Board Games: X-Wing Miniatures

Anyone who knows me or reads my waffle will know I'm a Star Wars baby, I was born in '77 and grew up with the films, toys, breakfast cereal and all manner of paraphernalia, but when I wanted to 'play star wars' I had to make my own games.  I flew my x-wing toys around the front room (making appropriate vrooom and lazor noises) and shot at tie fighters destroying them as I saw fit.  Needless to say my shots almost always hit and they almost always missed...

Then I graduated to X-wing on the pc (ibm?) and then the much missed Tie Fighter.  How I miss those days of blowing x-wings out of the sky and escorting the emperor...

And, just for the record, anyone who looks at that picture and thinks 'that looks a bit naff' - well, you don't know man... you weren't there!  Phenomenal.

I am not a big nostalgia fan, but I still have very fond memories of this game, the star wars roleplaying game I played (West End Games v1) and then there was Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars Battlefront, the amazing Timothy Zahn trilogy and some of the follow on books.  And of course Tales of the Old Republic...  Yes, I'm a fan.

When X-wing Miniatures from Fantasy Flight was announced I was in two minds, I'm not a big 'wargamer' but as it got closer to the launch I thought I would give it a try and I picked up a copy when they were still in stock in the UK.  I have to say it's a great game.  It manages to flow extremely well and the balancing of the stats - points - abilities - dice is extremely well thought out.  I am a big fantasy flight fan, and often their games are quite complex with quite a lot of rules.  Not so here.  Colour coded dice, templates, all the oddities on the cards - it's very very elegant.

Players decide what they're going to do at the same time, pop down a dial and then move according to pilot skill (least skillful first) and then shoot in descending order (most skillful first).  Pilots skill levels are on the cards and weaker pilots cost less points (meaning more ships potentially).  Each ship will have a couple of abilities which they choose and you get tokens to represent what you're doing (all beautifully made by Fantasy Flight).  The game flow is fast and the rules become second nature very quickly.  It makes for a wonderful play experience.

The box set (shown above) comes with 2 tie fighters and 1 x wing which is enough to play with, but you can buy more ships to enhance your choices - tie advanced and y wings were out at launch and they've since added the falcon, slave I, a wing and interceptor.  All of these can be combined for some pretty large scale battles, come with enough tokens for easy use and there are objectives and missions that you can undertake too.

The models are fantastically made - they look great, are beautifully painted and work really well in the game (robust enough to move, detailed enough to still be 'pretty') and are apparently 'to scale' (of imaginary ships!!).  Size difference can make a big difference in the game though, the falcon model is huge and this impacts on it's flying into asteroids (Han Solo must have had some good dice rolls in that scene in Empire!)

The balancing on the game really is phenomenal, and the way the dice roll against each other, especially combined with the add-on abilities pilots can buy.  I have (because I am a cynic) two criticisms of the game, but they are pretty minor ones.  The game should come with more dice.  FFG sell more dice, but really to easily run a game you want a set of dice each.  It's easily solved and I suppose would have added to the cost of the product but even so, lack of dice frustrates me.  It's also really difficult to store.  With models this nice you want to store them carefully and that's pretty difficult.  Battlefoam offered an elegant solution which was foam that fitted in the original box and held your miniatures (still not really enough space for tokens) and have now released one to hold wave two.  It STILL doesn't hold all the tokens and is quite pricey.  I'm not sure what the good answer is here - lots of people online offer suggestions, but I do wish that FFG thought more about how to store their (beautifully made, extremely well crafted) models.

Game mats are something that the game would benefit from too.  I bought myself a 3' piece of felt from amazon which was cheap and does the job perfectly, but some people have bought / made very extravagent ones.  It adds something to the game feel that is better than a tabletop, but isn't necessary.  I also quite often play some Star Wars music in the background when we're playing.  It again just boosts the feel of the game.

