22 hours ago, FlyingAnchors said:

Complete game. SW Destiny is a complete game, not a dead one.

Armada is a dead game, because it has unreleased content and no one plays it.

This all depends where you live. Armada is far from dead in my area, and is regularly played. If it wasn't, the announcement would have been to cut the line instead of moving it. It doesn't match X-Wing sales, but I bet it sells more than Legion.

9 hours ago, Frimmel said:

Hopefully this will fix the distributor issues for the FLGS. That has been a mess of Asmodee's own creation. I wonder how much blame for the sales not there has been misplaced on the minis design teams.

I think this is probably the most positive aspect of this shift. Distribution can only improve. I don't think we're going to get a 3.0 for X-wing, that would be a game killer. I'm sure they have the line setup for the next year or two, so I don't think we'll see anything dramatic happen to the game (except in price) for the next little while.

23 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Interesting. No mentioning of staff moving with the game - still negotiating?

I wonder what kind of other SW miniature game they want to make. Large ships, small ships, infantry and heroes - done. Missions - done (Imperial Assault). Krayt dragon hunting?

Star Wars: Crisis Protocol perhaps? Something that is not Imperial Assault but isn't as big as Legion. Something where they can produce 30 dollar unpainted miniatures of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker that they can sell as much to "hobbyists" as to "gamers."

I think about a story I heard about Games Workshop. The executives showed up one day only to lose their stuffing that their employees were playing games. They weren't a game company they were a model company. Is Atomic Mass a game company first or a model company first?

49 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

I am not distinguishing miniatures and board games by which rules they use or whether they have rules in common but by spaces being marked on the board.

What about something like Kill Team, which has measured movement on a well-defined board?

And what would you call something like Lazer Riderz, which is basically Tron using X-Wing’s templates but no minis and without even as hard of a board definition as x-wing (and also is a self-contained single box game).

Hopefully distribution, app support and development (something else than just 400/6 deathmatch, and then also not just introduced but further supported) will improve.

That said, Armada here has died long ago, and almost all major gamestores and all other distributors stopped already in early 2020 carrying X-wing (Northern Europe). Local FLGS has stopped ordering as there is too much unmoved older stuff.

Wave 7 was available in a very limited quantity from 2 sources. Wave 8 is not even announced.

Now you can get stuff only on preorder from some very few large players. If at all.

It looks pretty bleak here.

1 hour ago, Hiemfire said:

While I'm neutral on this entire thing I find myself wondering how in the heck these blobs of marketing speak both make you feel better about the reorganization and present a "promise" in any way? All he's really said in his parts of the entire QA, of which he has the largest portion, is "We're just like you. Trust me." and "Expect the games to change." The guy comes off as a politician saying something close enough to what people want to hear while not actually committing to anything solid.

Because the alternative would be something along the lines of:

"We look forward to building on the old framework of the X-Wing Miniatures and take it in exciting new and innovative directions with an experienced and inspired design team at AMG." Which IMHO implies they could give a **** about what came before cuz they are going to take XWM and pimp it out The AMG Way.

And, yeah, I have to vote for "leaders" based on the same vacuous sentence structures, so it's all just gut feeling.

44 minutes ago, Matanui3 said:

What about something like Kill Team, which has measured movement on a well-defined board?

And what would you call something like Lazer Riderz, which is basically Tron using X-Wing’s templates but no minis and without even as hard of a board definition as x-wing (and also is a self-contained single box game).

I am not familiar with Kill Team nor with Lazer Riderz. It doesn't sound like Kill Team uses spaces on the board or there wouldn't be a need to measure movement that would suggest a miniatures game. Lazer Riderz doesn't sound like it has spaces either so that also suggests a miniatures game. I thought I was clear that it isn't what the game pieces are or how they are acquired that makes something a miniatures game. By well-defined board to you mean play area? Or do you mean a board like the play area used in Imperial Assault or a Heroclix map?

Do you want to argue that Monopoly is a miniatures game since it has model houses and model hotels and a miniature car and a miniature shoe and miniature man on a horse?

