X-Wing Miniatures Sample Game, Part 3

I've gotten a lot of traffic from search engine queries like "Sample X-Wing Game Turn" and "X-Wing Game Turn Examples" and as I've kind of meant to do this for awhile but just didn't for whatever reason, I thought I'd post a series of articles this week outlining a complete game of X-Wing Miniatures for those folks who are interested in seeing a real nuts-and-bolts write up of an entire game. Note: This is not a battle report, per se, though if you guys dig on those, boy are you in for a treat in a few weeks...

In case you missed them, here's links to Part 1 and Part 2 in this series.

Ok, so yesterday saw the satellites scanned as well as the first few shots fired in this game. BC had stuck my Black Squadron TIE with a critical damage card, I'd burned off one of the shields on his Red Squadron X-Wing, Obsidian TIE was making a run for the border. 

After we selected our maneuvers, Obsidian unsurprisingly floored it revealing a Straight 5 and also unsurprisingly selected Evade as his Action. That was a no-brainer, really. Recall that all I have to do to win this thing is get one of my TIEs off the board after scanning those satellites. 

Black Squadron's maneuver was going to take a little more finesse. First, I'd incurred a Stress token since my last maneuver had been a red maneuver. Now, there's nothing saying that you have to immediately get rid of a Stress token once you get it, but you do lose your Perform Action step while you're actively Stressed, so I do not make it a habit to fly around Stressed if I can help it. 

Not only that, but I'd just been stuck with a face up Damage card that would Stress me if I pulled a Turn at any speed. In the rules, it says you can't perform any Stressful maneuvers if you're already Stressed and if you do, your opponent gets to pick which maneuver you perform from your dial. So not only should I be pulling a green maneuver, I need to be pulling a non-Turn green maneuver, and last, I had to pick something that wasn't going to crash me into BC because I was going to move before him. This really only left me a couple of options, and since I did not want to end up on the business end of BC's Red Squadron at Range 1, I opted to punt and pulled a 2 Bank to the right, then selected Evade as my Action. 

This ended up being a pretty lucky guess as BC opted to think outside the box and pull a Straight 4 even though he was still Stressed from his own K-Turn last turn. You can see exactly how that turned out in the image above- Black TIE had Red Squadron at Range 1 dead to rights and as such, opened fire on the X-Wing. 

The Attack value on a TIE Fighter's primary weapon is 2, but being at Range 1, I received an extra Attack die. I rolled and ended up with a "crit" and two "hits." BC grabbed his 2 green Defense dice since his X-Wing's Agility is 2 and rolled a wavy arrow and a blank. As I mentioned before, in X-Wing Miniatures, you mitigate "hits" before you mitigate "crits", so BC was left taking a "hit" and a "crit" as damage from the attack. This bros before hoes, I mean, hits before crits thing also applies to shields, so Red's last shield failed under the "hit", while the "crit" went against his hull, causing him to not only draw a Damage card, but also to flip it face up and observe the card text. His Agility was lowered by one permanently, but the card gave him the option of attempting to remove it in the Perform Action step in lieu of performing an Action by rolling a "hit" on an Attack die (there's several Damage cards with this type of mechanic). 

As Obsidian was out of Range of Red's guns, we moved from the Combat Phase to the End Phase, removing tokens that weren't persistent and we were back to spinnin' wheels. 

I knew I wanted to get Black Squadron out of there- only having two Hull left with an X-Wing breathing down his neck wasn't a place I really wanted to be in, especially with that face up Damage card limiting my movement. I knew I was going to pull a straight 5 with him and there wouldn't be much to worry about as BC still had his Stress token. Of course, that didn't stop me from playing it safe and declaring an Evade Action. Obsidian though... hmmm. I was pretty sure a Straight 5 would take him past my board edge and end the match, and well, I wasn't quite done playing yet. I had Obsidian pull a 3 Straight K-Turn. 

