Okay, so in a few months, I'm going to be doing a library program for teens, showing them the X-Wing game. I'm expecting 12-16 kids and will have enough tables for four matches. Also, the library is allowing me to buy two core sets to use in addition to my own medium-size collection. The time allotment is 2 hours.

So, I'm wondering what kind of format would be best. Should I just do 4 separate games with 2v2? Do I just have them fly X-Wings vs. TIE fighters? Or, do I try to figure out how to do one big epic game?

The kids are not expected to know anything about the game.

Your thoughts?

My intial feeling about this is keeping it in the 50p range

4xAP 48p

2xAlpha Interceptor + AP 48p

Defender + Alpha Interceptor 48p

BH + Night Beast 48p

Luke + Rookie 49p

Knave + Rookie 48p

2xBlue + FCS 48p

4xZ95 48p

And just let them run 2v2

Escalation isn't a bad way to learn the game, but you're going to be hard-pressed to accomplish much in 2 hours with people unfamiliar with the game. Start small and work your way from there, and you might be able to squeeze in 3-4 matches. To save yourself setup time, you could keep the ships assigned to the tables and let the players rotate.

What I find to be prohibitive to newcomers is the burden of knowledge associated with upgrades. Most people will be able to identify with ships, and say "I want to play that!", but get lost when it comes to filling in the cracks. You might be better served with pre-generated lists that each focus around a particular ship, so your players can pick something and jump right into the action. That leaves the balance and burden in your hands, a knowledgable player, and mitigates any wasted time that may come of players trying to assemble something themselves.

That having been said, if you know nothing about these kids or their knowledge of Star Wars, you might also want to stick with the more iconic ships. Anything from the OT should be fine.

Make the lists yourself and don't use upgrade cards until they're solid with the game. It should only take one of them to grasp the mechanics.

Um...didn't you already make a thread about this?

Keep it small and without upgrades. Planning for multiple ships is where the time gets eaten up. More games vs larger games is what you should focus on so that if someone lost their first couple of games they have a chance to rebound and take a match.

Um...didn't you already make a thread about this?

Yes.

Escalation isn't a bad way to learn the game, but you're going to be hard-pressed to accomplish much in 2 hours with people unfamiliar with the game. Start small and work your way from there, and you might be able to squeeze in 3-4 matches. To save yourself setup time, you could keep the ships assigned to the tables and let the players rotate.

What I find to be prohibitive to newcomers is the burden of knowledge associated with upgrades. Most people will be able to identify with ships, and say "I want to play that!", but get lost when it comes to filling in the cracks. You might be better served with pre-generated lists that each focus around a particular ship, so your players can pick something and jump right into the action. That leaves the balance and burden in your hands, a knowledgable player, and mitigates any wasted time that may come of players trying to assemble something themselves.

That having been said, if you know nothing about these kids or their knowledge of Star Wars, you might also want to stick with the more iconic ships. Anything from the OT should be fine.

I agree. Small, pre-built lists that focus on popular characters should cut down on planning and playing time, and also generate more interest.

Okay, so in a few months, I'm going to be doing a library program for teens, showing them the X-Wing game. I'm expecting 12-16 kids and will have enough tables for four matches. Also, the library is allowing me to buy two core sets to use in addition to my own medium-size collection. The time allotment is 2 hours.

So, I'm wondering what kind of format would be best. Should I just do 4 separate games with 2v2? Do I just have them fly X-Wings vs. TIE fighters? Or, do I try to figure out how to do one big epic game?

The kids are not expected to know anything about the game.

Your thoughts?

Small, pre-built lists that focus on popular characters should cut down on planning and playing time, and also generate more interest.

This is also what I'm thinking - iconic characters, without rules that are too complex.

The main conundrum that I'm thinking about is to give the kids a luck-of-the-draw build that are not necessarily balanced. Do I keep the games shorter by having, say, 50 points per board, with one side having one kid-per-TIE (or two) and the other end with a Luke and a Rookie X-Wing?

This would be an option to cram as many kids at one table as possible, just in case I get a flood of kids. However, it would be clear that kids playing TIEs would be quickly removed from the game. So, the question is; how much attention should I put on each kid having the same amount of points? That would be more difficult to engineer than each table having a roughly equal number of points per side. That difficulty in engineering would cut down on the use of iconic characters.

Also, I think it would eliminate the use of the Millennium Falcon or the Slave I. I had a game in which I was teaching a couple of kids and I was just using X-Wings and TIEs for the sake of ease, but they really wanted to see the variety of ships on the board.

I've been thinking about this for some time at my branch because our Star Wars stuff gets checked out constantly and it would help grow a community that plays in a free, public space on 6x3.5' tables. The only issue is that I don't like teenagers.

You may have well-grounded reasonable reasons for not liking teens in general. On the other hand, there's a lot of variety in that species. Maybe you would like some of the teens that your local branch has to offer.

Um...didn't you already make a thread about this?

Yes.

So, why did you make another one?

Um...didn't you already make a thread about this?

Yes.

So, why did you make another one?