It reads to me like they’re reserving the right to make changes to the games in an authoritative way, while also honoring what came before, insofar as it worked well and was fun. Which is exactly what they should be saying. Now, is it possibly empty promises? Sure, possibly. But given the fact that we already have gotten communications about a major change in a timely manner, these guys are already *killing it* compared to FFG’s years of radio silence (granted, it’s my inner Armada player saying this).

2 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

Do you want to argue that Monopoly is a miniatures game since it has model houses and model hotels and a miniature car and a miniature shoe and miniature man on a horse?

This “board game v. minis game” argument is definitely not THE most pedantic argument I’ve ever heard from gaming nerds, but it’s close.

Is it even relevant to the conversation?

8 minutes ago, Cpt ObVus said:

This “board game v. minis game” argument is definitely not THE most pedantic argument I’ve ever heard from gaming nerds, but it’s close.

Is it even relevant to the conversation?

No. But I can't let it go. I didn't think it was particularly unclear or debatable. I was incorrect. I think these guys are just yanking my chain a bit. 🤷‍♂️

30 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

I am not familiar with Kill Team nor with Lazer Riderz. It doesn't sound like Kill Team uses spaces on the board or there wouldn't be a need to measure movement that would suggest a miniatures game. Lazer Riderz doesn't sound like it has spaces either so that also suggests a miniatures game. I thought I was clear that it isn't what the game pieces are or how they are acquired that makes something a miniatures game. By well-defined board to you mean play area? Or do you mean a board like the play area used in Imperial Assault or a Heroclix map?

Do you want to argue that Monopoly is a miniatures game since it has model houses and model hotels and a miniature car and a miniature shoe and miniature man on a horse?

Killteam is probably a miniatures game, but the boards are well defined and the same every game, though you measure like you would for any other warhammer game.

Lazer Riders is one of those games that can’t be a miniatures game because it hasn’t no miniatures, but won’t fit your definition of a board game, and certainly isn’t a card game... what would you consider a game like tiddlywinks?

26 minutes ago, Matanui3 said:

what would you consider a game like tiddlywinks?

A bored game.

So much spilled electronic ink over so little info. The stress here is sometimes palpable, I can feel peoples' forehead veins bulging with intensity. I don't think that's warranted, at least not yet.

I don't understand why we're trying to slice & dice the term "miniatures" so thin to predict outcomes, especially since the minis of x-wing minis are more visual than mechanical. But let's quickly run through what I believe x-wing is:

• X-Wing is a tabletop strategy game or wargame first . It is not exactly like certain other tabletop strategy games (it's not warhammer, it's not legion, it's not battle tech), and that doesn't keep it from also having a foot elsewhere (like board games), but this is a major part of its design. The squad building, wide autonomy over placement and movement, and tactical management all lean toward the tabletop strategy genre.
• Tabletop/wargames tend to use miniatures, but don't strictly have to.
• Miniatures are a strong selling point for a game. People like when game pieces look amazing, and the wargames tend to sell on this point.
• Minis are also very expensive to produce and tend to constitute the bulk of manufacture & sale price.
• X-Wing shares a number of elements with board games. Board games also like to use miniatures but don't have to.
• "Miniature game" doesn't need more meaning than "it has detailed plastic miniatures"; how those minis are used isn't defined merely by the game having minis. The other facets of the game determine this.

Not all pieces are minis. The term Mini is distinct from the cheaper and less detailed plastic or wood playing pieces that are generally referred to by other names like meeples, tokens, or pieces, e.g. chess. When you have a super fancy chess set it might start to approach the detail of a miniatures game, but that's neither common nor core to chess games (that's more of an aesthetic upgrade, separate from the game; and the fancier a chess set, the less it's played, because this is a decorative choice not a functional one). Let's not mix a Rook, Pawn, or Meeple up with a T-65 X-wing or Super Dungeon Explore's Ember Mage or Warhammer's Space Marine or Land Raider. I also don't care about wild edge-case exceptions when the common case holds up very well. So that comparison to chess and board game pieces is spurious: minis are pretty easy to distinguish from other game pieces.

