My group can usually only muster 3 people at once, the 4th inevitably working, etc. Making the third person sit and watch for an hour is unfortunate. But a 3-way furball usually results in some poor sap dying when he ends up between both. Has anybody found a way to have 3 players play at once? Do you tweak points, alliances, play area, etc? Any thoughts are welcome!
Anyway for a balanced 3 player game?
Give the 3rd player a mission objective.
Fly this ship to here to pick up something and bring it back to here to win. 1st player is trying to blow you up, 2nd player is trying to kill 1st player, 3rd player is trying to survive.
Never played it through, but you could have a mexican stand-off type game, 3 way can only attack the person on your left... Might not work too well but seems worth a shot.
Another might be 2v1, have you fly a 200 pt they each fly 100 pt, or some version of that... you have 150, they each get 75, etc. 400 points on the field tends to take a long time to remove, so for a quick game fewer points would work better.
I've played team games like that with a 3v2 and it worked out well, balanced point wise and didn't make choosing a target too difficult. 2 side had 225 points, we each had 75, game lasted about 90 minutes.
Hope it helps!
I forget who originally posted it, but I'm a big fan of the Attack Left! game style. With three or more players, each player attempts to destroy the player seated to their left. It's interesting and somewhat asymmetrical because your target is shooting someone else, and you aren't interested in shooting back at the person shooting you! If you attack someone besides your target, you may inadvertently help someone else win. It makes for a fun game, and is pretty balanced at three players with 60 points apiece, in my experience.
Edit: ah, ninja'd. But I speak from experience when I say it's fun and relatively balanced!
Edited by TsiegtiezAnother vote for a rock/paper/scissors, attack left, whatever you want to call it format.
Should work especially well once S&V us out. Scum want to kill rebels (for the bounty), rebels want to kill Imps (for freedom) and Imps want to kill scum (for law & order, who can tell all these criminals apart anyway).
Since the hardest part in a 3 player match is 2 players ganging up on 1, Id impose some rule like...
If Player 2 shoots Player 3's Falcon this round, then Player 1 cannot shoot Player 3's Falcon for this round.
This prevents Players 1 and 2 from ganging up and shooting down Player 3's Falcon. This way, no single ship is ever focus fired by more than 1 squad's worth of points. Now, this doesnt prevent Player 1 from shooting at another ship owned by Player 3, which is okay since you DO want to kill him at some point, but at least Player 1 can't deal the finishing blow (in that round) after Player 2 did all the work.
Heck, I might even impose a win condition of "kill 100pts" with this rule.
Could make for some silly fun strategy where your PS 9 Wedge shoots the B Wing that the entire Tie Swarm is pointing at just to prevent the Swarm from killing the B Wing. This also adds some cool tactical advantage for high PS, whixh might be important, considering there are 3 players worth of ships denying actions and clogging the field.
I am not sure if this idea would work as it just occured to me and I have never tried anything like this but, What if you played on a circle or triangle playing area, where each players set up area is equidistant from the player to his left and right. Then each player divides his force in half and has to deploy one half to fight the player to his left and one half to fight the player on his right, effectively setting up 3 smaller battles that are all going on simulaneously. A player has to destroy the force he is fighting before he can reinforce his allies. Might be cool.
I've found the easiest thing for 3 players is to make it 2v1 and give the single player double the points so the team players would each get 75 points to play with and the single player would have a 150 point list
X-wing mission Control has a 4-player scenario that can be played with 3-players as well.
http://tools.fantasyflightgames.com/xwing/home/103/
It doesn't quite work as intended with three players however. One player will inevitably be sandwiched between the other two. To solve this we allow the third player to use two deployment areas (check the scenario map) which balances out quite nicely.
Edited by MacrossVF12 v 1. Its really good fun. The best player should be on the team, and really avoid trying to "play" for the other person, though advice is always good.
Adding in that command chain nixes things up a bit.
http://tools.fantasyflightgames.com/xwing/htmlpreview/732/
Space Whale Hunt for 3 or more players!
Have we seen any of the out of the box missions w/ S&V yet? I wonder if FFG already has something prepared to account for a third faction.
