Imperial v imperial takes longer than rebel games usually. Try rebel v rebel for speed.

I played Blood Bowl for many years and you had a four minute time limit for your whole turn. When we didn't bother with it, the game could really drag out, but when we enforced it for tournament play, play sped up dramatically.

You might be over-thinking during the planning phase ("analysis paralysis" -love the term). Try using a small egg timer hour glass or something similar for your planning phase. For playing 60 point games, this should be ample time to plan your moves. And you will find you'll get faster with your planning. I tend to start thinking of my next maneuver as soon as I've completed the current one. In this game you've got to learn to think moves ahead. Most of the time, by the time we get to the 'clean up' stage, I've already chosen most of my maneuvers and just need to place the dials. You will find 'down-time' during each move, usually while you opponent is deciding what he want's to do. Maximise the down-time.

Sorting stuff is crucial! There is nothing worse than having an opponent show up for a game with all his components in one, single bag. He'll take forever to find anything. It's happened to me more than once.

I keep all my tokens in a small fishing tackle box that keeps them all separate, then I only get out the ones I'm going to need and place them next to the pilot card. I usually have about four or five pairs of target locks separated from the rest of my TL tokens, just to make it quicker to grab some during set up. So when my Rookie does a Focus, his token is on his card, goes on the table, gets used and back on his card. It's always going to be either on the pilot card or on the ship.

Maneuver templates: Sort them out, lay them out in order at the side of the play area and be obsessive about making sure they stay in order. It makes it so much faster to grab the one you need. The illustration on page 5 of the rulebook shows this perfectly.

As for ships sliding around on your table, I wouldn't be too worried. Ships are going to get nudged or bumped during the course of play. I wouldn't get overly pedantic if things are moving a bit. Personally, I just use a black table cloth and things tend to stay put reasonably well. Most hardware stores have self-adhesive rubber stoppers for cupboards that you could stick onto the undersides of the bases to stop them from sliding. It's worth checking them out, and it's easier than trying to fill the base with silicone sealant.

It may sound a little OCD, but being organised in this game will speed up your play.

Win faster.

This has been an another addition of Short Answers to Long Questions.

I agree with using a non vinyl matt. I use a felt starfield matt and nothing slides on that.

If you want to keep your stuff organised.. top tip here...

Keep all the little bags that you get with a standard expansion.

The large bag the cards come in are good for keeping all your pilot cards together, the smaller ones for the base etc are good for keeping all your shields etc together.

After a while you'll find that you need a larger bag for things like target locks, shields etc. Also i dont know if this craze has hit the states but kids in the UK are all mad about 'loom bands', its like woven bracelts made of small elastc bands.

a packet of these bands is about UK £1 for hundreds in any colour and they are perfect for keeping target locks sorted and bound together so you're not trying to find the corresponding letter all the time.

I don't think I've had a game go over an hour and most are shorter than that, I could understand two hours if your playing epic but not at sixty points.

It does seem a tad excessive i'll give you that.

What i love about xwing is its very very rapid.

I'll echo the comments about blood bowl too. 2nd ed was a nightmare if you didnt time turns it could take hours to get a touchdown.

I don't find that X-wing take a long time (unlike some other miniature games) It is probably the fastest game out there.

But yeah here are some tips.

• Have tokens already pre-sorted and place all the action tokens you can play out while leaving those you can't use in the bag (i.e. only 1 evade token if you have only 1 ship that can evade)
• Keep a dice tower or tray to make dice rolling easy and prevent them from dropping on table.
• Have a time limit on the planning phase, this tends to be the longest phase after all.
• Play through mistakes, have agreements such as once you set a puck down by the ship you cannot pick it back up, or if you declare an action you must attempt to do that action unless it becomes impossible.
• Have squadron lists already set up so you can get the cards quickly or just have a squadron printout so you can play on it.
• Keep it at 100 points, maybe even fewer. Bigger point limits tend to have more ships and upgrades and options for actions which means longer.

I always take a long time in figuring out the dials for my ships. I think you are spending too much time thinking of your next move and the more ships you have, the more time it will take. Use less ships on your squad.

Use less fancy upgrades. Heavy Laser Cannon is non-fancy as it's just a big 2-3 range gun. While R5-K6 is fancy since its card has 2 paragraphs which require thinking.

Keep a plastic bottle to take a piss in. No bathroom excuses.

Stop having fun and do not joke or have any conversation. Speed is key.