"You sure you want to do that?" BC asked. 

"Ah, what the hell, right?" I replied lying a Stress Token beside him. 

"Ooooook." BC said, revealing a 3 Bank left, a white maneuver that caused him to retain his Stress Token for at least one more round and denying him an Action. 

As no one had valid targets, the Combat Phase was foregone and we started picking up tokens in the End Phase. It was time to spin wheels again. 

Obsidian hadn't been hit yet, so I decided to have him move in on Red to Attack. Black was going to continue straight lining it towards the board edge as insurance in case BC managed to one-shot Obsidian. It was sort of the opposite line of thinking I employed at the start- now Black was going to escape with the satellite intel regardless of whether Obsidian could manage to take out the critically damaged X-Wing. 

Obsidian pulls a 2 Bank to the right and as I'm hoping for him to smoke Red, he declares Focus for his Action. BC had Red come around square with a 1 Bank to the left, a green maneuver for his X-Wing so he was able to pick up that pesky Stress Token and Target Lock the rapidly closing Obsidian TIE. 

Once again, the Combat Phase was upon us. 

Red had a higher Pilot Skill than Obsidian, so he would fire first. BC checked range and found Obsidian to be just a bit outside of Range 1 from his X-Wing. He picked up his 3 Attack dice and rolled a "hit", a Focus symbol, and a "crit." Wanting to try to get Obsidian off the board, he opted to spend his newly acquired Target Lock token and re-roll the Focus result. End result? Two "hits" and a "crit."

I picked up my three green dice and threw them- two wavy arrows and a blank. Had I rolled a Focus, I could have spent my token, but a blank result I could do nothing with. My wavy arrows got rid of the two hits, but the crit went on through, and I picked up my Damage card and turned it face up. Bastard! It was the dreaded Direct Hit card, which counts as not one, but two hull damage! My Obsidian TIE had gone from perfectly unmolested to on its last legs in just one volley of shots from an X-Wing. 

Still though, he wasn't dead. Time for me to return fire. I picked up my two red Attack dice. 

Two natural "hits", no Focus needed. BC grabbed a single green defense die (remember- his X-Wing usually gets two, but that face up Damage card lowered his Agility value by one) and rolled a blank. The two hits went on through and Red Squadron Pilot exploded. 

Per the scenario rules, as we entered the End Phase of the game turn, I removed the Action tokens from my TIEs and BC dropped a brand-spankin' new Rookie X-Wing on his board edge. 

As we spun wheels, I asked BC if he wanted to keep playing or not. It was getting late, and we'd done a lot of talking during the match, so he said we needed to wrap it up. With that, I picked a 5 straight for Black TIE which I was confident would take him off my table edge, triggering the win condition for me. With that in mind, I figured I'd get Obsidian in another fire fight. I needed to turn a little to get Rookie X-Wing in my firing arc, so I picked a 3 Bank to the left to cover the most ground possible. BC set Rookie's dial and we began revealing our maneuvers. 

As Rookie X-Wing is only Pilot Skill 2, he now had the first maneuver. BC revealed a Straight 4 which put him within Range 3 of Obsidian, so for his Perform Action step, BC chose to Target Lock. Obsidian revealed that 3 Bank Left and declared Focus, hoping to maximize his Attack. I didn't declare an Action for Black TIE as his Straight 5 took him off the playing area. 

As the Combat Phase started, I picked up my Range Ruler (sorry I've forgotten to include it in so many of these pictures- I was more focused on taking pics of the dice results for some reason) and found that Obsidian was Range 2 from Rookie. No extra die for me, I grabbed a couple of red Attack dice and rolled. 

I rolled a "hit" and an Focus result. I opted to spend my Focus token and turned the eyeball into a second "hit." BC grabbed two green defense dice and threw a blank and a Focus. Both of my hits landed, overloading the Rookie X-Wing's deflector shields. 

Now it was BC's turn to fire back. He picked up his three red Attack dice and threw them. 

