Xwing Tournament @ The Twisted Hop

 

  A tournament at a Bar. And all I bought all day was coffee.

Jarred put on a 100pt Tournament at the twisted Hop Bar in Woolston Christchurch. Good venue, with a mezzanine floor arrangement where you can hide the gamers out of sight by still in range of the bar.
It was Three games plus a Death Star 'bonus round'. Games one and three were standard. Game two had 12 (!!!) asteroids and a kill the pirate scenario condition.

There were 18 players, if you count the TO. I suspect it was more like 16 players in total. I've played a bit of X-Wing but since I've become the gaming hermit after child # 3 arrived, it was really good to play some of the other Christchurch regulars and face three totally new opponents. This isn't a superdetailed report, as I was busy having fun. 

Game 1 was vs a guy called Chris. He had Biggs (a popular/much cloned fellow), two B-Wings, and a Y-Wing. There will have been upgrades. The only one that impacted on the game was the astromech that allows him to stress a target. Someone tried to tell me before the game that the -Wing was the key to it all. He adopted the box-in-a-corner deployment, which I had genuinely never seen anyone do before but seems to be a 'thing' locally.

I thought it an interesting approach as while the rebel player ostensibly gets to guard flanks, they inevitably end up turning inward once halfway down the table so I get to flank them on two sides. My Bounty Hunter had a lucky escape from being Ionised (though looking at that pic could probably still have turned to avoid the edge?) and my TIEs slaughtered Rebel Scum. I lost 1-2 TIEs.

Game 2 was vs a guy called Shaun. This mission was an interesting one. 12 asteroids on the table. Shaun's Firespray was the Pirate Captain (to be protected like the protect the Senator mission) and he took 5 damage cards (yes we got the rules slightly wrong) to booby trap 5 asteroids. Despite multiple splash hits for seismic charges, I actually only lost a single TIE. Shuan did not enjoy both having to navigate all the asteroids AND play bumper cars with TIEs and I bagged the Pirate captain to win this too.

 Interlude was the Death Star trench run! Jarred made a model of part of the trench and set up Turbo lasers that some Imperial players (and a mate's daughter) got to man while a wave of Y-Wings, a wave of doomed X-Wings and then the wave of Biggs-Wedge-Luke got to try and take out the Death Star.

 It was awesomely scripted, with Darth and wingmen appearing at just the right moments. Then just when we Imperials thought we'd got Luke... Wedge was swapped for Han in the Falcon who had the rule that if he got one TIE then all were out. Just like in the movies. Nathan is btw a terrible person for opining that he saw in the Movies that Han in reality shot second...

Game 3 was me hoping I could win! Hah. My opponent, John. Had so far not lost a single ship all day. He had the Gencon 2013 X-Wing build. Because I am also a slightly bad person, I pointed out to him that I'd already seen pretty much the game we having on Youtube and it did not end well for the Rebels :P

Of course, I'm not quite as tournament ready as those guys pushing TIE swarms and my list doesn't benefit from the things that make those lists so inoculated to poor dice. If I fail to get the Firespray in the right place (or my opponent does not let me) or it fluffs a roll, I got nothing. And I needed something to chew through 3 X-Wings with 3 shields, upgrades to shift hits, and regenerating shields on Luke. John did the box in the corner thing too. I'm not sure what it achieves but once we close and I got off my initial enfilading fire, John was way better at 'jousting' with his X-Wings than I was at focus firing on one ship at a time. I did get Biggs but shared too many hits between Luke and Wedge so couldn't keep the momentum going. Well played John.

Final placings were:
1st John
2nd Antony
3rd Me!

I am pretty sure much fun was had by all. I definitely had fun, anyway. Thanks for reading.