Heroes of the Aturi Cluster Original Archive

I started to save this privately, but decided to go ahead with a public post so I can share it. The original archive site for Heroes of the Aturi Cluster, one of the best things ever to happen to Star Wars X-Wing from Fantasy Flight Games, has expired. The original author has collected the materials in a drop box, available at the following link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/idahlgp7j63b5rn/AADvW3D4JMnZ_IL2orWza1J1a?dl=0

Board Game Geek Top 100 Checklist, Part 1

One of my favorite resources for getting exposed to, learning how to play, and discussing board games is Board Game Geek affectionately known as BGG. They have been around for a long time, especially counting in Internet Years. One of the things they do is provide an interesting mechanism for ranking games. Some people like it, some people don’t, but for the sake of this post I will leave that behind and just talk about a different topic.

Suppose I had a goal of owning all of the games in the BGG top 100 list, what would that look like? What’s on the list, what do I have, and if I don’t have something, will I eventually? If I owned a game and then sold it, does that count? Is this the questions only game? Continue reading “Board Game Geek Top 100 Checklist, Part 1”

Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (Part II)

Heroes of the Aturi Cluster User Manual Cover
Heroes of the Aturi Cluster
Wow, I completely forgot about this. A long time ago (in a galaxy right here) I wrote a post about “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster” which is a fan-made campaign expansion for X-Wing Miniatures Game. I talked about my Y-Wing pilot “Rover” and the abilities he had by the end of the campaign. What I didn’t talk about was how the Imperial side worked, and I’ll address that now, as well as talk about the overview of how the campaign works. Continue reading “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (Part II)”

Terraforming Mars Custom Play Mat

Terraforming Mars Box
Terraforming Mars
Terraforming Mars had been on my “shelf of shame” for about a year or so. I recently wrote about my first impressions of the game (after playing a couple of times). I also wrote about buying acrylic overlays for the player boards. Today I want to write about a custom play mat that I had printed from Inked Gaming.

One of the frequent complaints related to Terraforming Mars is that the components are seen as being lower quality. The board is one of the main challenges. Even new out of the box, my board does not unfold to be completely flat. The other day I noticed that someone on Board Game Geek had posted a preliminary copy of some artwork that he was creating for TM. I thought to myself, “That’s awesome, because you know you need another custom game mat.” 😉 Continue reading “Terraforming Mars Custom Play Mat”

X-Wing TIE Fighter Repair

X-Wing TIE Fighter With Ouchie
X-Wing TIE Fighter With Ouchie

I’m a huge fan of the Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures game by Fantasy Flight Games. I’ll have plenty of posts coming about that game in the future. Today, however, it’s a quick note about repairing your X-Wing ships. I happen to have two TIE Fighters with broken pegs. They’re too expensive to throw away (retail is about $15 / ship) so what do I do? Continue reading “X-Wing TIE Fighter Repair”

Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (Part I)

Heroes of the Aturi Cluster User Manual Cover
Heroes of the Aturi Cluster
A few years ago my younger son came home from a visit with a friend, and he told me about this new game that let you play Star Wars on a tabletop. Now I’m as big a geek / Star Wars fan as the next person, but I couldn’t see how a tabletop version of a space fighter game would actually work. A few weeks later, I dropped him off at a local game store for X-Wing Night and checked out the game. It seemed really fiddly to me. There were so many tokens and moving parts. I got over it. 🙂 In fact you can read a review of X-Wing that I’ve previously posted to hear the rest of that story.

Fast forward a few years, and I now have invested in dozens of ships and user-created materials and storage cases and game accessories. The primary reason? Heroes of the Aturi Cluster. Continue reading “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (Part I)”

X-Wing Custom Play Mats

I’ve teased a few times about playing “Heroes of the Aturi Cluster,” a fan-made expansion for the X-Wing Miniatures Game from Fantasy Flight. Heroes is played with standard ships and play mats (but custom terrain) and supports up to six players. When we played through the first time, we found some of the missions got really crowded! It felt just like driving in rush hour traffic. 😆

We decided to start “Battlestar Pallas” a few months ago. This campaign uses the same framework as Heroes but features a serial story played out over three seasons. (Rebel pilots break out of jail and steal an Imperial Assault Carrier! How much fun is that!) The Pallas campaign only goes up to four players because that’s how many docking clamps the Gozanti offers. However, there are folks that feel the campaign scales quite nicely up beyond four, so we decided to jump in with everybody and give it a go.

It was rush-hour traffic on steroids. Continue reading “X-Wing Custom Play Mats”

Bling Out Your Games With Sharpie Paint Pens

Have you ever looked at the special upgrade packages available for some games and wished they weren’t so expensive? Have you thought you might like to “bling out” your game just a little bit so it’s a bit more personal? What I am about to show you will change your life! Or at least give you something to do on a rainy afternoon… Continue reading “Bling Out Your Games With Sharpie Paint Pens”

Game Review: X-Wing Miniatures Game

X-Wing Miniatures Game
X-Wing Miniatures Game
Ah, Star Wars. I was in high school when the first movie (strangely titled “Episode IV”) came out. Back then if you wanted to see a movie, you went to see it! There was none of this newfangled streaming over your phone…heck, we didn’t even have smartphones! And we liked it!

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. Continue reading “Game Review: X-Wing Miniatures Game”