures war game system but wanted to actively avoid GW – a few systems looked interesting but this was ultimately the game that we both wanted to play. Part of the appeal is that the game comes as a starter set, which means that there’s enough in the box to get an idea of the game and then allow you to make a decision whether to indulge and buy more… sorry, increase the size of your chosen army, or not.

Jay has taken the part of the alien scourge (skimmers), whereas I have got the fabulous UCM (lots of tanks). Now this is also a work in progress since Jay has still to complete painting his arm. At the last look I’ve got about 50% of my starter army ready (all my tanks and APC’s are painted awaiting fine details) although my ground soldiers and drop-ships still need further prep work. I’ve not painted anything in a very long time but what I’ve done so far I’ve enjoyed – it’s certainly a challenge painting models that are at a 10mm scale. Once we get this to the table there will most certainly be another AAR.

Talking of getting Games to the Table, we have still been having the occasional game too. The most recent game played has been Tales of the Arabian Nights.

This game was played at our last evening of gaming, there were five of us playing. Simply put, each person decides what their own win condition is, which is done by choosing a score that can be split between story and destiny points – adding up to a total of 20. You then have to take your character around the map completing quests, scoring (story & destiny) points and ultimately experiencing a story as you would an old Steve Jackson “choose your own adventure” book. For those not old enough to remember, these books all started in a similar way, but as you read you would be asked to make decisions… decide to try and kill the monster, goto p75, slip past the monster, goto p99. 

This took the entirety of the evening with some very peculiar story’s being told, some of us got married, some were being pursued by ner’do wells and I died… no-one told me that death was even a possibility (fortunately my brother? Was able to take up my quest), unfortunately I didn’t win. A good game and it made for a very enjoyable evening… but you do need to play with individuals who don‘t mind making a fool of themselves or reading a lot (there’s a lot of reading).

Finally, The Resistance – I got given this for my birthday and managed to play this with 7 people soon after.

 
Everyone seemed to have a good time, although we all got called a spy at one point or another. Essentially this is a game spread over 5 missions, with a team selected from everyone playing by a team leader (which is continuously moving from one person to the next) being tasked to complete at least three of five missions successfully… but you don’t know who are the spies or if they have been selected for the mission –and it only takes one spy for a mission to fail.

As each mission completes, successfully or not, you start to deduce who the spies may be and those loyal to the Resistance (the spies know the other spies). To add further pressure – everybody gets to vote on who goes on each mission – it is possible to fail a mission if you’re not satisfied with the team leader or their team choice – just decide quickly whose going – five no votes and it becomes an automatic fail and the spies win the game.

Note to self – it’s not a good thing when everyone agrees with a team being sent on a mission, it typically means there is a spy on the mission.

Right, I’m off to take photos of the unboxing of Super Dungeon Explore for the next piece which will hopefully be up shortly.

Yo Ho Ho.....

Just had to write a quick post to point people towards the latest release from Two Hour Wargames. They produce some really interesting rules for tabletop wargames which have a lot of flavour, with great roleplaying and campaign elements. I've a few of their books as PDFs and have messed around little but it's their latest I am most interested in.

"And a Bottle of Rum" is their new product focussing on pirates, and our group really does enjoy a little over the top pirate gaming. I grabbed a copy as they had a sale over the weekend, and I might try it out if I can get over the current bout of sleep deprivation. One of the great things about their rules is that they can be played competitively, cooperatively or even solo, which makes getting them on the table and testing them out a little easier. The campaign and character creation usually has a lot of tables to roll on, and there are reaction tables for almost everything which determines how non player characters react to your actions.

Just need some miniatures...though I might just makes some card ones for now.

Anyway, some info from their website:

“FIFTEEN MEN ON THE DEAD MAN’S CHEST - -“
Everyone likes Pirates…okay, maybe not everyone but, if you’re reading this, I bet you do! So how do you like your Pirates? What? Let me explain.

YOUR PIRATES, YOUR WAY!
Some like their Pirates from history, you know, Blackbeard, the Spanish Main and such. But some like their Pirates a little more open-ended. More “what if” history, where the game is grounded in the period, but the player is open to do what he wants. Write your own story, if you will.
In “And a Bottle of Rum” we do both. We start you off learning the mechanics of the game. Build your crew, get your first ship, etc. We give you all the game mechanics you’ll need for you table top adventures. Not strictly a miniatures game but not a traditional Role-Playing Game either. We like to call it an Immersion Game where you take the role of a Pirate Captain and fight and flee as needed to gain Fame and Fortune.
Inside you'll find...
Rules for small land Encounters from Carousing to Smuggling.
Rules for Big Land Battles for sacking cities.
Rules for ship to ship combat with boarding actions.
Rules for Big Sea Battles with multiple ships per player.
To cap it off, in “And a Bottle of Rum.” We give you two Campaign areas. The first is the Spanish Main, the New World around 1660; the Golden Age of Piracy, if you will. That’s the historical part with the places and people of the time period.
The second is the “what if” historical version. Instead of the Spanish Main you’re plying your trade off the coast of Lemuria, seeking the charms and treasures of Mermaids then carousing in the Trade Ports of … but I digress.
What we’re saying is you can Pirates your way. Torn from the pages of history or from your imagination, it’s up to you! So grab a beverage of choice and prepare for nights of high adventure as you write your story. Listen! Hear the song? Sing along matey, you know the words.

You can also find some more information at their blog, with some examples of play.