X-Wing Miniatures

X-Wing Miniatures Game is frankly awesome. It’s set in the Star Wars universe, uses fantastic pre-painted models of all your favourite Imperial and Rebel spaceships, has options for quick games or more complex points-based squad builds and mission scenarios, and has fantastic pilot/upgrade card artwork and more counters, tokens and dice than you can throw a stick at. Oh, and did I mention it’s set in the Star Wars universe? End of.

The game basically lets you fight dogfights in space, using a simple but effective ruleset. This ensures that the game is fast paced, and the focus is on out manoeuvring and out-gunning your opponent using smart tactics and planning. One of the particularly clever elements of the game is that you have to plan the move for each ship ahead of any moves actually happening or being revealed – that way you must try to pre-empt what your opponent will do before you actually know. This can have frustrating, satisfying and down-right hilarious consequences depending on how experienced you are, how much you’re concentrating, and whether or not your call-sign is STORM_BOLTER (in which case you get your left mixed up with your right – not usually very productive for the pilot of an advanced space fighter…….). Then, each ship gets to perform actions such as target locks, boosts, evades etc, and attempt to shoot down the pesky enemy ships. All the movement and range measuring is done using templates provided, so it’s quick, easy and un-contentious.

The squad building is cool – you can set maximum points for each player for a game, and each player can then ‘spend’ those points as they wish. That means you can have lots of cheap, basic ships on the table using ‘swarm’ tactics, or a couple of heavily tooled up ass-kickers with tons of upgrades. This allows for some great scenarios and options. Fantasy Flight Games have done a great job with this game. it’s relatively inexpensive to buy the starter set, but for that you only get 3 ships – 2 Tie fighters and an X-Wing. Not to fear, booster packs are available with lots of extra ship options, but be warned, you’ll soon find that you’ve spent more money than you expected to, with each extra ship costing around a tenner for the small ones. There are a couple of HUGE ships as well for cinematic play, but they’ll set you back £60-70 a pop. That said, we LOVE this game – easy rules that allow you to focus on the game play, lots of collectability with excellent model ships, and for those of us that grew up painting Warhammer models, a joy that they come pre-painted (particularly now my eyesight isn’t what it used to be!), the challenge of finding the perfect squad build and the option to play 1 hr to all-day games (without taking over the entire house withrulebooks and scenery!).