51 minutes ago, skotothalamos said:

I am the longest-tenured member of my local X-Wing League, which means eventually I became in charge of it. We do a two-tiered system, where the "better" players play against each other each week and the "lesser" players play against each other each week. Basically, we do two separate 2-game tournaments each night and give out a prize to the winner of each group.

If you keep winning in the bottom division, you move up. If you keep losing in the top division, you move down. We are lucky enough to have 16-20 people every week, so we do a couple of 8-10 player tournaments and give out a ship to each winner.

That is a great idea. It reminds me of the Ladders in online games like Dota 2 or Starcraft. You are indeed lucky to have enough players to do this!!!

We have a small gaming group (4 to 8 players any given night) so not enough to do ladders. However, we try to change up the format. My personal favourite is furball because it allows everyone in our group to play at the same table. The furball is not competitive at all. It allows new players to feel 'safe', it doesn't feel so bad when ur ship is destroyed because you get to respawn it right away. For the experienced players, it allows us to fly ships we normally wouldn't fly or a good area to try out new wave ships.

My suggestion for smaller groups is to explore other formats than the 100 pt 6 asteroids. This should help to keep interest to non-tournament players. Before major events like Regionals, we will switch to using the 100pt 6 asteroid format for players to try out their regional lists (preparation). I think most people are ok with that idea.

Last year we ran a league but found that its too hard to get the games in for most people. Maybe its just due to our lowish numbers. This year we are just going to try to do a monthly casual tournament. Starting with 30/60/90 escalation format (yet another twist to the official escalation rules).

My local FLGS runs a different kind of tournament each month, intermingled with 100/6 as we approach tournament season. I've personally started taking two lists to casual nights - one for veterans and one for the players that still self-bump onto rocks.

I just got off an amazing Objectives based tournament last Saturday. Now I'm normally the biggest player in the room - I don't think I've lost a game at my FLGS for a couple months. But for this tournament travelled, because objectives are awesome. I ended up playing against a team of players that took the game super seriously, travelled to every regional and so on. It just so happened that my list was... kinda... really strong with objectives, so each game was pretty fair, save the last.

In that last game I played Control Bots (ion, tractor, rigged cargo and so on, with Advanced sensors and PTL to boot), while flying my so far undefeated Ghost + Dash build . What made it worse was the fact it was the cargo escort mission - the only one that Dash didn't like. Despite the bad matchup and extremely skilled opponent (he plays something like 4 times the game I do, just for a start) I had a go of it, and got half points on one Ghost before biting the dust.

At the end of the game, my opponent apologised for the very one-sided matchup. I then congratulated him on the most fun game I'd had all day, because I wasn't facing yet another Imp Ace, or harpoon gunboat, etc. I acknowledged his superior flying (only later did I realise I could have ionised both his bots into a corner forever with Dash's EMP Device), and vowed to beat him next time. playing from the bottom up isn't so bad - you just need a chance at winning the game around 20-30 % for it to be engaging and fun.

While I'm one of three "veterans" in my local area, I'm the one with the best competitive record from major events. The new FLGS has a lot of casual players, kids, and rookies. I've found it best to stay out of the meta as most others have suggested. I might fly one meta ship with a couple less competitive things. That said, I always fly to win, while having fun.

I have fully accepted the role of the big bad, but I make sure my opponents enjoy themselves. A couple of them have commented on both dreading and looking forward to playing me at the same time. They assume they will lose, but also know they'll learn a few things. A lot of people, in my experience, don't want someone to play "dumb." Nothing takes the steam out of a win like learning your opponent wasn't giving it their all.

Put Vader and or Palp in ALL your squads and CRUSH your opponents so that they may know the POWER of the Dark side... And make sure you have a full repertoire of Vader Quotes to use like " I find your lack of maneuvering disturbing" when they fly into something.. or "Impressive. Most impressive" when they do something worthy .... Or my favorite if they are flying Rebels "You are a part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor!"

It doesn't hurt to play fluffy lists. Kit out a list that's Luke doing the trench run. Or Vader and his wingmen. Or Lando and Nien Numb with Wedge. The kind of list that literally anyone would look at and say "that's Star Wars!". This has two advantages, usually it's a lower tier power level (not always: Poe and Rey with Finn is pretty brutal) and it looks and feels like Star Wars, which new players tend to appreciate more.

Our league started from nothing a little over a year ago with everyone coming from other games so to help learn the game and strategy of it, we did a lot of two versus two games. Old player paired with a newer player against other pair just like it. We would talk about what we were doing, why this maneuver instead of that maneuver, making sure our ships did not run into each other, which actions to take plus thinking about the next move too. Target priority we discussed after getting into the game.

As part of our league, we play a lot of alternate formats to learn the ships movements and planning the moves more than winning against your opponent. Hunger Games using both small base and large base ships, multi-faction builds, no pilot skill over 6, are just few that we have used in learning the game. We do score cards for each week, but these cards are scoring things like 4 blank dice on a range one attack, all focus rolled with no focus, so the focus of the game is not on the winning but rather the game itself. This really helped all of us fly better.

Our league did start playing more competitively this last store championship season and has continued that way as we move into the regional season. Did any of us win one, nope but we learned and improved our games. We are still having fun and playing X-wing. We continue the alternative formats more the regular 100 points of madness. Casual play is more fun most of the time to super competitive play. Some days tho, you just want to see how good you really are at this simple game and for those days we bring out the competitive lists.

Locally I've run a league for 3-4 years, run a regular X-Wing night at the FLGS and TO'd a lot of local tournaments so I have a lot of players looking to me for guidance when they get into the game. It's really difficult to give generic advice because everyone wants something different from the game. I find it's always worth trying to talk to the newer players and gauge where their expectations are, for example, one player may just want to push B-Wings around and pretend it's the Battle of Endor but another may actually want to "git gud" at the game. I try to asses what they want from the game and provide that. It could be fluffy lists, it could be competitive lists, it could just be they love geeking out about Star Wars and pushing ships around is a byproduct.

General advice though would include things like talking them through the games. Explain as each phase begins and ends so they can understand timing triggers and the phases properly. Prompt them on missed opportunities, go slow and glance over at their cards every so often, remind them about that predator re-roll they forgot and be kind over mistakes.

I usually try to avoid list building and tactica straight away; I try to approach it in a way like "Hey, you know what I found works really well on TIE sf's? Lightweight frame!" and try to explain why and how it could have affected the game. To clarify what I mean; I wouldn't try to explain why the whole quickdraw build sucks, I'd approach it one upgrade at a time and try to get them going through a similar decision making process to myself.

I try to explain to them my thought process on each turn; so for example I could say "I have expertise and I'm stressed so you know I want to clear that stress. That limits me to either staying stressed or doing on of these 3 greens". I try to explain the decision making for taking actions (Or why you focus instead of boosting for R1). Usually I find once people click with the basics of turn sequence and realize the importance of predicting maneuvers and actions; things like blocking and list building will just fall into place.

It can be a fine line between telling people what to do (which no one likes) and leading them along the path of learning. As I said above; some may not even want to learn so just try to provide them with a good experience and feel welcomed. Hope that helps a little.