Overview
My buddies and I are all filthy casuals and play X-Wing only in our basements with beverages in hand. As the evening progresses, we find certain lists... harder to play well. We have discussed at length what trips us up and the answer is fairly obvious: complicated card text. In order to help us decide what list might best fit our current... state, I made a website tool that I call the X-Wing Basic Assessment of Complexity, or for short:
Using the tool is very straightforward. Copy your XWS from one of the wonderful third-party builder apps and paste it into the site's field. Hit submit, and the tool returns a score for you. The higher the score, the more complex your list is! A squad like the "Ocho", eight Academy TIE Fighters, has a BAC of only 8. But the card-text-intensive double-Sith Infiltrator list that has recently popped up clocks in at a brutal BAC of 54! You better be very clear headed to play that list... or fly it earlier in the night!
Please note that I am not taking a position on whether the complexity is good or bad! Different members of my group find joy in different parts of the game. Hopefully that's enough said about that -- this tool is for fun!
Implementation
If you want to understand how X-Wing BAC determines the complexity of a list, read on! Also, I welcome feedback on what you think may be off about this approach.
Minimum Per-Card Complexity: For starters, each pilot card and upgrade card adds a minimum of 1 point to your BAC.
Repeated Cards and Abilities: When you have the same upgrade or ship ability across multiple cards, the complexity is not as high as when every ship has unique card text. When a ship ability or an upgrade is a repeat of one already accounted for by the BAC tool, the complexity score of the card is fixed at 1 (or 2 if the repeated card is double-sided).
Double-Sided Cards: A card with two sides will always count as a minimum of 2 points of complexity, even if the same card showed up earlier in the list.
Cards that Grant Things: Whenever a card grants you an additional action or changes your stat line, each granted thing counts as 1 point of complexity.
Cloak/Decloak: This particular action adds +6 to the squad's complexity the first time it occurs and +1 for every repeated occurrence.
Mixed Ship Lists: The first occurrence of a ship type (think TIE/ln, or X-wing, or Aethersprite...) adds 3 to the squad's complexity with repeats of the same ship dropping back down to 1. This is intended to represent the added complexity in "TIE Salad" or "Alphabet Soup" lists where the player needs to remember multiple different dials.
Mixed Initiative Lists: The first occurrence of a given initiative value adds 1 complexity to the squad. Additional ships at the same initiative add no additional complexity.
Words that Increase Complexity: Certain words on a card cause more complexity than others. After trying many different approaches, I settled on counting the occurrence of triggers , conditions, conjunctions , and decisions . The occurrence of each word or set of words listed in the following sections adds 1 to the complexity of the card.
Triggers are found in the card text by looking for certain words that signal a game event that a player needs to be alert for. For example, "At the beginning of the Engagement Phase" is a trigger because the player needs to remember that this is when the card takes effect. The words that signal a trigger that I've identified in the card text are:
AFTER, DURING, AT THE, BEFORE, WHILE, and ACTION
Conditions are signaled by words that require you to assess whether you've met a certain required game state to satisfy the card's requirement to take effect. The following words have been found to signal that the card has a condition:
IF, AT RANGE, WITH, IN YOUR
Conjunctions are words that join together separate concepts. These words mean you've got more text to read while keeping everything that preceded in mind:
AND, THEN, TO
Decisions are words that mean the player needs to make a choice. Decisions take time!
MAY
Examples
As an example, let's look at the ship ability text for Autothrusters:
- After you perform an action, you may perform a red [Barrel Roll] or red [Boost] action.
I've bolded the words that BAC will pick out as increasing the complexity. Autothrusters counts as +3 complexity total. The keyword after means that a player must remember this trigger in order to fully take advantage of this ship. The keyword may means that if you remember the trigger, now you have a decision to make as to whether you want to do what the ability grants. The or near the end signals another decision to be made, although I chalk up the or as a conjunction in my classification system.
As an extreme example, take a look at the card text for Grappling Struts:
- Setup: Equip this side faceup. While you execute a maneuver, if you overlap an asteroid or debris cloud and there are 1 or fewer other friendly ships at range 0 of that obstacle, you may flip this card.
This totals 7 points of complexity, and that's only the first side of the card! Here's the second side of Grappling Struts:
- You ignore obstacles at range 0 and while you move through them. After you reveal your dial, if you reveal a maneuver other than a [2 [Straight]] and are at range 0 of an asteroid or debris cloud, skip your Execute Maneuver step and remove 1 stress token; if you revealed a right or left maneuver, rotate your ship 90° in that direction. After you execute a maneuver, flip this card.
The second side racks up 12 points, totaling 19 points for the Grappling Struts! As a reminder, the second Grappling Struts card in your list will still only be +2 complexity because it's a repeating double-sided card.
TL,DR: Use this tool to assess how complex your list is. Disagree with how it is scored? Discuss below. Have fun!
Edited by J1mBob