I don't remember what his first roll netted him, but he did spend his Target Lock to re-roll his blanks and eyeballs. The picture above is the after picture, in other words. He managed a single hit. If I blew my roll however, it would be enough to send Obsidian to hell as he only had one Hull left, so when I rolled a single wavy arrow on my Defense roll, I was happy that Obsidian had managed to cheat death and would survive the match!

Whew, that was more writing than I kinda thought it would be! I think I'll just stick to battle reports from now on! 

Hope you enjoyed it though and found it useful if you're a new or prospective X-Wing Miniatures player!

X-Wing Miniatures Sample Game, Part 2

I've gotten a lot of traffic from search engine queries like "Sample X-Wing Game Turn" and "X-Wing Game Turn Examples" and as I've kind of meant to do this for awhile but just didn't for whatever reason, I thought I'd post a series of articles this week outlining a complete game of X-Wing Miniatures for those folks who are interested in seeing a real nuts-and-bolts write up of an entire game. Note: This is not a battle report, per se, though if you guys dig on those, boy are you in for a treat in a few weeks...

In case you missed it, Part 1 ran yesterday. This being Part 2, if you've not read Part 1... well, that's just daft. 

We last left our starfighters at the start of a new Planning Phase. I picked my maneuvers and set my dials, while BC did the same. After we both indicated we were ready, I revealed the dial for Obsidian TIE, who you'll recall had the lowest Pilot Skill of the ships on the board and therefore would maneuver first. I had selected another Straight 5 maneuver, then picked Evade for my Action, again hoping to scan those satellites and high-tail it outta there, hopefully without being blown out of the firmament. Black Squadron TIE revealed his maneuver next since he had Initiative over BC's Red Squadron X-Wing, also showing a straight 5 on the dial and also selecting Evade hoping to minimize any shots coming his way. BC decided to maneuver to engage Black Squadron revealing a Bank 1 on his dial, then choosing to Target Lock my Black Squadron TIE. 

The game's first Combat Phase began with Black Squadron, but BC's cagey maneuver had put him outside of Black Squadron's firing arc (probably can't see them in the picture above, but there are a couple of lines on the cardboard insert that illustrate a ship's firing arc), so the only shooting for the turn fell to Red Squadron. 

BC checked range and found Red to be at Range 2 from Black. Hoping to get one of my ships out of the way early, BC elected to fire his Proton Torpedoes which would get him 4 Attack dice (one more than he'd have been able to roll had he just used the X-Wing's primary weapon) as well as some other side benefits depending on what he rolled (for the particulars, click the Proton Torpedoes link there). His roll netted two filled explosion symbols, or "hits" as we usually call them (whole other subject- click to read The Combat Phase Explained! for more details), an unfilled explosion symbol, or a "crit" as we call them, and a blank. 

A TIE fighter has an Agility of 3 standard, which means I got to roll three of the green dice to hopefully mitigate the effects of BC's shooting. For every wavy arrow symbol the defender rolls on the green dice, he gets to cancel one hit result on the red attack dice. 

For my defense roll, I ended up with two wavy arrow symbols and a focus symbol (or "eyeball" in local parlance). Normally, this would mitigate both of BC's "hit" results (you mitigate normal hits before "crits"), but since I'd also declared Evade as my Action, I elected to use my Evade token to also mitigate the 'crit." 

Net result? No damage to my Black TIE. This turn's Combat Phase was now at the end as my Obsidian had no shot on BC's X-Wing. We entered the End Phase where most unused tokens get removed. In this case, it was Obsidian's Evade token going back to the pile. 

Spinnin' wheels again, I was definitely going to be in range to try and overlap those satellite tokens. This is where things were going to get tricky; if I didn't overlap the tokens, I couldn't try to scan them, so I took a long hard look at the table and tried to visualize the maneuvers I needed to overlap both satellites with both TIEs. I figured BC's X-Wing had plenty of firepower to one-shot one of my ships before it could escape, but it was unlikely he'd get both of them running away. We selected our maneuvers and concluded this turn's Planning Phase when I revealed Obsidian TIE's maneuver. 

