“Red five standing by!”

How overused has that line been over the years, although I could have used the immortal line from Toy story 2 “Buzz, I am your father”. Anyway as you probably have already guessed I have been introduced to the wonderful world of the X-Wing Miniatures game by Fantasy Flight, luckily Ashley found himself with time on his hands one night and offered to run an intro game for me.

For anyone that doesn’t know it’s essentially a table top battle game where each player controls one or more ships and attempts to destroy their opponent or complete a predefined objective. The game play is very simple (the rules are on Fantasy Flight’s website as a free download), has pre-painted miniatures and uses a variation of the Wings of War game system. Each player secretly chooses their ship manoeuvres and then reveals them in order of how skilled their pilots are, therefore you spend a lot of time (in my case) trying to second guess what your opponent is going to do.

I have to say that I have been quite sceptical on the game as the war gaming purist in me was put off by using “prepainted” miniatures, however it was immense fun. The fact that it isn’t an IGOUGO system made it more of a challenge and provided something a little different, the game set up was very quick and the rules very simple yet with a nice level of depth available from the various characters that you can include. I’d compare it to SAGA in that you can pick up the basic game in a few minutes however it has immense depth once you realise how much of the game play strategy is in the battle boards. In X-Wing the depth lies in the named characters and skills you can give some of the ships thereby creating interesting combinations and strategies.

I’ve still to try out any of the missions; this may be where the game lacks depth however I shall reserve judgement until I know more. However it may be the holy grail of introduction game for me as I plan how to get my kids into this crazy hobby. I was considering Dreadball however I’ve never been much of sports fan, but playing with little toy spaceships, now that’s something I think my kids would enjoy!