Anyway, that was then, this is now. Now we have little tiny X-Wings and TIE Fighters and a Millennium Falcon that we can push around on a tabletop and make “pew-pew-pew” sounds until somebody blows up.
And somebody always blows up.
Fantasy Flight Games — after securing a licensing agreement with Lucas/Disney — announced the game system in 2011. Gen Con 2012 showcased the release of the first core set which included one X-Wing (Luke!) and two Imperial TIE Fighters. The core set comes with dice, movement templates, maneuver dials, asteroids, pilot cards, upgrade cards, and a variety of tokens. I had never heard of the game until my son came home one day talking about playing Star Wars with a friend of his. He played it a number of times and then started asking if he could go up to a particular game store where they played on Wednesday nights. Hmmm, okay, I guess?
I stopped in to watch at one point. The game seemed really fiddly to me. So many moving parts, I just wasn’t interested. Little did I know.
A few years later (and many dollars of discretionary income as well) and I need a dolly to transport my X-Wing stuff to the game store (yes, the same one where my son learned to play). I have enough Imperial ships to run two simultaneous campaigns of “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster” (more on that later) so yeah, it’s a big box. I read a comment online that suggested if you spend over $250 on the game, you had a mild problem, but if you had spent more than $250 on storage for your game, then you really had a problem.
I really have a problem. 😳
A few years later and Fantasy Flight released a second core set to coincide with the release of “The Force Awakens.” It included Poe as a pilot (later upgraded in the X-Wing upgrade pack) and BB-8 as a droid.
Recently Fantasy Flight announced that version 1.0 of the game (we didn’t know it was called that, we just thought we were playing X-Wing) was going to be retired, and version 2.0 would get released in September, 2018. There have been plenty of articles written since then, but this post is supposed to be a review of the game, not a history article, so let me get to the review part.