Hey guys,

I love X-wing and was looking for away to practice my lists and have only vaguely heard about vassal. what is it and how does it work? Does this also work for Imperial Assualt too?

Thanks for answering a neb's questions.

The x-wing module has reached the #1 spot for the most used game module on vassal, surpassing wh40k way before the "real tabletop" version did the same!

I've been managing the module since the onset of wave 3 and kept at it since, profiting from some helping hands from time to time, especially the excellent radarman5 for the art department. I made a hands-on text guide (with some images) that's meant to be followed step by step, from installation to getting to grips with the game motions:

http://s93768914.onlinehome.us/xwing/

There's also an imperial assault module out there, but I've only peeked into it once by curiosity, but I don't play that game, can't help you there.

Essentially, yes. It's a digital adaptation of the X-Wing ruleset that helps to simulate the tabletop experience. You need both the core program itself, as well as the Vassal module.

Youtube has some good video summaries of how it works.

Interesting things that happen on x-wing vassal:

-Many games going on at any time of the day and night (every time zone has players it seems)

-Eventually, if you learn the shortcuts and you play with a vassal regular, you can play a game faster than on a real tabletop

-Meet an excellent community of skilled players to up your game much faster than any local group

-Search around in the online communities of tournaments and download known players' logfiles and watch them

-You could park yourself in a lobby of a game that's about to start, start a logfile recording, go away from keyboard, watch it later

-Scratch the x-wing itch between real games

Muons turtorial is great and so are some of the youtube videos. Vassal seems a bit akward a first, but you will soon find it is in fact pretty intuative. Add to the list of interesting things, you will likely get the chance to play some of the more "famous" players, if that is your thing.

I haven't looked at any of the technical data on Vassal. Will it work on an Android tablet? Even if it works, it is worth doing?

-Participate in the many events (that are inclusive, competitive, sometimes both) that go on in the online communities, mainly Team Covenant (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4) or Reddit (example 1, example 2)

I shudder to think of playing on a tablet. Vassal eats real estate in great big gulping bites. You really need to see clearly so you can judge ship placement. And there is a lot of other things going on at the same time. Personally, I would like 2 50+ screens to play on, but that isn't happening any time soon, so I make do. I've learned I can get by with a 24" widescreen monitor. Playing on a 15" MacBook Pro is frustrating unless you like playing window juggle all the time. Connecting the 24" screen to the MBP, though, works very well... but the log file seems to crash more frequently on the Mac than the Win7 PC, so I have mixed emotions on games that count.

Thank you for the feedback. I guess I have something new to checkout this weekend.

Thanks GF,

That is kind of what I figured. I've been hesitant to download Vassal onto my old desktop for exactly the reasons you described. You verified my suspicions.

Vassal at large uses the Java Runtime Environment, so it won't run on Android platforms (unless someone got extra, extra crafty and hid it from the world!)