While I'm socked away on this remote mine site working, my ability to have a game of anything has seriously suffered. Luckily for me I found a way to play some games. I've grown close with some of the engineers (or engi-nerds as they are fondly referred to), and they have been pretty interested in what it is that I do for a hobby. Most of them come from nerdy backgrounds like comics, video games, or RPGs. However, none of them have ever played a miniatures game.
Enter X-Wing!!! It's easy to travel with, it's easy to teach, it's quick, and it's Star Wars.
Three of them wanted to have a game, and since I wasn't going to be able to focus on my game while teaching both I figured we would just all put ships down and play. We each picked our favorite ships within a 25 point ceiling and no named pilots. Then if someone had left over points I selected a few appropriate upgrade cards for them to choose from.
The ships were as follows:
1 Red Squadron X-Wing - R2 astromech
2 Academy Pilot Tie Fighters
1 Syndicate Thug Y-Wing - Blaster turret and R4 agromech
1 Tempest Squadron Tie Advanced (this was mine)
We each deployed in a corner by placing the range ruler parallel to the corner and setting up somewhere behind that. I dropped 1 big asteroid in the exact middle and put one asteroid just outside range 2 along the center of each board edge. Each turn we determined initiative by a simple D6 roll off. Points would determine the victor: 1 point per damage and 1 point per kill.
Unfortunately I don't have any pictures to show, and couldn't post them even if I wanted to with our poor internet.
The game was furious. The engineers got the hang of it really quickly and had a blast. The X-Wing and the Tie Fighters went after each other for the majority of the game and there was much bumping of ships. The Y-Wing took to the outskirts, rather cunningly, but he had trouble keeping his turret in range. The Y-Wing was left standing at the end, but due to our points allocation the X-Wing was the winner. She actually ended up damaging and then splashing both Tie Fighters and doing 3 damage to my Advanced. I thought the Tie Fighters would take it being able to get double the shots each turn, but they ended up just providing extra points for everyone else to score.
This was a fun way to play the game with a group as the winner clearly was not the last man standing.
The game was a hit and I'm sure we'll be playing this more often up here. They've already decided that we'll be taking our dinner down to our makeshift game room tonight and pairing off so that we can get a few games in each.