Obsidian TIE started pretty much straight across from the satellite token he was going after. As BC's X-Wing seemed to be much more focused on taking out Black Squadron TIE, I decided go for the gusto and attempt a Koigoran Turn, which is the fancy pants X-Wing Miniatures term for a straight move that ends in a 180 degree turnaround. TIE Fighters can do a K-Turn at the end of a Straight 3 or a Straight 5. I wasn't entirely sure a 3 would get me on top of the token, and seriously considered selecting a 5 instead. I knew that maneuver would cause me to overshoot the satellite, but I could easily 'lap it on the way back. The problem was, it would be an extra turn that BC would possibly have time to destroy my other ship, then come after this one, so I decided to pull the Straight 3 K-Turn instead. 

Black Squadron TIE wasn't directly across from the satellite he was after, but again, after taking a long look at things, I figured a Bank 3 ought to get me pretty dang close, and hopefully even if I didn't end up on top of the satellite, it'd at least put me out of BC's firing arc. 

Probably should have mentioned this before now, but when you're selecting your maneuver in the Planning Phase, you can't pre-measure the maneuver you select- it's all your spatial awareness versus the other dude, as well as guessing what you think your opponent is thinking. It's a really cool mechanic that sort of makes a poker game out of the maneuver phase as a well selected maneuver can very literally set you up to win the game. 

BC indicated he was ready to go, and I flipped over Obsidian TIE's maneuver dial. 

What a stroke of luck! Er, I mean, what a great couple of maneuvers picked by me! Both maneuvers put both ships right on top of their satellites. Since a K-Turn is red on a TIE Fighter's maneuver dial, I had to place a Stress token next to Obsidian which meant he couldn't declare an Action this turn. Since Black had just pulled a white maneuver, I elected to Evade again in case BC was going to be firing on me. BC elected to pull a 1 Bank to the right and as he was well within Range 3 of Black, decided to declare Target Lock for his Action. 

Note: If you look closely, you'll see that Black ended up outside of BC's firing arc. While he would be unable to fire upon me this turn, the Target Lock Action only requires that the target ship be within Range 3- it does not have to be within the ship's firing arc. 

We entered the Combat Phase of the game turn and I elected to have Black Squadron Pilot Scan the satellite. Red Squadon had no valid target, so we moved on to Obsidian who also scanned the satellite he was overlapping. 

Moving into the End Phase, Black's Evade token left the board, but BC's Target Lock remained in play as it's a persistent type of Action, and Obsidian's Stress Token would be sticking around until he pulled a green maneuver. 

Spinnin' wheels again, I liked my chances of getting at least one of these TIEs off the board with the intercepted Rebel comm transmissions. I figured my best shot at this would be to fly Obsidian straight back towards my board edge and have Black try to engage the X-Wing. I didn't figure I'd kill it, but I thought if I could at least hold him up for a round or two, Obsidian would have an easy time escaping. That in mind, I didn't want to just pick a straight 5 for Obsidian because of his Stress Token. Instead, I picked a Straight 2 as it's the fastest, straight maneuver available to a TIE that's still a green maneuver. That sorted, I decided Black Squadon would pull a 3 K-Turn and attempt to engage the X-Wing. I set my dials, BC indicated he had chosen his maneuver and we moved from the Planning Phase to the Activation Phase. 

Obsidian performed his maneuver, which being a green maneuver, allowed him to discard the Stress Token he picked up last turn. With the Stress Token gone, he was free to select an Action in his Perform Action step. I chose to Evade again. Black then pulled his 3 K-Turn, a red maneuver, which Stressed him out and with the Stress Token attached to him, he was unable to declare an Action this turn. BC pulled a K-Turn of his own with Red; also a Stressful maneuver, but one that left Black in his firing arc and vice versa- the Combat Phase was upon us!