Play the game on Vassal which is the computer version and free and it moves everything for you.

I have found that using more potent ships speeds the game up. Part if the problem might be that you have a limited pool of ships, cards, etc., so you are building really simple yet inefficient lists that take a long time to kill anything. That was certainly my early experiences with a core set and a couple extra ships.

Take some time and build a couple very potent lists, then only play that list for 3-5 rounds. Each time you play it you will get better at using it, and your planning, activation and combat stages will get faster with each game.

Time how long it takes each game to:

a) kill the first ship (also mark the round, the damage you caused)

b) lose your first ship

c)kill the 2nd and ship 3rd Ships

d) finish the match

With the data you collect, you can clearly analyze your patterns and then improve. Filming was a good idea, but a notepad and stopwatch is also helpful. Time each game, and nite how king each round takes.

Jacob

Have to agree with that, sometimes games where the surviving ships are TIE/ln and Z95s take ages as no one can hit anyone!

Have to agree with that, sometimes games where the surviving ships are TIE/ln and Z95s take ages as no one can hit anyone!

If the game could end either way but the dice refuse to make a difference then agree it is a TIE and start a new game

Start thinking about your maneuvers two rounds before and seriously start planning them during the combat phase prior to setting the dial.

And maneuver to attack, maybe you're dancing around each other too much?

I only ever play 200 point games and they take a good evening up, 3-4 hours. I would love to play a few 100 point games but my friend doesn't see the point in small dog fights when we have spent a lot of money on various ships.

I personally think the length of the game depends on you and your opponents take on the game. If every turn is life and death, more time will be taken up in the manoeuvre phase. If you aim to play more like tournament games then the game will be faster, but you personally might not find any fun in that as it just feels rushed.

I do feel sometimes that I am often waiting for my opponent, as the games are always around mine I can ensure I am prepared and have everything laid out nicely....I needn't bother though!

My suggestions would be, end the game early if it is 3 on 1 and that 1 is a z-95 headhunter/tie fighter etc. with 1 damage point left.

Push each other into making their decisions quicker if they are taking the piss.

I find games get exponentially longer with more ships so your friend may be short changing himself.

Your 200 point game takes you 3 to 4 hours.

You might get four 100 point games in that time if you pre planned your lists before you met.

That way he'd get to use twice as many of his ships and in more interesting combinations.

Unless he suffers from the 40k disease of 'must play as many of my toys at once so lets do all my models versus all your models' gaming.

Game mechanics are geared to 'optimise' at a certain level, clearly 100 points for X wing, while it 'works' at higher levels I imagine it will get tedious when you get to the *thousands* of points a side games due to the ammont of 'book keeping' and the way in which a turn could take half an hour to play out (at least) . I've not desire to test this theory but to me the charm of x wing is that its fast.

I started playing at 150 because my friend went mad and bought every ship and wanted to use them, we've recently started to do 100 point games as well though we easily got two games into an hour and a half.

We are holding off on epic games until imps get their big ship but we've done the scenarios with the transport.

One thing I don't miss from 40k is the thirty minutes spent deploying your army, they should of stayed at skirmish level games that they knew how to do well.

Yeah but it doesnt make money.

Necromunda was one of the most popular GW games ever and i remember it having to be downplayed as you spent £15 on a gang and that was pretty much all you needed to buy if your mate owned the box set.

40k or fantasy on the other hand was a minimum 100 quid start up.

Back in around 2000/2001 i was chatting to Ian Pickstock and he recalls being briefed to make space marines cheaper in points (from 30 to 15 points or there abouts) so that people needed to buy more of them to make a 1500 point basic army.

70 per cent of 40k sales are space marines of one sort or another, but as they are the most 'elite' and expensive core troops (or were at the time) they needed to make you need more of them.

Its a business after all.

But thats why your 30 - 40 model space marine 2000 point army faces off against a 200 - 200 model guard or ork army...

I bought some cheap strip velcro and attached it to the back to the target locks, simultaneously eradicating the double lettering and keeping the pairs together.

1. Time your games for around the tournament length. 60 or 70 minutes works pretty well. Then, count pts killed on either side to determine a winner. Usually I'm thay time period you'll have a clear cut winner. If not, play a few more rounds! The clock teaches you speed.

2. Learn how to win faster! Haha. Sounds simple enough, but if you have a clear cut plan of what ships you'd like to focus fire first, and a solid backup plan, you'll tend to play faster, as you'll be setting goals along the way to keep you focused. Etc etc.

