My LGS sucks. In a typical week I can maybe get one friendly game in, two tops. There are 6 of us that play on a semi-regular basis. Out of those 6, 2 almost always would rather play Magic than X-Wing, 2 are there MAYBE every other week, I haven't seen the other in almost a month, and absolutely none of them have decent lists to fly against. My record against these guys is like 30 and 1. I had to stop playing my Brobots because they were on the verge of house-banning the Agressor because they thought it was OP. It's just so stagnate and boring, I'm afraid I might lose interest in the game altogether if I don't get some decent competition or something.

On top of that, the owner of our LGS is upset that X-Wing is not making any profit. He is ordering some of the new wave, but I fear if our community doesn't pick up soon, he might stop carrying product and stop supporting it altogether.

What sucks is the closest store that actually has a decent community is over 2 hours away, so other than possibly driving out for a tourney, I'm not making that trip every week just to play a couple of games. I'd like to know how far some of you guys travel just to get some games in? And how big is your typical showing each week?

We have a local Facebook group with... I don't know, 10-12 people? That makes it pretty easy to meet up for a game if you post your availability a day or so ahead of time. And when we ran a Store Championship, 31 players showed up--although a fair number of those were from out of town.

Now, we have like 8 in my town that play and organise, another 2-3 that don't want to do with us anything looks like. I try to reach out to them, still no message from them.

From the 8, just 3-4 including my self try to play regular each week, but it's life, not everyone has time for games.

Next community for me is about 1h drive. And i going there mostly for tournaments (x-wing will be first, played other games).

So now i play on Vassal to improve my game and test out lists

We have 8-10 (besides me) who are fairly regular, with varying degree of skills. I only have to drive twenty minutes (the same drive whenever I have to go into town from my house).

One thing you could do is help your opponents make better lists and even give them suggestions about how to fly against your brobots. This will encourage casual players and also make your games more fun. You don't want stagnate game play? Help people at your LGS play better.

I try to help them build and play better, but they hardly ever listen. I've also started flying less competitive ships, which I enjoy, but even those they can't beat, my only defeat being with a squad of 3 Starvipers (against Dash and Corran, the only competitive list I've ever seen them play).

We have a Facebook group, but I'm the only one who ever posts anything. And when I do post, no one ever shows interest.

I have been trying to demo the game out to other people, letting beginners use my ships and get a feel for it before committing to anything. I've had maybe a bite or two from the local Magic group, but most of them can't afford to play Magic and X-Wing (Magic being the very expensive hobby that it is).

I try to help them build and play better, but they hardly ever listen.

That's always a risk. Sometimes people don't really give any weight to advice from relative strangers, and other people are mildly offended even to hear advice.

I'd focus on demos and expanding the play group first, rather than trying to improve list-building among existing players. People who play other tabletop minis games (like 40k or Warmahordes) might be a better target than card-game players.

If you're serious, you might try leaving notes on coffee-shop bulletin boards... If your Barne's and Noble sells XWING, there are likely more players in town than you're aware of...

Next is to hit up your town's sub-reddit...

Demo's are the best bet. Local college? Game nights at churches? Stuff like that.

We demo'd half of a round at Ep 7 premiere and had 3 extra players at our most recent store champ from that encounter.

Dats a good idea! We do have a Barnes and Nobles with X-Wing product!

I mean, there are 3 colleges within 10 minutes of each other, one being JMU, a sizeable establishment. You'd think there would be at least a few more players than what we have. Of course, college students are broke, so maybe they can't afford it.

I don't even have a LGS, we have a GW, but you probably know how their policy is.

Also the community isn't flourishing that much, so a friend and I just meet up at either my or his home and we play a couple rounds and drink some beer.

I find this to be a very good alternative to a LGS, especially because it is more private and casual.
Ofcoure you don't have the community, but can allways expand those evenings up to small turnaments.

Demo's are the best bet. Local college? Game nights at churches? Stuff like that.

This is what I did to get my local scene going. Use the upcoming May the 4th to your advantage. As your FLGS if they would be willing to supply a core set or two (DO NOT USE YOUR OWN!!!) to promote the game that day. May the 4th is a Wednesday, so you may want to pick a weekend date before or after. Offer to teach people how to play. Don't turn anyone away. I think I ended up teaching several children, and their parents ended up becoming regulars at X-wing events.

