I had some pretty fun plays within the past couple hours. It's my night off for the week and I got together with a coworker for our board game night. Our commander is leaving and so we invited him over to play, along with a guy who lives in my dorm.
We played a game of Love Letter that lasted quite a while. A game of Guillotine was played and was a blast. I started off hammering someone with negative points, but they squeaked out a narrow victory over me.
Then we got down on a game of King of Tokyo. I wound up having pretty much the last turn of the game. The only other monster left was in Tokyo and was guaranteed to win on the next turn, either buy VP or killing me, his choice. I had shit int he way of cards that could help, had only 15 VP, and could not deal enough damage. I gamble on the card that grants you 9 VP if you roll one of each face on the dice and it paid off. One 1, 2, 3, claw, energy, and heart later I was victorious. Got three of those on my last re-roll too. It was pretty intense.
To be honest, I thought the X-Wing rules are pretty simple. But I have to say I played with the beginner rules at first and after my 4th game, I used the more advanced rules. I still do not have used droid cards etc., so I do not know if they slow down the overall pace of the game.
But after my few games of X-Wing, I just want to play more with more ships. It's a trap. As a teen, I have played tabletop games like Warhammer 40k, so maybe that's why I am enjoying X-Wing more than you do.
X Wing and Attack Wing games typically have a time component to them as well, such as 50 minutes, so make sure the matches don't last forever. But in this case, I'd also say that with lower attack dice numbers and higher defense dice numbers, a lot of X Wing matches end up being miss dodge miss dodge dodge dead. Attack Wing, on the other hand, with higher attack values compared to defense, is more of a slugging match.
Learning to maneuver is really a matter of practice. I, to this day, will still mess up. But you'll learn tricks like how to maintain a formation after turning.
On the home front, I picked up the newest wave of Attack Wing (Borg Cube, Vulcan D'Kyr, and Bajoran Interceptor). Played a Bajoran Scout Ship + 3x Interceptor build versus a single, decked out Borg Cube. It wasn't pretty. I roughed him up pretty bad but he ended up decimating me in the end.
It's funny because on this week's Dice Tower, Eric had pretty much the same experience and it reminded me of my handful of experiences with the game as well. I can't compare it to minis games because I'm a board gamer, and from the perspective of other 2p board games it does just feel like it takes too long for what it is. I know people go gaga over it, and even I have tons of figures (which are amazing), but I just could never get over the hump to really enjoying it as a game. Next time I might just try some of the scenarios rather than just army vs. army, which I find dull and overlong.
So I played another game of X-Wing tonight and had an absolute blast. The guy I played with used to be into 40K I guess and was familiar with moving minis around a table. I also played a lot more steadily and was not bumping pieces all over the place, which was what frustrated me last time. I felt like the game wasn't getting played right last time but this time I wasn't nudging ships or moving them around accidentally. I also got my moves down well, holding the template firmly in place and guiding my ships exactly where I wanted them. Since this was a casual game, we weren't playing by the normal rules of 'if there is a ship in front of you, hold the template above it and eyeball your movement.' We were taking the 1 straight template that is the exact length of a side of a ship base and using that to keep track of where a ship's exact place was, then moved the ship temporarily and made our moves. I was also better with my piloting and wasn't accidentally flying them into each other the whole game too.
We were doing a couple things that aren't strictly correct when it comes to official play: using range templates to measure stuff (not before the movement phase though), allowing people to take actions they forgot to take after movement (something I am bad about remembering), and so on.
My Dutch Y-Wing, Luke X-Wing, and Red Squadron X-Wing took out my coworker's Darth TIE Advanced and 5 Obsidian TIEs. We played a 100-pt game with squads I created over the weekend using a squad building and had a really great time. The game still lasted really long, 2 1/2 hours. But we had fun the whole time and are both looking forward to playing again next week, maybe one of the missions or something.
I also need more ships now. I want some Interceptors badly. Wish CSI had free APO shipping, because I would have bought two of the Imperial Aces packs at the $15.99 they were selling them for earlier. As it stands, my next acquisitions will probably be a Slave 1 and Mil Falcon.
Anyway, tonight's experience was a lot better than last weeks. Probably because I spent every day since that first play reading everything I could and familiarizing myself as much as possible with the game. I shot emails with the rules, FAQ, and tutorial vids to my coworkers and he was thoroughly solid with the game too by the time we played. Definitely a fun game.