X-Wing - Getting Re-Inspired with Rebels

When I started playing X-Wing nine months ago I gravitated towards rebels.  Although I bought pretty much everything, I found Rebels more inspiring, easier to get my head round, and more forgiving on the table.  I went to my first tournament with the classic Golden Daggers.  For those of you not down with the build names, this consists of 2x Gold Squadron Y-Wings with Ion Cannon Turret and 2x Dagger Squadron B-Wings with Advanced Sensors (AS).  This was very strong prior to the release of Imperial Aces and all the wave 4 shininess, and I won with four wins out of four, including an incredibly tough final against four ion cannon Y-wings.  Then Imperial Aces came out and everyone started flying Imperials, and I started to lose.  A lot.  Since then I have struggled to get back into rebels. 

However, last week I finally found something to make me adore Rebels once again, and I think it's really, really good, so I wanted to share it with you guys. 

X-Wing Tournament Report - Chaos City Store Championship

Last weekend I attended my first X-wing tournament, an official Store Championship at Chaos City Comics in St Albans.  In addition to being my first tournament, it was the first time the store had run one.  This considered, they did a pretty good job.  The only issue was the fact that the tables were smaller than regulation.  They were the correct width but the length was 6 inches shorter than normal.  The store was very open about this from the start, and it was made apparent in all their adverts, so I had no problem with it, and I don't think anyone else did either.  It just meant you had to adjust starting moves accordingly.  It was a four game event with 75 minute rounds, which turned out to be the perfect amount of time. very few people failed to finish each round, and it was always the same people, so I guess they were just slow players.

I had no idea how hard the field would be, and my only thoughts were that the current meta is supposedly very rebel based, so I came up with something to combat that threat, but which i felt might be able to hold its own against Imperial squadrons.  I was playing around with Squadron Builder a few weeks ago and came up with the following: 

B-wing - Dagger Squadron, advanced sensors

B-wing - Dagger Squadron, advanced sensors

Y-wing - Gold Squadron, ion cannon

Y-wing - Gold Squadron, ion cannon

Pros of the list

• Durability - you have 16 hull and 16 shields in total.
• Maneuverability/ability to stay on target (turrets, advanced sensors) even while ion’d.
• Complimentary dials enable formation flying.
• I like pilot skill 4 ships, as they are cheap, yet enable you to fire before the majority of other non-named pilots.
• Brutally effective against anything with agility 1 and very good against agility 2. 

Cons of the list

• You are amazingly easy to hit, and therefore easy to focus fire down.
• Not enough damage output to regularly put hits on agility three ships.
• Slow overall speed (4 forwards are red).

It turned out that this is a well known list nicknamed 'Golden Daggers' and is pretty widely used, but I wasn't aware of that until after the first game of the tournament.  I went into the event with genuinely zero expectations, so let's see how I fared. 

X-Wing tactics - Tie Fighters

Introduction

Hi all, and welcome to my first Star Wars ship review.  I intend to write one of these for each class of ship available in the X-Wing game.  However, there is a disclaimer.  I have not been playing long, only two months in fact, so I am by no means an expert.  There will certainly be many things I miss, and other things I flat out get wrong.  However, this is as much an exercise for myself as it is for you as readers.  Writing things like this down helps me to go over ideas, solidify them, and come up with new ones.  I am therefore happy for anyone to tear any or all of my ideas to shreds, as long as they do it constructively. 

Right, with that out of the way, let's begin.  The humble Tie Fighter seems a good place to start this series of ship overviews because it is the backbone of the Imperial fleet, both in the fiction, and the game.  Many 100 point squadrons will include nothing but standard Ties, and many others use them to fill out whatever remaining points might be available after the 'cool stuff' has been chosen. 

First, lets go over the strengths and weaknesses of a standard Tie Fighter.  

Why you should all be playing X-Wing

For most of last year I barely played, looked at, even thought about 40k or any other mini game.  Occasionally something would ignite a spark of interest and I'd paint a few guys or have a few games, but everything seemed overwhelmingly stale, and boredom would strike once more within days.  Then, after Christmas, I ran into a blog post somewhere about the X-Wing miniatures game.  While I'd heard about it before, I had never seen the minis in detail or heard about the rules.  For the first time in ages, I was immediately interested and since I had some amazon vouchers I bought a starter set (only £22) to see for myself.  Two days later I Ebayed off an old copy of space hulk and bought £120s worth of other ships and a playing mat and haven't looked back.

I will make no secret of the fact that I love this game, and I just want to run over what I think makes it so brilliant, as well as touch on a few minor niggles I have with it so far.  In essence I suppose, this is a review of the game.