After measuring with the Range Ruler (forgot to take a pic, sorry!) Black Squadron found himself at Range 3 from his quarry and fired on the Red Squadron X-Wing. TIE Fighters have an Attack value of 2, so I grabbed two red Attack dice and rolled a "hit" and a blank. BC now had the opportunity to mitigate this damage with a his X-Wing's Agility of 2, but he was able to roll a third green die since I was using a primary weapon to attack him at Range 3. He produced a roll of three Focus results, so my hit landed upon his ship and removed one of his two shield tokens. 

Now, it was his turn to attack me back. His X-Wing has a primary attack value of 3, so he grabbed 3 red Attack dice and rolled them scoring a single hit and two blanks. Not the greatest roll in the world, he opted to spend his Target Lock token which allowed him to re-roll whatever dice he wanted, one time. He left the hit on the table and picked up the two blanks to roll again. 

This time, the results were more favorable. Net result? Two hits and a crit. I grabbed my three green Defense dice because of my TIE Fighter's 3 Agility and added another for being at Range 3 and being attacked by a Primary Weapon. I scored two wavy arrows and two blanks. As I'd declared a Stressful move, I had no Evade Action Token to save my butt this time. 

My two Evade results cancelled both of BC's hits, but that crit went against my hull which caused me to not only draw a Damage card to represent the damage, but also to flip it face-up and observe whatever the card said. 

As the card was a "Ship" critical damage card, my Determination did nothing for me. Nope, I was going to have to take a Stress token any time Black Squadron TIE performed a Turn maneuver at any speed for the rest of the game! Bummer for me! Still though, it was only 1 point of damage and a TIE Fighter has a hull value of 3, so I could take two more unmitigated hits, then I'd be done for. 

Since Obsidian had no valid targets, we entered the End Phase, discarded any remaining Action Tokens, and that game turn ended. 

Black Squadron TIE has critical hull damage, the Red Squadron X-Wing has lost only a shield, and the Obsidian TIE is about to floor it for the board edge. Which faction will emerge victorious? Find out tomorrow (maybe)! Holy mackerel this is taking up a lot more copy than I'd thought!

Stay tuned!

X-Wing Miniatures Sample Game, Part 1

I've gotten a lot of traffic from search engine queries like "Sample X-Wing Game Turn" and "X-Wing Game Turn Examples" and as I've kind of meant to do this for awhile but just didn't for whatever reason, I thought I'd post a series of articles this week outlining a complete game of X-Wing Miniatures for those folks who are interested in seeing a real nuts-and-bolts write up of an entire game. Note: This is not a battle report, per se, though if you guys dig on those, boy are you in for a treat in a few weeks...

Ha, ha! New table suckas! Yeah!

Right. So last Saturday evening, BC and Sean were supposed to play a game over Hangout, but one of Sean's kiddos got sick, so BC and I began texting about what we were going to do. After some back and forth, BC agreed to a "small-side" (i.e. less than 100 points, in our own verbiage) game so I could take a bunch of pictures for a series of articles covering how a game of X-Wing really works. We discussed a 50 point match, then BC had the novel idea of just using the stuff in the Core Set as it fits thematically with what I'm trying to do here- namely give the perspective X-Wing player or those new to the game an insight into how all of this awesomeness really works. 

I complimented him on his insight and took it a step further suggesting we play one of the scenarios from the back of the rule book rather than a straight up dogfight like we usually do. He was down like a town to try something different as we've done pretty much nothing but play the dogfight scenario since like Christmas. We decided to play Scenario 3- Dark Whispers mainly because it didn't have asteroids, so therefore allowed for a faster setup time since it was already getting pretty late. 