It's hard to do this game enough justice, its very well thought out, extremely smooth and plays like a dream.  It has some of the best mechanics I've experienced in any such game.  

Punchboard Joy

I enjoy all sorts of video games but I am also a great lover of boardgames,  I grew up with such joys as 'Game of Life', Monopoly and Upwords.  Now as an ever-increasing adult my love of boardgames grows greater and greater and of late I've been playing quite a number of different games, so I thought I would write some bits and pieces about some of those games and my thoughts about them...


Boardgames are a fantastic way of learning about rules because nobody else interprets them for you; they have to be read and understood by the players, as opposed to the computer doing all the calculations for you and not letting you do the things you can't do.

There's a particularly good games shop in Reading that will sell you games you want called Eclectic and can also advise on other games and new things to try, or of course well known online retailers can help you out.  I have also used Spirit Games and Infinity Games online for good service on mail orders.

Why is this called Punchboard Joy?  Well, anyone who plays any Fantasy Flight games (as well as a number of other brands) will know that they usually come with a piece of card which you push out tokens from.  These are called Punchboards.  I take a certain pleasure in pushing all the tokens out and then finding ways to store all the bits in a user friendly way.  I realise that this really is incredibly high up the OCD-sounding scale, but I like to tell myself that it's ok - I don't mind if they get a bit mixed up during play and mostly I only do it to make the actual gameplay easier.  I don't know if that's true but I like to think it is...

Rather than make this a horrifically long post as I waffle about each one this will be a sort of index, which also means I can update it later as I play more games.  So, here's the list, each one will link to a new page on my blog (linked to as they're completed):

X Wing Miniatures
Zombicide (Season 1)
Descent
Gears of War
Village
Ghost Stories
Chaos in the Old World

Old Habits Die Hard

When I was 15 I played a LOT of a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign.  It was tremendous fun.  I don’t think we knew what the real background of the WFRP world was, or much of the ‘canon’ but it was well reffed, with quite a few players and we played for a few years.  It was reffed by Peter Newman and I have extremely fond memories of it.

Here I am almost 20 years on <I weep at this>  and I was thinking that I fancy running some tabletop again and into the frame comes bouncing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3^rd Edition (WFRP).  It’s created by Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) who I mentioned last month in this post.  I was quick to discover in my research that it has received quite a lot of praise and a fair amount of criticism also.  I was told by a few people who do use the sytem that it works well, which is encouraging.

It uses a lot of tokens and cards and components (something Fantasy Flight to nicely) to represent things you keep track of.  Some people accuse it of being a bit ‘boardgame-esque’.  Anyway I took a punt and bought it and very quickly fell for it.  It’s beautifully produced.  There are LOTS of extras for it, and it’s a really nice product.  I am yet to run the game (starting in a couple of weeks) but it seems like it will be a really good experience.  The idea of the cards is that it cuts down / out on the looking up of rules.  You have them there in front of you.  Even the dice are different and are pictorial, and supposed to make working out results dynamic and interesting.

Expansion packs cover a wide range of topics from Chaos Gods to disease and mutation to horses (!)  The artwork in them is fabulous and they are simply laid out and easy to read.  My only concern about them all really is the level of entry is quite high – you have to shell out quite a lot to have all the products you are bound to want, not to mention card sleeves and all that paraphernalia.

In total I think to have all the packs NOT including the published adventure material is well in excess of £200.  Which is a lot.  You don’t NEED a lot of it, but if you are like me you want it – which is the nature of a hobbyist I suppose.  And of course you don’t know what you’re missing until you have them.   IT’s important to stress again that you don’t need it.  The game (apparently) runs perfectly well without anything bar the base box set.

