Hey guys! I was just wondering, has anyone played Escalation with 4 players? My friend and I want to do some beginner-friendly X-Wing tonight with a group of our friends who don't play, and the respawning mechanism seems useful for keeping people in it as long as possible, without having to keep track of too many ships.

If I'm doing 4 players on a normal 3x3 mat, do I need four hyperspace lane marker things? I don't have a problem tracing some out of cardboard, but I don't know how crowded it might make the board is all. I'll probably limit everyone to one ship at a time, and keep the threat levels pretty low, just to keep it simple and enjoyable for the newbies.

Any insight? Suggestions? If nobody's done this before I'll report back on how it goes.

I'd say do two-person teams and then you only need two markers.

I played a team game 2v2 with two markers. Each player started at threat 2 and received one reinforcement at threat 3 once theit first ship died. We had a great time and the mechanics worked well.

We've had a lot of fun with it locally, although it's worth noting that Escalation does take significantly longer to play than a standard 200 point game, and a four player version will increase that further. Probably putting aside a couple of hours for it, at least the first time you play.

That said, it's the best multiplayer X-Wing experience I've had to date, and a huge amount of fun. There's also some interesting kill stealing that can be done by lower Initiative pilots, meaning that shooting last (or at least later) can be a major advantage. 4 players on a standard 3x3 board is busy, but not too crowded IME.

Hm... good points. If we stick to 4 threat to begin, we’ll probably do 2v2, yeah.

So normally if you start with 4-threat builds, you play until somebody destroys a total of 9 threat?