Like all of the rule book scenarios, you can play them with more than just the Core Set ships, but we used only the suggested pilots from the Core. BC wanted to be Rebels, and as such, he would be using a lone Red Squadron X-Wing, with Proton Torpedoes and R2-F2. This left the Imperials for me- one Obsidian Squadron TIE Fighter and one Black Squadron TIE Fighter with the Determination Elite Pilot Skill. 

That settled, we started putting our stuff together, picking out the counters and tokens we'd need for our match, getting out the movement templates, and pulling dice out. We also set out the cards representing our ships, and BC placed a couple of Shield Tokens on his X-Wing card to represent the state of his shields. As my TIEs fly without shields, my cards don't have them. 

Note: This may seem a little weird, the way we do things, but keep in mind we play over Google Hangout, so don't let the grid map in the pictures and the fact that none of BC's cards and maneuver dials and whatnots are on my table throw you off.

A quick read through of the scenario reveals our objectives/ win conditions. As the Imps, I'm supposed to "scan" some satellite counters. I do this by overlapping (I'll talk more about what exactly this means later, I promise) the satellite counter then opting to "scan" instead of attacking that round. Once I've scanned a satellite, I pick the counter up and put it on my ship's base, then try to fly back to my own board edge. BC is supposed to prevent me from doing this. Should he lose his lone Red Squadron X-Wing, he can add a Rookie Pilot "reinforcement" in the current turn's end phase (which is also when you clean off most of the Action tokens). 

Ship setup is fairly standard- our deployment zones start at our table edge and end at Range 1 towards the center of the table. You can see my Range Ruler there on the left side of my table. 

From Left, below the mat, my maneuver dials and various Action tokens, ship/ pilot cards with the Determination card, maneuver templates

In X-Wing, the order you deploy ships is (usually) dependent on your pilots and your opponent's pilots Pilot Skill rating. It's represented on both the card and the little cardboard insert that actually sits on the miniature's base. I talk about it a lot in this article about Pilot Skill, but the short version is, lower Pilot Skill pilots move first and shoot last, while conversely, high Pilot Skill pilots move last and shoot first. For deployment purposes, it also sets the order in which you place your ships on the table. My Obsidian TIE is Pilot Skill 3, so he goes down on the board first. In the picture above, he's the one on the left. My Black Squadron TIE and BC's Red Squadron X-Wing both have a Pilot Skill of 4. When you have a tie like this, you refer to a tie-breaker mechanism called "Initiative." I talk about it in that same article I linked to above, but to sum up quickly, when two guys have the same Pilot Skill, the guy with Initiative moves and shoots before the guy without. For the purposes of deployment, this meant that my Black Squadron TIE would hit the board before BC would drop his Red Squadron X-Wing. 

Note: If you, uh, you know, actually like, read the scenario's Mission Setup section, it actually tells you to do what I just said above, only without having to know about Pilot Skill or Initiative or whatever. What's that old line about writers being terrible readers? Oh, there's no old saying like that? I just totally made that up? Ah. Mea culpa, homies. 

If you look closely on the far side of the table, you can also see that BC has deployed his X-Wing and the two satellites. The satellites aren't a "standard" thing in X-Wing, just this scenario, so they have their own deployment rules outlined in the scenario rules. If you're curious about the methods used to deploy the satellite, just have a look at page 24 of the rule book. 

Now that we're all set up and we've got everything deployed on the board, the game kicks off normal mode with the Planning Phase. We colloquially refer to this as, "Spinnin' wheels." That is, it's when you pick up your ship's maneuver dial and assign a maneuver to it. You do this in secret, and once you've picked your move, you set the wheel face-down near either the miniature for your ship or near the ship/ pilot card so that your opponent knows which ship that wheel is referring to. Once both players have set maneuver dials for all of their ships, you then reveal the dials one by one, in Pilot Skill order, from lowest PS to highest completing the maneuver and assigning an Action (if appropriate) before moving on to the next ship/ pilot. 

