Okay, so my friend and I went split-sies on the TFA core set, an A-Wing, and a Tie Advanced. Didn't really know much about X-Wing, just bought a few starter things that looked cool. We've played Armada the last few months so we're pretty familiar with the overall mechanics but were interested in X-Wing because we were told it was faster-paced and less nuanced; pick your ships (which look awesome), blow people up, make Darth Vader sounds with your mouth, rinse and repeat.

Then, after an hour, we battled to a very boring draw.

Imp side was Vader and two Zeta Squadron Pilots, Rebel Side was Tycho and Poe (we only have enough ships for ~60 point game). Maybe it just was very bad dice, but with all the focusing and evading and Poe's annoying super-focus ability, after an hour he had taken one shield off of Tycho and while I had done a bit more damage, I couldn't even take down a TIE.

The only things we could think were:

1. With 100 pts, there'd be more ships on the board and more overall damage, leading to harder choices.

2. We're likely terrible at the game, but we typically got between 3-5 of the total 5 ships within firing range every round.

X-Wing is the most popular miniature game in the world. We love FFG and we love Armada. We want to love X-Wing, but this one game just felt like such a crap-shoot dependent on rolling that we finally got bored and called a draw.

There's got to be something we're missing.

Help!

Were you playing with the full set of actions as well as obstacles? I've yet to have a game that I would call boring and am relatively new as well.

Edit: Sorry I didn't read this a bit close I'm a tad drunk, but did see you played with actions.

Did you try focus firing each others ships?

An obvious threshold question:

Were you playing the full rules, with actions and dice modifiers? Or were you playing the easy beginners rules?

Because I can tell you from experience trying to teach the game to both adults and children, you can't have much fun for very long without advancing to the full rules. It pretty quickly becomes just boring dice throwing and flailing maneuvers.

Edit: I was both ninja'd and failed to catch the same thing the Ninja edited!

Yeah, Poe is just sort of like Luke in the original core set. Not exactly great to be teaching the game with when the opponent is only using 2 ATK die ships.

Did you use focus to turn all eyeballs to hits? Some new folks miss that.

Extra red die at range 1? Take some target locks? Maybe just get better at lining up shots and not run away so much? No idea really.

With super-defensive ships, try to focus fire. If your first attack strips the defender's Focus and Evade (Poe is a special case with his shenanigans, I realize), your second and third attacks have a much better chance of doing damage. Another issue is all the 2-dice attacks you're playing with! Two red dice against high-agility or token-stacking targets have a really tough time doing damage.

I think you also made a good point: in 100 point games, there are more ships and more upgrades to allow damage to go through.

The ships you have are all very defensive and 4 of your 5 ships only have a primary weapon value of 2. To kill ships with that type of line up you need to concentrate all your shots on one target. The first shot or 2 will likely only get the defender to spend their focus and evade tokens, but once the tokens are gone their defense weakens quite a bit. With only 60 points it is sometimes not enough shots to punch damage through, but once you get up to 100 you see a huge difference.

As others said, are you using full rules? If so, remember that when you attack at range 1 you get an extra red die to attack with so maneuvering in close is key.

Edit: Ninja'd

I can attest to this experience as well. When I tried playing a few games with just the core set the games were like this. Sometimes 2 or even 3 turns would go by with nothing really happening.

I found it to be a combination of strange maneuvering and simply not enough things that go pew pew on the table. It can be hard to get hits through, especially at longer ranges. However, it did teach me an important lesson, when you do get that shot lined up and where you want it's important to make it count. It's why offensive upgrades and multi action capable ships are so popular.

Did you use focus to turn all eyeballs to hits? Some new folks miss that.

Extra red die at range 1? Take some target locks? Maybe just get better at lining up shots and not run away so much? No idea really.

Yes and yes. Full actions which were part of it; focuses and evades would turn 3 hits into 0 damage.

Target locks, homing missiles, etc; we used every upgrade we could while keeping the points relatively even.

I think the issue was we were using a lot of smaller, faster, more defensible ships; Poe's silliness and everyone only having 2 atk (except for Poe) unless at close range. That coupled with extraordinarily bad rolls.

My next question; so long as we can find a way to salvage it, what ships would do well to supplement this to give the game its much needed "oomph" when moving up to 100 pts?

Bwings are fun and will either blow stuff up or get blown up quickly. Crack shot will lunch through damage even with 2 dice.

Interceptors will also bring some hurt and then disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Don't play with a time limit.

The starter missions don't really do the game justice. Sure you can have fun with it but they tend to drag on. I mean they are good if that is the only thing you have and I guess you have to learn how to crawl before you can run but yeah you would want at least 100 points unless you are playing escalation.

Add a Y-wing and Tie Interceptor expansion pack. They don't introduce too many new, weird tricks, which I advise for all new players (later wave ships can be harder to learn since the game's complexity increased over time) but your squint will give the Empire some needed 3-dice punch, and the Y-wing gives you a couple of fun options in either multi-torpedo builds or the turret weapon (or both, if you want to sink a lot of points into a fragile ship with 1 green die).

Then, since you have a Tie Advanced, do yourself a favor and print out from Google the expensive cards (only available in a $90 huge set) Advanced Targeting Computer and Tie X1 title. Those make the universally reviled Tie Advanced an instant favorite with mega punching power.

Ghost expansion might give your Rebels some added oomph. With the right upgrades, it'll drop a TIE every round. The Moldy Crow can add some helpful buffs to allied ships, but it won't hit very hard itself.