Hold a friendly tournament with prize support a few weeks after the demo. Tell everyone you teach how to enter and give them inexpensive list ideas that they can purchase that day. If your store owner is smart, they'll stock up for the demo/tournament events and profit from it.

If you're looking to overtake Magic, you'll have to cater to maybe something other than ult-kill-100-point-deathmatch. What kind of Magic do they play? Is it EDH or Commander? Or are they Standard players that drop $500 on a hyper-competitive worlds deck? If they are hyper competitive, you may be able to bring up the skill level by showing people competitive cheap tournament builds throughout the years (biggs walks the dogs, etc). If they are Commander or EDH, those folks favor a casual atmosphere and you can do a furball, or another "casual" format.

I'd go the more casual route when building a comunity: Try and setup an epic game with ships you own. It will take 3 hours, yes, but with 6 people around the table and a couple epic ships it could be super fun. I've also designed a couple "casual friendly" formats that we use in our FLGS:

59 point cross faction: minimum 2 ships from differing factions, all faction restrictions removed (Yes, you can put Vader on Chewie's falcon and its pretty good, but didn't win our last tournament!). You can actually play this tournament with just a starter! 45 minute rounds.

"epic" Team play: Bring 34 points of either imperial or rebel with no uniques. I usually have people bring a list for each faction and split them up randomly. You may get 6 vs 6, and with no uniques there's really no complicated interactions. We use dice for total hull+shields and skip the damage deck. It still feels epic though with that many ships! Use 1 foot width of play area for each 2 people. So if you get 6v6, use a 6x3 setup. You can even play this format by borrowing maneuver templates and buying a single ship. This takes a couple hours.

So I'd say: don't give up hope. If you start on the casual side of things people will see what a fun game it is, and eventually start doing more competitive builds. You'll raise the skill levels of everyone involved and they will have more fun. It just takes time.

As to your original questions: Our store has 8-12 regularly (built up from about 5 a year ago). Its about 30 minutes from me. We do more casual stuff throughout the year. I used to drive upwards of an hour to get in a couple games. X-Wing is flourishing now in my area and any week you could play xwing at least 5 nights within an hour of wherever you live. We got 8 store champs in the state this year, and the ones that weren't capped for space got 30+ people.

I can get 20-34 for tournaments. Yet I am lucky if we get 2 or 3 of us out to the weekly meetup. Local town has a few more that are just casuals who refuse to come out sadly. We get players from all over the region for tournaments due to how central we are. So i feel your pain.

Hey, I have no LGS, and only a two or three people to play with, only one of whom is regularly available to play, so you can think about that as showing that your position isn't as bad as it could be. Then again, I rarely repeat builds, and play just to have fun. While I rarely lose to my tiny pool of opponents, as long as they and I both enjoy ourselves, then I think the game has served its purpose.

I have the CR-90 and Raider for occasional epic games, though even outside of epic we rarely adhere to the tourney 100 pt. limit. Usually, non-epic is closer to 120 for us. One advantage of casual play is that the format is more flexible.

Having no LGS, I purchase none of my ships locally, instead leaning on places like MM and CSI (whom I'm uncertain of the Asmodee impact on), which saves me money (so far) both by way of discounts and lack of impulse buy opportunity.

Anyway, I just thought a different perspective on the subject might be of some benefit to this discussion.

I try to help them build and play better, but they hardly ever listen.

That's always a risk. Sometimes people don't really give any weight to advice from relative strangers, and other people are mildly offended even to hear advice.

Or, and I'm just tossing this out here... maybe they don't think becoming a world class caliber X-Wing player is a worthwhile enterprise. I mean, who wouldn't want to spend hours practicing with the goal of giving you a challenge, crazy, I know.

If you like your gaming group, it sounds like you don't, but if you do you can still get a challenge out of them. But, and this is a big but, you're going to have to take a handicap. Whether it's 50 points or 25 points, you want to shoot for a number where it's 50/50 matchup.

It hurts to not win every game. It hurts some people to not win 75% of their games. If they stand even odds, they'll play. You get the bonus of getting a challenge that helps you improve, without them having to become pros! You don't have to go in search of a new gaming group.

Golfers use handicaps all the time, Chess even has a handicap system. It's not uncommon. Just a suggestion, good luck.

I started my local scene recently with just two of us. I live in a decent sized city, but the best game store is on the other side of town from most people. I had a good group going, but when another game store opened up on their side of town, my store utterly died. Eventually, it died off almost everywhere. A year later, I found one guy who was into it and we brought it back. We now have a FB group with over 110 people on it. There are now at least 4 game stores that have X-wing game nights and my store almost always has over 10 people each week. I think the largest was around 16 people?

