So, I got the game really wanted to test out Fat Han. Played against one of the best local players, routinely places at top in regionals, always wins a store champ or 2 every season and even placed top 16 at worlds. He was running 4 ship rebels, one of his preferred archetypes. I had Luke with Stealth Device, R5 and S-Foils and Han With Lone Wolf, Kanan, R2D2 and the title.
I started Luke and Han moving in opposite directions. I gave him initiative mostly for his Luke and split to try and force him to commit. I was able to get him to waffle a bit and used initiative with boosting to play keep away and we traded minor shields at long range. He saw what looked like a chance to pin Han because he definitely thought I'd be doing a hard turn with a boost, but it definitely seemed like a trap, so I made a substantial gamble into a sloop on the board edge figuring that if he set a kill zone going after the hard turn, I could stay mostly at long range with the sloop, then straight 4, clear stress with Kanan and boost out and even though this was taking me far from rocks, I still had Kanan and Lone Wolf active and it let Luke safely Tallon Roll into a pursuit. the gamble paid off quite well and we traded small numbers of shields. His Luke turned to meet my Luke with a B-Wing in tow while his U-Wing (built for blocking) and X-Wing gave a half hearted chase to Han, but mostly setup for a kill zone on my Luke.
The initial trade of Lukes went super badly, I took 2 damage and only put one on him, but shrugged off the B-Wing. At this point, I definitely noticed how he had positioned his ships for a killzone on Luke. His Luke was well positioned to block most slow maneuvers with the B, X, and U wing all having shots. I was 90% certain he couldn't block a 3 bank and, unless he did something weird, I was pretty sure, I could also boost out of the trap. The guess was spot on and Luke was able to boost into a range 1 shot on the tokenless U-Wing while Han was also able to get a fully modded shot on it. The U-Wing got knocked down the 1 hp, but also knocked Luke down to 1 (yeah, Luke's dice were anti-good this game).
Fortuantely, because Luke ducked the killzone and the U-Wing was on 1 HP and had a crit that would kill if it did a non-straight, I had enough room to straight 4 Luke away and take a minute to R5 twice. Then Han had a run of bad luck. First damage card he took all game was a structural damage. So a ship build around modding dice, no long rolled defense dice unless I could get out to range 3 or obstructed. Fortunately, despite the bad Luck, the U-Wing was almost dead and very limited in how it could contribute, the generic X-Wing was down to 3 health, and Luke himself had taken some hits. Ducking his kill zone was spreading my damage, but the shell game of the high initiative boosting ships was also spreading his damage around a lot.
Due to a straight 4 maneuver that Han only barely clears (about a milimeter from an asteroid) he's able to boost past Luke and the B-Wing trying to line up shots on his no defense dice butt and clip the B-Wing for 3. His Luke is forced to break away for my Luke, the U-Wing drops and Han kills the B-wing with a pair of range 1 modded shots over 2 more turns. By the time we reset to the joust, Han is limping hard and Luke is down to 1, but his Luke is only at 2 and his X-Wing is only at 3. He's forced to use his Luke for a block to set up the X-Wing for a potential game ender, but has to do it on naked dice and fails, then Han kills it next turn before it gets a second attempt.
With his Luke on 2 and Han on 1 hull plus a shield, I hard turn into him hoping for the range 1 kill shot and by using his pilot ability, Lone Wolf and Kanan kill him with Han limping away.
It was a fantastic game and really came down to the wire, but also demonstrates a lot of what I've observed about Han in previous games. This was a terrible scenario for him because the first hit being a Structural damage probably cost him at least 4-5 health over the the course of the game. Luke also botching the very first defense roll and then taking 3 damage from an unmodded U-Wing shot was also really bad, but Han and this build was so good that it still had a toolset capable of pulling the game out even with a major part of his defenses down.
For reference in regards to the turret, I spent 0 turns with it not in the butterfly configuration. There was exactly 1 turn where it would've helped to be in the hourglass config, but the X-Wing's dice didn't show up as much as they needed to, so it didn't matter. This is why I think Luke Gunner doesn't matter and even Agile Gunner is just too expensive for me to care. It doesn't take much work to just never have to shoot out of the front and back because the sides are so generous. Also, for the record, there were 2 turns where I didn't have his pilot ability active, the sloop and the turn after doing the 4 straight with a boost. It was a calculated risk, but it worked. There were only 3 shots all game where Han didn't score the maximum possible hits, two of them where the sloop and return turn and another was a random turn where he re-rolled 2 blanks and a focus into 2 blanks and a focus and it wasn't worth going for Lone Wolf or Kanan in that position. R2D2 gave me between 5-6 shields, the only card he ever flipped faceup was a console fire that did 0 damage for 3 turns because of Han's pilot ability before I felt I was in a good enough position to take a breather and fix it. In short, very impressed with new fat Han.
and Cool Detectors