The Imperials LOVE their Interceptors, either the regular expansion or the Aces pack. The Decimator VT-49 adds a rather viscous, turreted centerpiece to Imperial formations.

Just some ideas you might consider.

Get those upgrades from the raider. Print them.

Use omega leader to avoid Poe changing stuff.

Get a few more ships for focus fire power. Poes ability is a little strong for small games.

Man, that's some wonky stuff. I've been playing this game for over a year now and me and my friend started off with just the regular core set, one Xwing vs 2 TIE fighters and we've never had a 'boring' game. Exciting, yes, infuriating, yes, we've even had a game that came down to two ships of the exact same pilot skill shooting at each other, and we were like, this is it, this is game right here and it came down to literally one dice roll.

Boring games are not an Xwing thing, you must be playing it wrong.

A 100-pt game can still degenerate to the same situation if the heavy hitters are downed on both sides, leaving the "second stringers" on the field.

To wrap up it will take some fancy flying, luck, and maybe some clairvoyance. In general, I would choose maneuvers biased to:

1) Put multiple ships on the same target. This is especially important for 2-dice attack ships that the Imperials have.

2) Prevent your opponent from taking an action. Obviously easier said than done. If you have at least 2 ships left, you can use the one with pilot skill lower than the opponent and try to maneuver to cause a collision with an opponent's ship, and shoot that with the others. This is easier to do near the board edges and around closely spaced asteroids, where your opponent is more predictable.

Sometimes, the situation just devolves to something dead-even, little better than tic-tac-toe, where victory only occurs when the other guy makes a mistake. One Tie versus Poe or an A-wing will make for a very long elimination game.

As an Armada player, you could also try objective-based games with your limited set, rather than cage-match elimination. When there are known objectives, it tends to make maneuvering a little more predictable and allow you to setup situations to pull off [1] or [2], or at least, provide an end to the game besides flying with the last two ships around and around.

Also, I would advise searching the net for the various tools that calculate the probability of hits for various dice combinations and actions. This will allow you to get a feel for what situations will give you the best opportunity to do damage, and also see if what you experienced was abnormal. For example, a single Tie versus a-wing (2 attack versus 3 dice), each would land 1 hit 23% of the time, both hits only 6% of the time (total 29% getting any hit whatsoever). So these two jousting could be a long fight indeed.

There's got to be something we're missing.

Asteroids/Debris ?

Mostly because you most likely didn't stack up tons of offensive upgrades, but instead played super-tanky dudes like Poe or Vader

The TIE advanced out of the vanilla expansion is next to useless. It received a heavy buff in the Imperial Raider, so you'll want to print off a copy of TIE/x1 and Advanced Targeting Computer (unless you're going to a tournament nobody expects you to buy a 100pt without upgrades Raider Corvette for two upgrade cards).

Yes and yes. Full actions which were part of it; focuses and evades would turn 3 hits into 0 damage.

Why weren't you using focus tokens on the attack?

Well I've been hearing this more and more often that base game only or small games with very limited upgrade cards are boring cause nobody cant hit anybody. The problem is probably pumped up by the fact that nooby players will have problems with keeping enemies in arc (thats only natural, manouvering in this game is not that easy at the beggining). When I remember first games I played with squadron we built they were kinda cripple fights

It is not the first time we read something like this in these forums either. Last year there was an user that complained on X-Wing games being a snorefest where nobody could hit each other. Most people here dismissed that user as a troll, but I think it could maybe have not after all.

Recently, I brought my whole collection of X-Wing to my young, 12 years old, nephew. He is a huge Star Wars fan, and specially fan of the starfighter battles on the movies.

We played a 100 points game full with all the upgrades and tricks to be tournament viable. After like 20 minutes of us playing, he was bored to death, with comments like "This game is really slow" or "Why the ships stop to shoot and they miss?"

He left in the middle of the game while saying that what takes like 20 seconds in the movies, it takes longer than 1 hour in this game.

I was feeling really disappointed, because I thought he would love it as much as I (we) do.

Perhaps it is just that this game's pacing it still too slow for some people's tastes. Or maybe miniature games are not for everybody.

Well new generations often seem to suffer from very short attention spans.

It is not the first time we read something like this in these forums either. Last year there was an user that complained on X-Wing games being a snorefest where nobody could hit each other. Most people here dismissed that user as a troll, but I think it could maybe have not after all.

Recently, I brought my whole collection of X-Wing to my young, 12 years old, nephew. He is a huge Star Wars fan, and specially fan of the starfighter battles on the movies.

We played a 100 points game full with all the upgrades and tricks to be tournament viable. After like 20 minutes of us playing, he was bored to death, with comments like "This game is really slow" or "Why the ships stop to shoot and they miss?"

He left in the middle of the game while saying that what takes like 20 seconds in the movies, it takes longer than 1 hour in this game.

I was feeling really disappointed, because I thought he would love it as much as I (we) do.

Perhaps it is just that this game's pacing it still too slow for some people's tastes. Or maybe miniature games are not for everybody.

I quite like playing with just generic ships (perhaps one "hero" leading each squad), no upgrades (ordnance and perhaps astromechs excepted), and I try to choose a range of pilot skills to that there's a degree of alternate activation. It keeps things simple for new players, and cuts down on the analysis time.

Well new generations often seem to suffer from very short attention spans.

And old ones just can't focus on anything.