My suggestion would be to purchase 4 paint pens They should be between $3 and $5 each. You'll want blue, green, red, and pick another bright color that will stand out...say purple or orange. These are to paint the sides of your cardboard items. Blue is for your blue tokens: shields & cloak. Green is for focus, evade, reinforce. Red is for crit, stress, ion tokens. Use the 4th color for the sides of your maneuver templates and, if you want, your bomb/mine tokens. That will make everything stand out more on your black background. Oh, and for target locks, I like the idea of blacking out one side.

I personally love my acrylic upgrades and highly suggest saving money for them. You can get some nice ones for reasonable prices. I use Daft Concepts for my general play tokens and target locks and use Cog-o-two for my maneuver templates. My suggestion would be before getting acrylic, pick up a play surface you're happy with. Do some research and find something that appeals to you that others have said work well. I use a cloth mat from Corsec Engineering...but that was expensive and probably not a good fit for your situation.

Here's a tip: don't give the rebels Luke + R2D2. I saw him solo kill Boba Fett, a shuttle, AND two Ties. And it took FOREVER.

These are things that I do to keep things moving. My action tokens that get used in game live in a little container that I can keep handy. It has shield, energy, evade, focus, ion, critical, stress and cloak tokens (plus a few marked differently for use as Marksmanship etc). My target lock tokens are paired with my ship number tokens (A/B TL's with 1, C/D TL's with 2, etc) and I grab these out when I set the ships up. To keep things clean, I leave the blue TL tokens on the ship cards and place the red tokens on the TL'ed ship. This reduces the amount of tokens you need to move around with each ship and reduces confusion (I'll place them normally if my opponent wants me to). I also leave the dials on the ship cards (as you're advised to do in blue on blue matches) as it prevents you from having to check which dial belongs to what ship mid turn if things are confusing.

Also, try stopping by you local store(s), and watch a round or two from people who play more than you. At our first tournament (two years or so ago), we played 75 min rounds, and nearly every game went to time. Now we play 60 min/ 100 pt. games, and usually finish with time to spare.

Or if you don't have a Local store, check out Youtube. There are a lot of good battle reports for x-wing there.

Everybody plays a little different, but if you see something that works...use it. Be it Tactics in flying, sportsmanship, or organization/ speed of play.

I have found like most people here these tricks

1 Storage. all my ships are stored assembled with there own bag of tokens needed for a game

2 chose your list and keep the cards separate for easy access

3 get all your templates out and sorted for easy access

4 if casual break the rules for the first round. most times there is no shooting so just move all your ships at once and skip actions (unless Barral rolling or bosting). In most games breaking this rule wont make much difference except for time

5 if all the same pilot skill let your opponent all the moves and actions at once and if no bumps or overlaps place all tokens after moving

6 when going to a tournament or a friends house only take what you need. saves time and space

This is what I do anyway

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

Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

7 P's takes to long i prefer the 6 P's

Pre Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance

but nothing prevents Piss Poor Dice Rolls

Here's a tip: don't give the rebels Luke + R2D2. I saw him solo kill Boba Fett, a shuttle, AND two Ties. And it took FOREVER.

So Luke is better then Boba and a shuttle. Ha. JK

Just want to update you on my observations. One thing I should mention is that my brother was playing with a phantom during this match(and the match that took a while). I haven't looked at all of my footage, but here is a summary of what I've seen during our first 3 rounds.

Rebels: Garven + Biggs(Upgrades aren't important)
Imperials: Echo + 2x Black Squadron Pilots

1st Round: 3 minutes 40 seconds
-Planning Phase: 40 seconds
-Movement Phase: 2 minutes 54 seconds : Takes a bit of time for phantom to make action.
-Combat Phase: Skipped (no targets)
2nd Round: 10 minutes 35 seconds
-Planning Phase: 1 minute
-Movement Phase: 6 minutes 50 seconds: Phantom takes a while to figure out what decloack option they should do but doesn't do it in the end.
-Combat Phase: 2 minutes 45 seconds: No damage is done with only one ship being able to attack.

3rd Round: 14 minutes 19 seconds.

-Planning Phase: 3 minutes 55 seconds: Imperial Player takes the longest to decide.
-Movement Phase: 6 minutes 20 seconds
-Combat Phase: 4 minutes 4 seconds: 3 fighters attack(I think its 3, I forget to record fully).

So far I'm seeing that we aren't ready to play with the Phantom yet because it has a steeper learning curve. We need to get more miniatures to have more choice in the matter too.
The match this time took only around 80 minutes, but I'll give more details on what happened in those matches when I have more time to report my findings. So what do you think about this conclusion. Is there something else that I'm not seeing with these results?

I think maybe being more decisive in making your movements with your other ships will help. 4 minutes to plan and then 6 minutes to move is quite long in the 3rd round. It could be 1/4 - 1/2 that and seem more normal for what I play.

Jacob

I think maybe being more decisive in making your movements with your other ships will help. 4 minutes to plan and then 6 minutes to move is quite long in the 3rd round. It could be 1/4 - 1/2 that and seem more normal for what I play.

Jacob

I agree. 2 minutes planning and 3 minutes movement makes more sense in my eyes.

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.

I cut one of my ranger rulers down about half an inch past the range 1. It's easy to get in between close ships and check things, and if I'm measuring at that point and don't hit the range 1, it's obviously R2.