3. Build squads that can kill eachother fast! If yup 7 Tie swarm vs 7 Tie swarm, there is no doubt the game will take a while.

Yeah but it doesnt make money.

Necromunda was one of the most popular GW games ever and i remember it having to be downplayed as you spent £15 on a gang and that was pretty much all you needed to buy if your mate owned the box set.

40k or fantasy on the other hand was a minimum 100 quid start up.

Back in around 2000/2001 i was chatting to Ian Pickstock and he recalls being briefed to make space marines cheaper in points (from 30 to 15 points or there abouts) so that people needed to buy more of them to make a 1500 point basic army.

70 per cent of 40k sales are space marines of one sort or another, but as they are the most 'elite' and expensive core troops (or were at the time) they needed to make you need more of them.

Its a business after all.

But thats why your 30 - 40 model space marine 2000 point army faces off against a 200 - 200 model guard or ork army...

Plus by ditching the specialist games they fail to keep people in their stores when they get burnt out from time to time, I loved mordheim and my skaven gang and the campaigns were always popular but it never replaced 40k it was just there when I needed a break.

Companies are there to make money but they generally do so by making the customer happy, in the years since you left they've just been making their customers angrier and angrier and pushing them into the arms of mantic privateer press and now off.

With 7th they should of broken the mold and made rules suitable to the new scale, instead they just made a cash grab edition that made games even longer.

Always remember the '7 P's'...

Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

This is true for all aspects of the game. I have all of my pilot cards organized in Ultra-pro binder pages. They are organized by ship and then by pilot skill. I have all of my upgrade cards in a business card binder; ten per page. I can find anything I may need in less than 30 seconds. I carry all the rest of my gear in a Plano 1374 case. It contains 4 stowaways inside. One for rebels, one for Imperials, one for S&V, and the bottom and final one for all tokens. The bulk storage on the top holds my huge ships, templates, etc.

Organization is key. This holds true for setup, planning, moving, combat... all of it.

Most things I'd recommend have been said, but here are a couple more:

1) A 3x3 play area has a bit too much room to 60 points. You might try cutting it to 2.5 square and cut out some turns flying in empty space and not shooting.

2) move your opponent's ships when they are on your side of the table.

3) you should be spending almost no time thinking about ship deployment or opening moves. Not because they are not critical, but because you should have a few pre-planned openings.

4) don't use the letters on target locks. Take a paint marker or sharpie and paint the brown edges. Make each set of two their own color.

Edit: 6. Black out one side of your target locks. The double-sided letters make it much harder to find the pairs in a game, and makes it easy for tokens to get flipped and cause problems. Black out a side so each only has a single letter - Sharpies do fine, but I actually stick mine on masking tape or contact paper and spray the backs with primer. It also makes sure you know which tokens are yours, because not many people do this

<Yoink!> So stealing this. Great idea, as I find TL tokens the most frustrating.

All good advice here but Im preatty shure the bigest problem you ave is experience.

A thing I say to One of my "overthinker" friend: Stop looking at the dial the move you want to do wont suddently appear.

Stop whit this 60 point non sense if you ave the ship. It take five second to build a fun and solid 100 point roster (not a tournement dasher). Four red squadron ... done.

I always take a long time in figuring out the dials for my ships. I think you are spending too much time thinking of your next move and the

Stop having fun and do not joke or have any conversation. Speed is key.

Play the game on Vassal which is the computer version and free and it moves everything for you.

I think your missing the point here... or maybe Ha ha ha good one.

Also i dont know if this craze has hit the states but kids in the UK are all mad about 'loom bands', its like woven bracelts made of small elastc bands.

a packet of these bands is about UK £1 for hundreds in any colour and they are perfect for keeping target locks sorted and bound together so you're not trying to find the corresponding letter all the time.

I was looking to those thing whit adult male disinteres but deep down I knew I add to buy some one day good Idea.

Paint the sides of target lock pairs unique colors or patterns. That way, you can just disregard the letter and use the color.

If you get multiple core sets, cut down a range ruler into a range 1 and a range 2. That will speed up measuring distance, especially when you have lots of ships.

As mentioned, stay organized. I always group my templates and carry a small organizer full of tokens. Some people carry card binders to easily find pilots. I use a pair of plano boxes to store my stuff (1 rebel, 1 imperial) and if you keep it organized, it really helps.