Recently, I ran some re-introductory games of X-Wing for my gaming group. Everyone has played before, but it has been some years. So many in fact, that the last time they played was first edition. To keep things easy, I decided to simplify matters and only fly pilot cards, no upgrades at all. Ordinarily I would say this logic is rather sound and helps avoid feels bad moments, but in this case I actually think it was a mistake.
To help set the stage a little, I had two classic matchups: Rebels vs Empire and Republic vs Separatists. Each side had 20 points, and I tried to make the squadrons interesting. The Empire had a bunch of TIEs, the Rebels classic alphabet soup, Republic Jedis and Clones, and the Separatists a bunch of droid fighters.
This is where I started to learn that not all starfighter cards are made equal. While yes, they might be the same cost, that cost a lot of times has upgrades in mind. Take for example the Droid gunship. One of it's abilities has to do with reloading munitions. You can only get munitions via upgrade cards. So I was paying for an ability I couldn't use. Meanwhile, the Jedi starfighters had force abilities built in, which basically act like their own upgrades. That made for a bit of a wonky matchup.
In my goal to avoid ships blowing up immediately, I had neutered many ships' combat abilities. I've found that X-Wing dice are very swingy, both offensively and defensively. Without solid or reliable dice manipulation, if the odds aren't in your favor, you can have multiple rounds of no damage whatsoever being done. And that was happening on both tables.
See the thing with X-Wing and other beer and pretzel games is that they need to move quickly, and for things to move quickly things need to die quickly. Since no one was dying, the games started to drag. What should have been a quick, fun little jaunt turned tiring as you had to maneuver over and over again to try to line up a shot that would just end up completely failing.
Eventually we did all get some damage to stick, and we had fun which is the most important thing. But I've come to appreciate what AMG was doing towards the end with their standard loadout cards, which include the fighter and all the expected upgrades in one easy to read card. No hunting down individual upgrades or finding out how many loadout points they take. Just right their on the card. Next time around I will for sure use those cards. Or at the very least give out some more upgrades to make things less dice-dependent.
-The Space Dinosaur
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