More X-Wing Fun: 200 points battle

Father's Day long weekned in Madrid, Alex and me organized an X-Wing bash at the club, fighting a 200 battle with another father & son pair (Darío and Alvaro). It was also a good opportunity to put our new Slave model on the table for the first time.

After some discussion both sons aligned together and chgose the Imperial side against the Rebel (?) fathers (the world upside down...it used to be the other way round, at least in the 70s...), although they were reinforced with a new (significantly older) recruit arriving late to the club.

Imperial Headquarters in Thinking Mode

The Dark side deployed 2 Slaves, half a dozen Tie fighters, a couple of Advanced Ties and Darth Vader. The Rebel side organised two squadrons, the first with two X-Wings and one Y-Wing; the second with a similar configuration plus one of the new A Interceptors.

Darth Vader under Harassment!!

More than 3 hours of fun playing on a big table. At the end of the game, the 2 Slaves controlled the battlefiled thanls to their great firepower and strong armour, despite most of the Imperial fighters being shot down, but after wearing down the Rebel ships.

Imperial Squadron

Rebel Forces

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X Wing Competition at "Mi Tesoro"

My son Alex and I went to our first X-Wing competition today, organised by a local games shop in our neighbourhood called "Mi Tesoro" (= Gollum's "my precious" in Spanish). This a small but extremely well-supplied shop run by brothers Juan and Josema, two very nice chaps and where my son spends his Friday evenings after school playing Magic.

Alex with Juan, owner of Mi tesoro

We played 100 points and decided to go for the Rebel Alliance, deploying a squadron with two X-Wings (manned by Luke Skywalker and Wedge Antilles) with some droids and a Y-Wing model with the ionic gun tower. Being a kind of a rookie pilots, we did not have a brilliant performance, but ended up in second place... starting from the bottom, of course (sigh). The balance was that we lost 300 points in 3 games and shot down 42 points worth of Imperial spaceships. 

Nonetheless, we had a lot of fun, the games were very friendly and all the participants were happy to share tactics and squadron formation ideas with us, so at the end of the day I think we significantly moved ahead in our learning  curve.

X-Wing: Father against Son and the new gaming mat

Two very excited Young Padawan Alex and father organised a X-Wing morning at the club to try our new Star Wars gaming mat, that just arrived on time for the event last Thursday evening. We quickly have a few onlookers around  attracted by the nice visual display of the game, even enlisting and training a couple of them in their first combat flights in a far away galaxy.

 

A Young Padawan Joins the Dark Side...

"Ha,ha, ha" (throaty laughter heard in the background).
"My evil plan looks working and the young Padawan is irresistibly attracted by Dark Side ...of the hobby"

Yes!!! I tempted my son with a basic box of X-Wing on Christmas Day and finally yesterday we spent the full New Year Day afternoon fighting against each other in a far away galaxy... and he really enjoyed the experience, to the extent that we have another game scheduled this afternoon.

Little Luke Skywalker chasing Imperial baddies

First "wargame" for Alex, and a great victory to the father, considering that I have to fight vs Black Ops in the PS3 and the Magic cards addiction.

Seriously, I'm very happy with the experience. The game is really good and visually engaging. He very quickly grabbed an understanding of the main game mechanisms and, after the second game, he started developing some tactical sense of the game on his own. In fact I won the las game by a very short margin and after a very lucky last move: with only one of my Imperial Tie fighters on the table, and 1 hit point away from being defeated, I managed to put my ship on his flank and put a blast of my laser guns on him and ... kha-boom!!

Hopefully, a historical wargame would be the next step in the ladder. Now, for the expansion kits and deep space matt to play on it.    

X-Wing First Impressions

Constitution's day (and a holiday) in Spain, we decided to have a father-son afternoon, attending a X-Wing exhibiton game in my son's local games and cards shop. A good opportunity also to try distracting the little rascal from his Magic addiction... we'll see if the attempt succeed. 

Being a long time fan of the StarWars film saga (I still remember the thrill I felt watching the first film in 1977!!), I've been taking a close look to the game and the very positive reviews in different blogs I follow over the past few months. But today it was the first opportunity to actually "touch" and "feel" the game... and I have to admitt that it's a very nice and engaging product indeed.