Red Five Standing By

I have decided it is now time to start getting excited about the new Star Wars film and a return to the world of the original trilogy.

Hence I spent some time in a Barnes & Noble buying a bunch of sets for the X-Wing Miniatures Game.

I got a Core Set, an additional X-Wing, a TIE Interceptor and a TIE Advanced.

And a Millennium Falcon.

The Core Set has the tokens, cards, rulers and dice and comes with two TIE Fighters and an X-Wing. It has everything you need to play dogfights with Luke Skywalker.

The ships are awesome. They are made to scale based on the models from the original films and are very nicely painted.

You get lots of tokens and cards to fiddle with. It looks complicated but it is actually very simple to play.

Lots of quality bits. Same as all FFG games.

The game uses it own special eight-sided dice. The red ones are attack dice. Each little explosion is a hit.

The green ones are defence dice. Each little wavy line is an ‘evade’. The evades cancel the hits.

The little ‘eyes’ do special stuff.

Funny dice.

Each ship has stats which determine how many dice they roll for attack and defence, and for each ship you can choose a card for different pilots who have special abilities.

For example, Luke Skywalker is good at evading. He can convert an ‘eye’ on his defence dice roll to an ‘evade’.

You can also add upgrades, such as R2-D2 who can fix the X-Wing’s shields. There are lots of combinations.

Flying around is very straightforward. Ship movement is done using special cardboard shapes for the various manoeuvres.

You put one end on the front of your ship’s base, then move the ship to the other end. No measuring and no fiddling around with angles or ship lengths.

You can see some of the black curved movement shapes. They are very easy to use. You don’t really have to ‘measure’ anything, you just stick your ship on the end.

You set what move you are going to make in advance by secretly choosing it on a dial. Different ships have different choices for moves. Some can move further while others can use the sharper turns.

After moving, you can shoot at someone if they are in front of you and within 3 ‘range’. Use the red range ruler to tell how far apart you are. Again, the actual distance doesn’t matter so it is very easy.

To get you started there is a simplified booklet of ‘Quick Start’ rules. This ignores most of the numbers in the ships’ stats and concentrates on flying around and shooting at each other.

I played a quick game and the X-Wing got destroyed. The TIE Fighters can turn very quickly.