Hey everyone, I was toying around with wierd ideas that aren't just the 100 PT dogfight and I had a thought. What if you had a model count rather than point count? Now there'd need to be a balance point to stop super Soontir,Whisper,Vader and friends from mopping the floor with everything, but I think having a limit on upgrades per ship or having a point value for them would work, thoughts?

The backs of the pilot cards for a faction are all identical, so I've been toying with the idea of a draw poker style casual game where the players try to build a list on the fly much like one tries to build the best hand in poker. Except at the end, they battle it out on the table for the pot. I haven't worked the probabilities, nor actually tried this, so bear with me here.

Each player first chooses the miniatures (not the pilots) they would like to fly with. Each player creates their own draw deck of the faction they want to fly from their own collection. I think each miniature comes with a minimum of 4 pilots (1-2 generics and a set of uniques). So, I figure each player can provide a minimum of 4 pilot cards that could fly each of their models. If flying multiple copies of a miniature, then each miniature brings in all copies of the generic pilots, but there can only be 1 unique pilot in their deck. Thus fielding 2 YT-1300s would only add 5 cards to the draw deck (2x generic Outer Rim Smugglers, Chewie, Han, and Lando). [Yeah, I'm not sure on the probabilities on this, just making a statement to move the description along, and swarms could be problematic with this idea].

The players shuffle their pilots together to create their own draw deck. (I.e. unlike poker, the players will be drawing from their own decks, rather than from a common deck).

Next determine which player has initiative (coin toss or die roll).

Each player draws 1 card from their deck for each miniature they want to field, +1 more card, face down. They may look at what they drew, taking care not to reveal it to the opposite player, and see if they can build some reasonable 75,80,90(?) point squad [i'm reserving pts for upgrades to be decided later]. The player with initiative starts and may enter a bet 1-5 "victory points" (VP) to the pot that would go to the winner of the upcoming battle. As in poker, the next player may "call" (matching the bet), or "raise" with a higher VP bet. If raised, then the first player may match or re-raise. If a player has an unrecoverably horrible hand, they can 'fold' instead of bet, and concede the VP in the pot to the opposing player without having to play a game out. On "fold" both players reshuffle and draw again, noting that the other player has a VP advantage toward winning the game. [Again, haven't worked out the raise limits, just making statement to move the idea along].

Once the other player calls (i.e. only matches the bet and does not raise) then each player chooses the pilot cards to discard from their hand, and draw an equal number of new cards from their own deck. Another round of betting as before. If the other player doesn't fold, or raise, then each player reveals the list they built from their hand. They don't have to use all cards in their hand.

Finally each player purchases upgrades to round their squad up to 100pts (or whatever fits the chosen squad limit is) and the two players battle it out for the VPs in the pool.

Whoever has the most VPs at the end is the champion.

Again, just a wild crazy idea. Obviously needs refinement: like it might be more interesting to draw with one or more pilot cards face-up to make the other player think about how he wants to build his list; or having a limit on miniatures; or adding "joker" pilot cards for miniatures they don't intend to field to fill out the draw deck to even out probabilities.