Star Wars: X-Wing Tournament at Titan Games Stourbridge

I took part in my first X-Wing Tournament today; it was a day of fierce competition and tense matches! I was running a Rebel squad, and my army list was as follows:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21	100
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21
X-Wing: Rookie Pilot	21	21
Y-Wing: “Dutch” Vander	23	37
Concussion Missiles	4
Cluster Missiles	4
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R2 Astromech	1

 

So, a lot of my strategy was centred on Dutch’s special ability, which is to allow a friendly ship within range 1 to acquire a target lock as soon as he does the same. I invariably deployed in a square formation, usually on the right corner of the board. Here’s how I got on:

My first opponent was Gareth, who was running the one thing I wasn’t expecting: Swarming rebels. Rebel fighters are usually quite expensive but when the Z-95 Headhunters were released for the Rebels, it became possible to buy ships for twelve points each, and since each has to take four hits to go down, tackling them head on is a messy business indeed. Gareth had six of them and also a Smuggler YT-1300 for some extra clout. I managed to take out one of the Z-95s, but after that they blocked anything that remotely resembled a clever move and I lost the game outright.

My second opponent was another guy called Matt, and he was running an interesting combination: two TIE fighters, a Firespray and a TIE Phantom. I recognised that there was going to be a lot of talent on the field, given that Imperial squads usually run numbers, so I decided to press my advantage by taking out the two TIE fighters first. Here the Y-Wing came into its own, as I managed to Ion Cannon the Firespray into an asteroid so that he couldn’t use his considerable firepower. After destroying that, the focus came onto the TIE Phantom and that proved to be a pain in the bum, since I just didn’t have the manoeuvrability to get a clear shot on it. I did my best with the Ion cannon, but in the end time was called and I won the game on points.

My third game was fun and extremely tense. Andy was running a peculiar set-up of Soontir Fel, Howlrunner, Backstabber, a Black Squadron and an Academy Pilot. This struck me as odd as it was the first time I’d fought a squadron with no duplicate pilots, which meant that for once it mattered which one I should take out first. Andy suffered from trying to fly the four TIE fighters in close formation; a powerful move if you can pull it off but if not you end up crashing into each other. This gave me some more time to get into position, and while my first Rookie Pilot didn’t last very long, I was fortunate enough to be able to take out Howlrunner quite quickly. Backstabber was the next to go, but the rest of the match was a deadly game of Cat and Mouse as we tried to outmanoeuvre each other. I wasn’t able to destroy anything else but neither was Andy, giving me a win on points.

My final game was against Russ, who was running two B-wings and an A-wing, rather cleverly deployed. I thought I was doing OK to begin with; I lost a Rookie but manage to take the lesser of the two B-wings with me. However, by this point I was exhausted and my concentration was slipping; I managed to make the mistake of flying my Y-wing the wrong way. I ended up off the board, which meant I had one Rookie left to take on two Named Pilots. He never had a chance, but I made Russ work for it!

So, two wins, two losses, and out of fourteen people I came ninth. I’m quite pleased with that, since as it was my first tournament I thought I was going to get absolutely destroyed. There’ll be time enough later to think about how I could improve my squad, though. I might get an A-wing next, and see where that takes me!

1/3/2014: X-Wing: A Massacre

Ado guys, it's been a while since I've played this...

I had a game of X-Wing today in Titan Games with Rich Bloomer and it was basically a massacre; I took three fighters to his five and was destroyed piecemeal. But as ever, I'm willing to learn from my mistakes.

My squadron was:

Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
X-Wing: Biggs Darklighter	25	28	100
R2-F2	3
X-Wing: Wedge Antilles	29	33
R2 Astromech	1
Marksmanship	3
Y-Wing: Horton Salm	25	39
Proton Torpedoes (2)	8
Ion Cannon Turret	5
R5 Astromech	1

The idea behind the squadron was that Biggs and Wedge - both in X-Wings - would fly in close formation. Wedge would use his offensive capabilities of reducing the defender's agility to do some damage, and Biggs' effect that forces the enemy to fire at him rather than another fighter would keep the heat off Wedge. It kind of worked, but I mis-interpreted Biggs' effect. I thought that if the target was within range 1 of the shooter then the effect would kick in, but in fact the target had to be within range 1 of Biggs. I'll have to be a bit more careful if I'm going to run that tactic again!

The Y-Wing was to provide long-range support and hopefully score a couple of kills early on to keep the heat off the X-Wings. Sadly this didn't happen, though it was astonishing how difficult it was to kill; Rich spent around 3 or 4 turns with that being the only model left! The Ion cannon proved surprisingly effective as well, though perhaps this is because I misread the rules. I thought if one of my attacks hit then it cancelled out all other dice, so Rich wouldn't have had to roll his - but I've read the relevant section on the Fantasy Flight Forums and apparently he would still have been able to roll his dice, but I wouldn't have done more than 1 damage no matter how well I rolled. The effect of forcing the enemy to do nothing but fly slowly in one direction for a turn can take someone out of the fight for a turn though, and it ignores the normal rules for arc of fire so it is not to be taken lightly.

Also, did you see the mistake in the army list? Yes, I put the R2 unit with Wedge and the R5 unit with Horton; it should have been the other way around.

The R2 unit allows all movements of 1-2 speed as green manoeuvres. This would have been invaluable for the Y-Wing, because it has more than the usual number of red manoeuvers to give it stress tokens, and very few greens. The R2 unit would have been great for counteracting this.

The R5 unit on the other hand allows you to turn over a Critical Hit card at the end phase so that it only counts as a hit rather than a Critical. Honestly, I only took this one to fill out the points, but it proved useful in the end so it's worth hanging on to until I find something better.