One of the biggest things you can do is have a night dedicated to X-wing that isn't a normal MtG night. If there is competition between a new game and one they already want to play, it could be tough. Find a night that is different and won't have competition.

Put up fliers for that game night in different places. There are a ton of Star Wars recruiting posters on the interwebs that you can print out and add on day, times, and address of local game store.

I don't know how big your collection is, but if you have a good number of ships (like I do) then you can really do some cool events to help take off the scene. Does your store have a calendar of events or something? Will your local owner be willing to help promote it by telling people? Maybe he would be willing to offer up a free prize of a ship or starter set to help get people in the door?

Having a big event is always a good way of getting people involved. I had the CR-90 and wanted to find a way to use it. I made up a 200 pt list for both sides out of all the ships I owned. I used all generics and had a bunch of Tie Fighters fighting a CR-90 with X-wings. I set up some easy squads of same same ships (but with different PS skill for each ship) so that each player got to control one squad of points. Let them fly at each other! Play some Star Wars music on your phone while you do it. Get one of those apps that makes the pew pew! sounds. Ham it up. This type of event really draws in players. People see it and get pulled into it. That gets them interested in the game.

If you don't have an epic ship, do you have a lot of Tie Fighters, X-wings, and Y-wings? You can always look at Dagobah Dave's Trench Run scenario. It can use a lot of space, but if you can scrape up 8 Tie Fighters, one Vader, 4-6 X-wings, and at least 2 Y-wings, you have enough. I used my work printer to print off Death Star prints and glued them all together. I found free PDFs of the turrets. I printed it all out and even raised up the main portions of the table so that the trench was actually lower than the rest of the table. You can pull in about 5-6 people to play the scenario and do all the music and stuff, too. It draws in a lot of people.

Have your local store owner upsell the event to those that buy SW comics or such. Make it a special Saturday long event. Post it at other locations.

Another thing you can do is missions or scenarios. I know a lot of people that get turned off by 100 pt deathmatch against the finest the meta has to offer. They just want to have fun. Make up or grab a bunch of missions and just have fun that way. Players get more into it if there is an objective besides "kill the other player that is really good". They stick around longer.

Star the Heroes of the Aturi Cluster campaign. It's a co-op game. All players are on the same side. This way, you don't get someone who gets disappointed about losing all the time. It helps people learn the game and learn the ships. You can find people who don't own ships and all you have to do is lend them an X-wing or a Tie Fighter.

I don't know how old you are or where you live, but I'm a 40-something guy who lives in suburbia. I can easily find some neighbors that want to try the game out. I can even find some wives that want to try the game out. My generation grew up on Star Wars. We fall for that stuff hard. Don't discount us not-quite-middle-aged guys.

The idea is to create a fun and friendly environment where those that are interested can borrow whatever ships you have to lend. A bunch would probably play. Some of those stay after a couple of times. A good portion of those will become regular players. They tell their friends and the group grows. Start a FB group with a regional name. Ours is "Charlotte Area X-wing". You might find local players that never knew where to go. People move into the area. Sometimes someone has an extended stay due to work for a few months.

Good luck, and may the Schwartz be with you!

does your LGS have tables that are big enough for X-wing? mine doesn't nuff said....

Thanks jonnyd, those are some great examples! Most of the people who play Magic around here play both super expensive decks (standard, modern, etc), but Wednesdays, the day we meet for X-Wing, is EDH night. So casual would go over better with that crowd.

I am gonna give it another shot. I am talking with my LGS owner (we are close friends) and we are gonna try and set something up for May the 4th. He thinks it's a good idea.

A great way to get a horde of new people in at once? Furball.
​Help them build one ship of a limited amount of points (25-40, the cap's up to you).

Then have them fly and fight each other, all at once, with you being on hand as a judge/TO.

Its kind of like how Magic communities start by having the one guy show up with a dozen decks, and get 4 new players all at one table for a free-for-all match.

My LGS sucks. In a typical week I can maybe get one friendly game in, two tops. There are 6 of us that play on a semi-regular basis. Out of those 6, 2 almost always would rather play Magic than X-Wing, 2 are there MAYBE every other week, I haven't seen the other in almost a month, and absolutely none of them have decent lists to fly against. My record against these guys is like 30 and 1. I had to stop playing my Brobots because they were on the verge of house-banning the Agressor because they thought it was OP. It's just so stagnate and boring, I'm afraid I might lose interest in the game altogether if I don't get some decent competition or something.