X-Wing represents how nimble a ship is by having different maneuvers available on the maneuver dial and they are most definitely not the same from ship to ship. While all the ships have quite a few maneuvers available to them (around 12-14), the more maneuverable ships will have less maneuvers that are represented by red arrows (which cause you to incur Stress when you execute them) and more maneuvers represented by green arrows (which remove Stress as well as trigger other in-game stuff) in addition to having a more maneuvers than their slower, more ponderous brethren. 

I figured my best bet for winning this game was to try and capitalize on my TIEs' superior speed and handling by focusing on completing the objective rather than go toe-to-toe with an X-Wing, especially since he'd get one back almost as soon as I'd killed it (assuming I even could). As such, I figured for my first set of maneuvers, I'd just scream in and try to get to those satellites as quickly as I could. BC would definitely move to engage one of my ships, but hopefully I'd be able to dance around a bit while the other ship scanned his satellite and vamoosed for my board edge before the X-Wing could kill both of my TIEs. With that in mind, I set my maneuver dials and told BC I was ready. He set his single dial and it was time to start the show. 

I had the ship with the lowest Pilot Skill (the Obsidian TIE), so I turned his dial over first, revealing the "Straight 5" maneuver I'd selected. I picked up my straight 5 template, placed it at the front of my Obsidian TIE's base between the little template alignment nubs, picked the ship up, and dropped it at the end of the template, aligning the template with the alignment nubs on the back of my TIE's base. 

After performing your maneuver, if your pilot isn't Stressed (usually by performing a stressful, red arrow maneuver, but can also be triggered by other stuff in the game), you can elect to Perform an Action. On both the ship/ pilot card as well as the cardboard base insert, there are some symbols that represent the Actions available to the ship. My TIEs have Barrel Roll, Evade, and Focus available to them. BC's X-Wing has Focus and Target Lock. I talk about all of those save for Barrel Roll in the Three Main Actions article. Of course, they're also in the rule book as is the particulars of using Barrel Roll. 

Not knowing how far up the mat BC's X-Wing was going to move, I went ahead and selected "Evade" as the Obsidian TIE's Action just to be on the safe side. I placed an Evade Token near my miniature then revealed Black Squadron's maneuver dial- also a straight 5. 

One of my TIEs pulling a "Straight 5"

Same thinking as before, not knowing if BC's upcoming maneuver, I selected Evade as my Action for the Black Squadron ship to be on the safe side. 

For BC's turn, he pulled a Straight 2 and found he was just short of being able to Target Lock either of my ships, so he elected to take no Action as we were at the end of this game turn. 

To Target Lock, a ship has to be within at least Range 3 of the ship doing the Target Locking. As this is currently the maximum range for ship weapons in X-Wing, since neither of my TIEs were in Range 3 of BC's X-Wing to provide a Target Lock, we also knew they weren't in range to shoot or be shot at. That's why we skipped the subsequent Combat Phase entirely. 

The Evade Tokens on my TIEs and BC pulling a 2 Straight

At this point, BC said, "So, spinnin' wheels?", and we picked up our maneuver dials and assigned our next set of moves to our ships. 

Turn one is in the bag, TIE Fighters screaming (would love to have linked the TIE Fighter "howl" there, but the only results on YouTube I can find right now are re-dubs where some dipshit has put in the Howie scream instead, so now instead of just being tired, I'm now pissed off and tired) down the board while the X-Wing sizes up the opposition and undoubtedly is priming his torpedo tubes. Who will end up victorious? Will the Imperials successfully download the transmissions on the Rebel Holonet satellites or will they die tryin'? How many days will I draw out this Sample Game for articles? I mean good lord, it's like a 30 point game, right? But it still took me like 1,900 words to cover deployment and a first turn where nobody fired a shot...

Find out tomorrow (or possibly even Wednesday or Thursday) in our shocking conclusion to Dark Whispers, only here on TheMetalBikini.com! 

Stay tuned!