So I finally found a willing victim (Travis) to try out my "meeting engagement" scenario. I flew Imperials, and he flew his crazy all A-wing list.
In military terminology, a meeting engagement occurs when two opposing forces have an unplanned encounter while on the move. Each force may know the other is in the general area, but neither knows exactly where the other is.
While I do love the X-Wing game, I've been growing a little weary recently of the head-to-head pitched battles. So I cooked up this little scenario on my commute one day:
Each player fields a 100-point force. (Ideally, force compositions should be kept secret from the other player, but Travis and I skipped this step.). The playing edges are numbered 1-4, with edge 1 being on the Imperial player's side, and the numbers assigned clockwise from that position. Each player rolls 4 attack dice. The number of hits dictates which playing edge that player will deploy on. Each player then rolls a directional dice to determine the orientation of his ships upon deployment. Once all of this has been decided, the players deploy their ships en masse at the end of the range ruler, with the other end on the edge that player deploys from, and with each ship oriented as dictated by the directional dice. The last house rule was that, upon deployment, any named pilots (i.e. the veterans) could fire a reflexive shot (primary weapons only) at any target in arc and within range 2. We didn't get to use this rule, due to our ship orientations.
With me so far?
The initial setup looked like this:
What followed was a knifefight. Or a furball. It was close and brutal. Lots of ship collisions.
Travis and I quickly realized we'd both brought the wrong ships for this type of engagement. A-wings, even at close range, lack the requisite firepower to really put the screws to Imperial starfighters; he would probably have fared better with X-wings. As for me, I probably should have run an all-Interceptor list. The TIE Fighter did ok, but the Bomber was almost useless. I ended up barrel-rolling the Bomber into his starfighters quite often to avoid getting shot at, meaning that I couldn't ever get a target lock to loose my secondary munitions.
Eventually, I killed two of the A-wings and he waxed Mauler Mithel, and the game ended due to the time limit. Here was the disposition at the end of the game:
The verdict: we both liked it! Travis remarked that the initial disposition really caused him to think about how best to go after my ships. The A-wings certainly had the agility to run my TIEs down, but just didn't have enough hitting power to seal the deal. We were both rolling pretty hot evade dice, which helped keep the ships alive longer. Had he fielded at least a couple of X-wings, the game would likely have gone in his favor.
Looking forward to playing more games under this scenario!
Thanks for reading, and may the Force be with you.