Have we seen any of the out of the box missions w/ S&V yet? I wonder if FFG already has something prepared to account for a third faction.
Well, S&V hasn't been released yet, so no. FFG is probably working on some, but the three-person scenario is very difficult to balance, especially in a straight-up dogfight type scenario.
2v1is easiest, we play 1v1v1 and spread the love out evenly and nicely. There area few good 3 player scenarios floating around also.
Edited by DoubleNot7Sadly it always leads to two ganging up one one, me and friends tried three player magic but they always ended up teaming against me which isn't any fun because you know going in your going to lose.
2v1 is the simplest way to do it and gives you a nice straightforward game with no need to worry about how your multiplayer rules are going to impact the game. Just make sure you don't use full 100 point squads for each of the two players unless you have a bigger table or both of them want to play 3-ship elite lists.
"Attack left" type games just seem too awkward in a game where "kill them before they kill you" is an important strategy. If that nasty phantom is about to kill Wedge why can't he shoot back and kill it first, why should he have to go chase some random academy pilot instead? Or maybe it's even worse, and you have to refrain from killing a good target so that it can shoot the ship that's about to shoot you? I just don't see how any of that would be fun.
When S&V gets released, all of the ships necessary to recreate the Skyhook battle from Shadows of the Empire will be in the game. I am very excited about that because I loved SotE.
Until then, try the 200pt 2v1 as Blail Bletg suggested. The game lasts a little longer and allows a very good player to either stand alone or be paired with a weaker skilled player. Not as a handicap, however, as the less skilled player has the opportunity to learn from his teammate.
Good luck.
nobody wants to try my space whale scenario? =(
Have played Attack Left once, and it came down to 1 ship per man, and a couple of hull points either way. It was intense and different and awesome!
We set up in a triangle...as best we can. We also over lap mats or using a bigger playing area. In order to win, you have to destroy X points of enemy ships, where X is the total points you are playing (ie. 100 point squadrons). This tends to keep everyone involved. First person to X points wins. It is possible for all ships to be destroyed before this happens...then whoever destroyed the most points wins.
"Attack left" type games just seem too awkward in a game where "kill them before they kill you" is an important strategy. If that nasty phantom is about to kill Wedge why can't he shoot back and kill it first,
He can. You just have to weigh the benefits of taking out a threat vs helping your other opponent achieve his objective.
I've often wanted to try the attack-left style game, and definitely will as soon as Scum comes out. That'll make it WAY more interesting than having two people using the same ships.
I've played in 2v1 games before (which each team having balanced points) and they are super fun. I've also played 3 way games where there was one 'capture the flag' objective.
We used a cargo container token and placed it in the center of the board. 1 player had a normal table edge deployment. 2 players had a corner deployment (within range 1-2 of both sides) on the opposite side f the table. First player to grab the container and bring it to the edge of the table in their deployment zone wins.
The shared objective ensures that the fight is constantly shifting between players.
What I came up with.. some people like it.
One time I had a friend who was learning the game (I know this is not the exact scenario, but bear with me) and we played a 2v1 against a vet. At the time I was more of a casual player as well. My friend and I formed the 2 person team, and got some amount of points, like we had 100 and our buddy had 120 or something like that. We had a bit of a handicap.
The other part of the rules were, that we each got say 50% of the points to do with what we wanted. Each of us. No double unique or anything like that. The final handicap, we couldn't share dials. So we had to each be smart about where we thought the two of us would go. I kept trying to fly safe and wide, and my buddy would continually fly into me. Granted, he was still learning, and I think we still won, but during planning phase we couldn't communicate, and that was a huge handicap, that made for a really fun game, and also pretty darn close too.
At least I thought it was a riot. 
When we play 2 vs 1 at the house we usually do 150 pts for 1 and 75 pts each for the 2.
Adding in an objective for alternate win for the single player is fun but we don't always do that. I like last ship flying slightly better.
Most of the time I will play the 150 and let my sons play the 75s. They don't invest as much time studying the game as I do, so it helps them by not having as much to keep up with.