Review on Embark on an Epic Space Battle with Star Wars X-Wing Death Star Assault Playmat by Ashley Lynn

An old colleague introduced me to X-Wing: Second Edition about a year ago and I have no regrets. It's an incredibly fun game that has the right mix of aesthetics (beautiful pre-painted miniatures), strategic planning (creating a viable list of ships, pilots, and ammo), tactical maneuvers (skillfully moving your pieces around the board), and random chance ( a lucky roll of the dice or an unexpected maneuver by your opponent). Despite a certain learning curve, the Second Edition was noticeably simplified compared to X-Wing 1.0, which added rules as the game progressed. many outdated ships and badly needed a restart. Major changes from 1.0 to 2.0 include the following: new medium ships, Force sensitive pilots, true hit angles, replacing 360 degree ship turret angles with forward ones. Tie the bows by splitting the First Order and Resistance into their own independent factions, adding the Republican and Separatist prequel factions, and creating new and improved ship sculpts, some with moving parts (e.g. 2.0 X-Wings and B wings have folding wings, and their 1.0 c has no analogues.) By far the best contribution to this game - and what convinced me to put my hard-earned cash into 2.0⁠ - is rather the creation of an online scoreboard to be printed as point values on the cards themselves. This change might seem counterintuitive⁠ — wouldn't you want every number in front of you positioning your 200-point squad on the table?⁠ — but it keeps version 2.0 current and prevents ships from becoming obsolete as the game evolves itself. For example, if Darth Vader is too strong, FFG can simply make him more expensive by updating the scoreboard. If the A-Wings don't play enough, FFG can just take a few points off each pilot and people will start playing them again. As long as the printed abilities and movement bars themselves aren't broken, units can always be re-rated to ensure each card is playable. A lousy ship can be made cheap, an exceptional ship expensive, and in the extreme, an almost useless modification can be made entirely free. (I'm looking at you, Jamming Beam!) In short, X-Wing 2.0 is essentially future-proof, and rest assured that any ships you buy around 2019 will remain competitive, possibly even years from now. The Base Set 2.0 is about the best buy you can get for this game: three new ships for $12 each, plus a set of maneuver patterns, some obstacles, range rulers, and three each of attack and defense dice. If I have one caveat, it's that the core set doesn't really give you enough dice to cover all X-wing and TIE/lns⁠ scenarios - for example, an X-wing attack with a range of 1 will normally attack four dice. But for most die-hard Star Wars fans, this might seem like a good thing, as it gives them a baked-in excuse to just go ahead and buy a second core set - now you can play with your friends right away, and you'll have twice as many ships! Win-win option, right? The base set is absolutely essential for anyone wanting to build a roster based on the Empire or Rebels, but you'll likely need to add more ships as 1 X-Wing or 2 TIE/lns per squad won't make it. If you're new to 2.0 like me, some reasonable options for Empire are the TIE/ln expansion (with the Howlrunner pilot required for any swarm list) and TIE Advanced x1 which includes Darth Vader, an awesome and almost mandatory Pilot. Some reasonable Rebel options include the T-65 X-Wing Extension, the BTL-A4 Y-Wing, or the Millennium Falcon. (For the record, when I started, I bought 2 base sets plus the TIE/ln, TIE Advanced x1, and T-65 X-Wing expansions through Revain. $100 worth of ships.)