Earlier this month, the Wargame society in HK had its general assembly.
The society is very healthy club in Hong Kong with a good player base. It host many competitions on different games to bring a great variety in gaming. The General Assembly is the opportunity to all gather and for me to lament on how little time I spent gaming in the last 12 month. Before using the afternoon to play. we lunch over a traditional curry, quick speeches from the board and auctions from the members looking to clean up their shed or buying new toys.
This year, we planned with Jeroen, another X-Wing fan, a story-based X-Wing game. The idea was to depart from the usual dog fight, and add in objectives and asymmetric play.
Setup: 2x X-Wing mats
Points: 100 pts each + 2 free transports
Restrictions: No more than 1 named pilot.
The game:
There were 3 crates in the middle. Each transport can carry only one crate. To capture a crate, the transport has to be within a distance of "1" (distance "1" on the shooting ruler) and spend the whole turn doing nothing (no action, no shooting).
The victory is determined as follow:
- whoever has the most crates wins.
- in the event of a tie (same number of crates on both side), whoever has lost the most points lose.
The game stop when one player has secured the most crates, or in the event of a tie, once no more ships of one side is on the table. Players can leave the mat by exiting through their deployment side. Spaceships are then assumed to have hyperspaced away.
I played the Rebel and Jeroen, the First Order. We used 2 different strategies. Quantity for the Rebel and Quality for the First Order.
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| The First Order on the move. Note Kylo Ren speedy moves |
Jeroen had 3 starfighters, including Kylo Ren, all maxed up with options
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| Quantity as a quality in itself |
I had Luke Skywalker, 2 X-Wing, 1 A-Wing and 1 Z-95
At the beginning, Jeroen got himself surprised by the speed of Kylo Ren, who within 3 turns ended up in the middle of the Rebel force. It seemed that Kylo Ren really wanted to kill Luke Skywalker and threw away all caution. Kylo Ren blew up, leaving his force leaderless. Nevertheless, as the Rebel fighters were focused on Kylo, they ended up in the worst position possible to chase Jeroen's transports and the F.O. captured 2 crates. The score is then 1 crate in Rebel's hands and 2 crates in F.O.'s hands. Will Jeroen hyperspace away?
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| The YT-1300 has 1 crate, but the F.O. quietly capture 2 crates and prepare to turn away |
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| The Rebels decide to use the YT-1300 low initiative to block the way of the other transports, risking to lose it |
With the First Order still very dangerous, the Rebels resorted to their trademarks: tricks and the use of seemingly YT-1300 to block the path of F.O. transport. The trap worked and the Rebels gained enough time to destroy one transport and captured back its crate, winning with two c
rates vs. one.
It was a fun game with a different strategy to apply: Choosing between Shooting fighters, protecting transports and shooting other's transports.
The F.O. almost won. The F.O. shuttle ran away with 1 hull points and without the YT-1300, Jeroen would have escaped easily. Kylo Ren sacrifice had enough disorganized the Rebels fighters.