So what happened in the battle?

I deployed my fighters in a 'step' formation; Wedge, Biggs and Horton. The first turn was basically spent moving towards each other on a diagonal slant across the board. I had hoped to take the flank of the TIE squadron, but instead I ended up flinging Wedge headfirst in to Darth Vader. He lasted two turns. Biggs was next to go; after flipping around to face the other way, he fired off a couple of shots only to be shot down by the entire squadron facing him. Horton lasted a little longer, as his craft was a little more hard-wearing, but he just didn't have the firepower to hold his own against 5 TIEs and went down after a few turns.

What would I do differently? Well, apart from the aforementioned changes to the army list, I would consider using the Ion cannon a lot more as it was surprisingly useful and did a good job of taking at least some of the enemy out of the fight. I've got another game coming up tomorrow so we'll see...

Thunderstone at Titan Games, 20/1/2014

It has been a long, long time since I've played this game. Usually when I play games with Dave, we try playing things that run a little faster than this. But it's also the game I have that supports up to five players, and one I thought would be good to play in a shop environment so I bought it to Titan games and played a game against Steve Hinnett.

It's been a while since I've posted about this so to summarise how it works: It's basically dungeon-bashing with cards. You attack monsters in a 'dungeon,' with penalties based on how deep into the dungeon you're going, with your cards that grant a certain amount of attack power. You can also visit the 'village' and spend the gold your cards give you to get more heroes, spells and items to improve your performance. The idea of the game is to get to the Thunderstone, and as soon as one player obtains it, the game is over - and the person with the most victory points wins.

I got off to a good start by drawing some hands powerful enough to overcome some low-level monsters at the start of the game, however we quite quickly became stuck at a Sphinx and a couple of Oozes. They both had a relatively large amount of hit points and the Sphinx can only be harmed by magic. Getting bogged down like this is nothing unusual in Thunderstone, and we had to spend a while building up our decks to the point where we could at least take out some of the Oozes. At this point I had two options: Build up a magical attack to take on the Sphinx myself, or wait for Steve to do it and build up a party of fighter-type heroes to follow up with some of the smaller monsters. The trouble is I never really decided which of these I wanted to do, with the result that I never really built up a powerful-enough attack to be much of a threat to the other monsters, and my magic was taking far too long to build up. Steve killed the Sphinx in the end and took a whopping 7 victory points from it.

We had to call time on the game because the shop was closing, so we took stock of what we had achieved up to that point. Steve had beaten me 19-14, largely due to the Sphinx, so well done to him for coming up with a game plan and sticking to it. Could I have pulled it back had the game gone on? Well, it's a possibility, but Steve had a huge amount of damage coming out by then, so the race would have been on.

Either way, we had a lot of fun playing it. It is a refreshing change from Magic The Gathering, where games are often won and lost on deck construction before you've even started playing. It is a balanced set of rules and cards, at least with two players, but one thing we've not been able to determine yet is how the game would play with more players. I suspect a larger level of resource-rush, because you'd have 3-5 people all going after the same resources which would be a lot more limiting, and of course there is always the possibility that this could de-rail the whole game, but we'd really like to check it out and see what happens.

Lets hope we can, in the not-too-distant future!

Magic The Gathering: Blue/White v Black.

I've decided to include my Magic: The Gathering games into the gaming blog, in case anybody is interested in hearing how my games went and also assessing my deck build. I played 2 games today in Titan Games, Stourbridge, and lost them both. Here's how it all went down:

My deck is Blue and White, and is built around the tactic of swarming the field with creatures and shutting down the opposing creatures. It was built as follows:

Mana:

• Island: 15
• Plains: 9

Creatures

• Coral Merfolk: 4
• Merfolk Spy: 1
• Air Servant: 2
• Seacoast Drake: 2
• Warden of Evos Isle: 2
• Messenger Drake: 1
• Wind Drake:1
• Seraph of Dawn: 3
• Serra Angel: 1
• Master of Diversion: 2
• Setessan Battle Priest: 2 (I managed to put these in without realising!)
• Deputy of Aquittals: 1

Other Spells

• Claustrophobia: 4
• Frost Breath: 4
• Riot Control: 1
• Spare from Evil: 1
• Show of Valour: 2

Artefacts

• Opaline Unicorn: 1
• Staff of the Mind Magus: 1
• Prowler's Helm: 1

Planeswalker: Venser the Sojourner.

The first thing to mention is that the games were one round each. The reason I've called it like that is because Steve used different decks for each game. They were both Black decks, but built slightly differently.

So, as I've mentioned, the tactic revolved around swarming the field with low-cost monsters, and doing as much as I could to make sure they were blocked as little as possible. It worked, but not quickly enough. My spells were getting through, but because they were low-powered attacks, they weren't hitting hard enough to stop Steve from building up an attack with his Black decks. But when it did work, it worked well, so I'm going to keep doing it.

I'm also going to change some of the deck:

I'm going to add 10 cards to it to bring it up to 72. This is because of my... thing with the numbers 4, 8 and 6, and 72 is the nearest legal limit of cards that divides into those three numbers. I've also swapped out both Setessan Battle Priest cards for two Scroll Thief cards, because their effect of allowing me to draw a card when they do battle damage is better conducive to my strategy. In addition to this I have added:

• Isperia's Skywatch: 2
• Opaline Unicorn: 1
• Darksteel Ingot: 1
• Celestial Flare: 1
• Solem Offering: 2
• Annul: 1
• Island: 1
• Show of Valour: 1
• Congregate: 1
• Archaeomancer: 1

We will see how this works out next time!