So my son and I headed down to our local game store here in Stevenage, England to play in the Spring Kit tournament. We picked up the core set about 4 weeks ago and have played maybe 10 or so games at home. We didn't really have a coherent enough squad for Imperials or Scum, and having watched Paul Heaver's 2013 World Champs game recently on YouTube decided to be inspired by his BBXX list with the following:
Keyan Farlander (29)
Veteran Instincts (1)
Blue Squadron Pilot (22)
Advanced Sensors (3)
Rookie Pilot (21)
R2 Astromech (1)
Rookie Pilot (21)
R7 Astromech (2)
Total: 100
We got to Lost Ark games for the 9am start and hung around with some of the other players whilst the tournament was set up. Mick, the friendly store owner, had kindly let me and my son team up as we were fairly inexperienced. He'd also said we could go whenever we wanted, as I wasn't sure my son's concentration levels would last the whole day, so my son and I agreed to play two games minimum and maybe leave then. We had decided to follow Paul Heaver's setup in 2013 and place our ships in a 2x2 formation on the right side of the board, move forwards slowly to see what our opponenent did and then try and take out his biggest, fatest ship. If we managed to take a ship down, we'd high five, be happy and whatever else happened would happen!
We were ready to go at about 9.45am and were paired with an experienced player, Andrew Christian. He was running two IG-88s (B&C I think) plus a load of upgrade cards we hadn't seen before. Andrew very kindly took time to explain his ships' and pilots' abilities - but we were a bit confused by them. He said he'd talk through all his moves as he did them as there were an awful lot of actions and re-rolls of dice involved. Too complicated for us newbies! We got underway and we played our ships up the right side of the board. Andrew took one Aggressor towards us and the other kind-of came up the side. We decided to joust the Aggressor that came at us and in the first exchange managed to do some damage. We then had to loop round the asteroid to get another pass at those tricky Aggressors as they dodged all over the place and took multiple actions...
Andrew took one of the B-Wings down, but we managed to come back round and use the Target Locks we had to take out one of the IG-88s. We were super pumped about this as we'd achieved out objective of taking out an opponents big ship... Awesome! Andrew then removed an X-Wing and time was called.
Others came over to help us tot up the totals, and then they had another count. Me and my son weren't sure what was going on, but they were counting our ships that had been destroyed versus the Aggressor we'd removed. Turns out we won by a single point - 48 points to 47! We were shocked, surprised and very happy! We felt a bit sorry for Andrew as he'd played well and was an experienced player - we'd kind-of lucked out a bit really...
Anyway, on to our second match against Robert Gilbert who was flying a fully loaded Decimator and two TIE Fighters. This Decimator was a beast with all crew slots taken and missiles and bombs. Easy choice for us as to what to go after. So we set up in our right hand corner and head off towards the VT-49. To our surprise it charged straight towards us with the TIE's buzzing around. Rob got his Ion Torpedos to ionise our four ships. Didn't really matter though as we still had range 1 shots on the Decimator and we pretty much knocked out it's shield in our first volley. There was then an almighty jam in the middle of the board as all out ships pretty much collided! It was a right mess!
We managed to get another volley of shots off and land a tonne more damage. We then managed to sort-of untangle and Rob dropped a Proton Bomb which caught two of our ships in it's blast radius. However, we'd got behind the Decimator now and were still focus firing. We'd reduced it to three hull points, whilst Rob had taken one of our Rookies. The next go we'd taken it off the board and it just left us to chase the two TIEs. We caught one, then the other and ran out 100-23 winners. So we'd one two games - way past our expectations!
Lunch was called and we took on some well deserved food and drink. We decided to stay on as we had a decent chance of scoring some prizes. Plus we were having fun!
Our first afternoon match was against a cool bloke called Alex. He was really helpful and totally had the 'fly casual' spirit. He was running Boba and Kath Scum with a few upgrades. Once again, we setup in our favourite corner and pulled away slowly to see where we went. Alex took Kath to one side and hung back a bit, but Boba ended up coming at us head on. Poor old Boba got the full brunt of some great red dice from my son and some poor green dice from Alex.
It didn't take long to strip Boba's shield and then we took him out completely. Alex managed to take out our Blue Squadron pilot, but we still had three ships chasing Kath. With her ability on her rear firing arc she was putting up a good fight. We then steered a Rookie into an asteroid, blowing him up, but the two remaining ships cleaned up giving us a 100-47 win. Alex was great with us - pointing out mistakes and advising us on better actions than we had planned. Top fella!
Our last match was against a player who also had 2 wins, one modified - Len Smith. Another top bloke and extremely helpful. He had to explain the StarViper and the M3-A. He was flying Xixor, Guri and Serissu and this was another one of those lists that had multiple upgrades (Predator on the Star Vipers, for example) and actions that criss-crossed between different ships. Dunno how he kept track of it all! This game didn't go so well for us. I think we were both a bit tired, a bit hot (it was a very warm summers day) and we had run up into a list we didn't really know what to do. There was no obvious fat target and with these three small ships and all their trickiness we wondered if we'd met our match. We decided to go for Xixor, but we barely got any shots off. Len came in and smashed us up. His dice were hot - rolling more crits than I'd ever seen and our dice were frigid - blank, blank, blank.... But I'm not blaming the dice, Len did an awesome job and he totally deserved to beat us.
So we lost 100-0....
An overall winner was announced, which was Len - so huge congrats to him! Me and my son finished third - which we were made up about. We snagged a dice bag, funky range ruler and two PTL cards from the Spring kit and we couldn't have been happier.
Big shout out to all the guys who made it there - especially the Stevenage and Harlow teams. And, of course, big thanks to Mick at Lost Ark for organising.
Unfortunately, we can't make August but we shall fly again!
Fly casual,
Duke
