For a summer kit this season I decided to put on a Mario Kart style racing event. This drew 14 people on a Monday night, and a couple came from 2 hours away to play this! I created a simplified version of the Vidla Crucible rules:

http://www.outworld-studio.com/xwing/pdf/Vidla-Crucible.pdf

I split everyone into 3 groups randomly, this was intended to be a 3 round event.

Scoring:

First place gets 5 points

Second place gets 4 points

etc

Kills are a tiebreaker, everyone keeps track of these along with placing.

After a round, I would separate everyone out and put all the highest scoring people together. I planned on doing this all 3 rounds, in effect you get "placing" tables. Perfect would have been 12 people on 3 small maps, I had to improvise with 14 people. I should have done 4 maps with 3 people on the "lower" 2 tables.

Fleet construction rules were as per the rules, 40 point fleet, mixed faction okay, no uniques. One person brought 3 academy ties, one with Engine upgrade! A few people brought 2 ship fleets mixing a fast ship (awing) and a "beater" with the remaining points. I took a Phantom with ACD, Gunner, and Sensor Jammer. There were a handful of single large based ship fleets. Almost everyone had Engine Upgrade if their ship didn't already have it. I think the Phantom players were the only ones that didn't have boosting abilities (but decloak worked well)

Random "bad" stuff: I rolled a die after picking out 3 of the "bad things" to happen in a race: Densis Rift (Round 1), Space Slugs (round 2), and Speed Governor (round 3). Maps were Round 1: first map in the packet on page 1. Round 2: "Triangle" and it was modified to allow either direction of travel, as long as you went around all 3 asteroids.

First round took almost 2 hours because I made the mistake of letting everyone try and finish. One of the maps had 5 people on it, the others had 4. (one person was very late). The map with 5 people had 9 ships! Even one lap takes a very long time with more ships.

Second round took 1.5 hours before we called it after someone crossed the finish line.

Third round never got played as it was already really late. We had started around 6:00pm.

During the first round, the rift took more than its fair share of people. The rift is silly amounts of fun! One kid had a B-Wing and was stuck in a yoyo motion trying to get away, but he also had an ion cannon and was firing like crazy as the rift kind of pulled him around the center of the map. He eventually tried a K turn and the rift pulled him in. The rift was hands down the best and most fun part of the race, I would have saved this for last as a cap to the evening of fun. It really was that awesome. Lots of cheering/OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH NOOOOOOO! type stuff. The energy level was HUGE during this event, it really feels like a race and I announced it similar to podracing in Episode 1. Hutts and all.

Blocking plays a HUGE role in these things. The guy that crossed the finish line first in both races had an A-Wing racer and a tie fighter for blocking. He's also a master of the awing.

Things I would have changed:

1. Race ends when the first person crosses the finish line

2. 4 people to a mat, period.

3. Should have not played and just sped things along

4. Setup the map ahead of time. Or get a projector so the players can see which asteroid/corner they are setting up.

All in all I *HIGHLY* recommend running this with any size group, the more the merrier!

Very cool! I'm trying to come up with my set of rules too, so this will be super helpful! Was thinking of using ordnance as the weapons, so bombs are like banana peels and missiles like turtle shells.

In testing this format we had one guy build up a max-bombs-kwing with extra munitions (simulating the banana peels and turtles), but it really didn't do all that good as it was tougher for him to stay out in front. Even with Advanced Slam!

We did come up with something we thought would have been awesome: Modcubes as "?"s! You could build a modcube or 5 as all beneficial, like free target lock, evade, cloak, double focus, etc. Then when you hit one with your ship or template you could roll the modcube and hold onto the upgrade until you used it! Seemed like a lot of fun but we didn't get enough testing in before the event. Next time, though...

Yeah, in my mind, I was going to do a bunch of "?" where you roll for items you get, and if you're ahead, it'll mostly be bombs, and if you're behind, it's mostly missiles/torps. I was going to modify the effects of ordnance and such so it's more about slowing people down or stunning them rather than damage.

The only thing left for me to figure out is how the different ships react to these "?" items. Like beefy B-Wings with slow movement probably can shake off effects master than super fast interceptors...

I think the key, based on reading your advice, is to limit players and for my version of this, limit the ships you can choose to "drive". This way I can balance out the abilities better.

The Ion Storms and Mines templates from HotAC could probably be used to great effect in an event like this.

I'd probably try to get three different tracks set up ahead of time, and then have your groups rotate between them. It would mean you couldn't re-seed them between races though, but it may be worth it for the time savings.