Nicely FFG have now released a component free version so you can be just pen and paper if you want, but for me that would take away some of the nice qualities of the game, some of the things that make it ‘different’.  You can also download quite a lot of the source books and guides in a PDF format, although it’s not included in the price, but it’s only circa $10 or less for E-copies of some things that.  There is also a dice rolling app on the iphone which is easy to use as well.  I thought it was a shame it wasn't free, but it's certainly cheaper than the dice sets at £7.99

There is a huge amount of source material available on the net and the Warhammer Online game means there is even more background readily available, I don’t really ever use pre-written campaigns but they are nicely done if you do with some nice props and things should that be your bag.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it runs – I am sure it will take a couple of sessions to be ‘smooth’ but in the meantime it’s an exciting system and I am really looking forward to taking it out for a spin.

Oh yes - where can you get it from I hear you cry?  Well, here is a good starter for 10...  (or should that be for one Sigmars Hammer and two boons?

"And My Axe"

In a departure from my chat about the various technological games I am engaged in this is post about Lord of the Rings the Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games.(FFG)

LoTRtCG is a co-operative 'Living Card Game' (LCG), it has elements of Magic the Gathering (MtG) to it and is a bit like the co-operative boardgame as well - players choose a deck and play through a scenario with each other.  There is a mechanism to know how you are doing (quests and progress tokens) and automatic rules to decide who is attacked and by what (the threat meter).  The rules (so far) work extremely well, and as long as you keep the book to hand are fairly easy to follow once you have your head around them.  To aid with that Fantasy Flight have provided a full illustrated with examples rule book and also a series of You Tube videos which take you through the sequence of play and give examples of how it all works.  They are really handy when understanding everything.  In addition to that there are rules that are simply printed on the cards which are easy to follow.



The game can be played solo (which is quite tricky) or with up to 4 players.  There are 3 different quests provided with the core set have are increasingly difficult.  There are 4 player 'suits' - Spirit, Tactics, Leadershop and Lore - each of which have very different styles of play.  All in all there's quite a lot of variation just there.  Add to that that there is a set of ways to design tournament decks which allows you to create a deck of mixed 'suits'.  Of course you also get to control some heroes, 12 of which are provided with the core set.  Also in the core set are encounter cards which randomise what you face along the way (ranging from baddies to fight, things that happen or locations to visit.)

So why is it a Living Card Game?  Well, each month (or so) FFG are going to release an expansion, which will will provide a new quest (s), new cards for each suit, new heroes and encounter cards and other additions to game play.  These aren't like 'MtG' where you buy endless boosters to make up your collection, hoping to acquire rare cards.  Instead they provide a set list of cards to enhance the game in specific ways.  There are 6 expansions currently planned which tell the story of looking for Gollum.

The art work is beautiful and the card text well written.  The tokens are well designed and all things well put together.  It's worth mentioning that the game is based on the books, not the (excellent) movies, which might confuse some people when encountering the very powerful Glorfindel and not knowing who he is, but overall it probably doesn't matter much, you don't need to know.

This can be played as a random board game, or probably with a storytelling element, indeed when sacrificing one of your allies it's hard not to vocalise a "My dwarven miner valiantly gets in the way to save the life of Eowyn!"

There are a few issues discussed on forums about not having enough cards in the core set to make up a world beating tournament deck but that doesn't really worry me (yet at least) and FFG have openly said that they've made a game which is playable and fun with expansion coming in the future.  Lots of people talk about buying two or three sets to make a full deck, but that certainly isn't necessary for the casual player.

FFG makes a whole bundle of games, many of which I didn't know about and I think I will be investing in more of them as time goes on.  in the LCG range They are releasing a Star Wars Co-operative game next year and already have Game of Thrones, Cthulu & a Warhammer one, the latter three being Vs games, not co-op ones.  Not to mention that they also have a lot of big licenses (Conan, Battlestar Galactica and more) not to mention their own fine IP (Tannhauser & Mansions of Madness for example).

So far I am very impressed.  I've orded Hunt For Gollum (the first of the expansions) off the back of the experience so far and I am looking forward to more multiplayer action this weekend. 

It can be bought from various places including amazon and the excellent comic / games shop - Travelling Man