On top of that, the owner of our LGS is upset that X-Wing is not making any profit. He is ordering some of the new wave, but I fear if our community doesn't pick up soon, he might stop carrying product and stop supporting it altogether.

What sucks is the closest store that actually has a decent community is over 2 hours away, so other than possibly driving out for a tourney, I'm not making that trip every week just to play a couple of games. I'd like to know how far some of you guys travel just to get some games in? And how big is your typical showing each week?

Sounds like you need to build the community.

When I moved to the city I now live in, nobody played regularly here. I had a store about 20 minutes form my old house that I played at every Tuesday with a bunch of folks and got used to that.

I have 2 stores down here in my new city so I approached both of them and organized an X-Wing night at each every week. We play at 1 of them on Wednesdays and the other one on Fridays. I have at least 5 out for a Wednesday and sometimes up to about 10 so we have anything from 2 to 5 tables going. Sales have increased at this store and he has started to run tournaments. I am TO'ing the first one he is having next month. The other store is hit and miss due to Friday nights but we have had up to 6 show up at that one too.

What I suggest is that you approach the store and see if they can give you a regular night each week. Start a local Facebook group and advertise it on the gaming store's website. Also have the store send out an email to their mailing list about the regular play night and see if you can grow it that way.

Oh, and above all, don't run brobots against new players. Run some different lists that require you to fly better and have more strategy which will give new players a better chance against you and improve your skill at the same time. You'll both have fun.

If I ran my "tournament" lists against the weekly guys, many of whom were taught the game by me, they'd lose interest in playing me too. Nobody likes losing every single time. I don't lose that much but when one of the newer guys beats me it gives them a huge sense of accomplishment and makes them build better lists and fly better.

Of my "trainees", all of them that were at the last SC made top 8 and won the Store Championship rulers. It was pretty neat to see the little group I started do so well at the SC on the whole. I won it by the way and my son placed 3rd.

I took matters into my own hands and I think you should too especially if you really like the game.

What sucks is the closest store that actually has a decent community is over 2 hours away, so other than possibly driving out for a tourney, I'm not making that trip every week just to play a couple of games. I'd like to know how far some of you guys travel just to get some games in? And how big is your typical showing each week?

I run a local group here in Austin, TX. Before I moved here, there was practically nothing regular. Since I have taken the helm at organizing, we have now 6 local stores, 4 different stores offer an X-Wing night, our first store championship had 53 people and we were awarded a regional 2 years in a row (we're hoping to break the 100+ person mark, which should be easy, we had 64 last year).

How can you replicate that success? You have to consistently show up, run a regular play night, and advocate for the game wherever possible. You can't be hopeful that something may happen. Make it happen. Be there every week, offer games to new players, offer competitive games to those players. Get the store to slowly see the community is the largest minis game out there. It will take a lot of work, but you will have built something at the end that you can be proud to call yourself a member.

does your LGS have tables that are big enough for X-wing? mine doesn't nuff said....

We have 2 (3 if you count the one 3x3 that has no where to put your cards). Lots of 2.5x4 tables though. The store owner said he would invest in boards to put over the smaller tables if we got more players.

Man. You guys have so many good ideas and encouraging words. It's nice to see this side of the forums. As opposed to the flame wars about TLT nerfs and FAQ changes. Haha. Thanks to all of you for the advice.

On a complete side note about always taking brobots: If you consistently fly that thing people will call for a nerf in your area. However, if you "handicap" yourself by flying other things (rebels, imperial, non-standard lists, etc) you will also learn about those other ships' strengths. It will actually help your tournament playing because when you go back to flying brobots you will more understand the other ships strengths, maneuvers, etc, and can prey on them better

Man. You guys have so many good ideas and encouraging words. It's nice to see this side of the forums. As opposed to the flame wars about TLT nerfs and FAQ changes. Haha. Thanks to all of you for the advice.

You just have to become your local X-wing cheerleader!

I forgot to mention that I usually bring 2 or 3 builds with me.

1 - pretty decent build to play against the guys that are good

2 - mediocre build that requires me to really think

3 - what I call the "junk bin" list - ships and pilots nobody usually runs with ordinance or options hardly used - I use this against new players and usually let them win if I can.

I never bring my tournament builds to casual night.