The Minis are not necessary. X-Wing can be played entirely without the plastic minis, as seen by my patient opponents on many occasions when I forgot to bring a ship model and just played with the bases on the table, all casual hippie-like. For a more official occurrence, see any time models bump and have to be removed from the base. The plastic ships are a major part of the theming and look & feel of the game, and a big selling point, but the game functions fine without them and even has rules for their removal. Put simply: the mini is not mechanical. Likewise, some tabletop strategy games don't use minis, and instead have meeples or tokens or pogs for their units, but don't stop being tabletop strategy games for it. Board games are especially agnostic to the matter; it's more about cost, visuals, theming, and other balances than mechanics. I've seen hybrid games like Tiny Epic Mechs whose meeples had slots for inserting detailed weapons (which I found charming because they clearly had fun toying with the boundaries there).

A game like Warhammer where visibility is determined by model might care a lot (at least it did when I tried playing it a few years ago), but again, not all tabletop games and wargames are like that. X-Wing could be played entirely with square cardboard and tokens on the table, with a printout or companion app to track your fleet; the effort put into the minis is entirely for theming and looks.

This rule also applies to the cards, btw, which are just as unnecessary. I stopped pulling them out of their box years ago, instead printing my list or working with an app. Tokens and such cover basically everything else. Critical X-Wing components are dials, bases, movement templates & rulers, tokens, etc. The minis and cards are visual selling points, and FFG has been a stickler about their presence in tournaments simply because that proves you bought their product, not because they're actually needed. And they insist on building the game with minis and cards because it looks better, feels better, and sells better with them.

However you wanna slice it, the hard-and-fast definitions centered around "minis" will only betray you. You can refine the definition but I don't know where that leads us in this discussion. It's a tabletop strategy game, a board game, and a minis game, IMO in that order, but does that matter here?

Even the right definition still leads nowhere. Will the new owners radically alter the game and price structure to be more like their other products? Maybe, maybe not, probably not given their existing customer base but who knows. We don't have any real evidence to justify the fear, but evidence is usually not why people feel fear. I'd prefer we acknowledge that without more info, there's not enough rational reason to worry further. We can just leave this line of questioning be since it's clearly not giving us new or helpful information.

As for whether this corporate restructuring is [ the end ] of x-wing... IMO the doom & gloom is just too early -- we don't know enough right now, and there's nothing to clearly say this is good or this is bad. It's just a change, and your reaction is probably more about whether you find change to be suspicious or scary. But X-Wing has already had lowered sales and t h e v i r u s hasn't helped, so if anything, maybe change is good rather than staying on the slow decline trajectory (however mild or intense you think that trajectory may be). We don't know enough about the new owners to be getting worked up.

Also, it won't change any battle lines:

• If you want to proclaim that x-wing is dying, you had ample evidence long before this announcement.
• If you want to proclaim that x-wing is alive and well, you had ample evidence long before this announcement.

This varies a lot by area too. What we lack is definitive information on the large scale from the company's point of view, and without that information, we're just cutting ourselves and each other over speculation. I'm not emo, masochistic, or sociopathic enough to find that forum violence fulfilling. We don't know much of anything, and "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer when you don't know, instead of "Is the SKY FALLING?! Tune in at 11!". But I'm also not the type to hang on a newscaster's every word when life and limb are not in actual peril; I'm happy to calmly wait and see instead of jumping at what-ifs. If anything, optimism isn't a bad way to approach these things -- let's give it a chance instead of stressing about it.

I do empathize with people who have cancelled orders to take a "wait and see" approach. When lots of your money is on the line, and especially if that cash is precious, you may wanna wait until you know if the game will live long enough to get your money's worth. I totally get that.

But beyond that, there's no strident cord of evidence saying this will be x-wing's doom or salvation. What we see so far is "X-Wing is under new management but still under the same parent company. New management is pretty responsible but they've never herded this many cats at once before, and our cats are slightly different". We don't know much more than that, and obviously speculation isn't helping.

IMO don't fire-sell your x-wing collection. Let's wait to see where this goes.

Re: The Mini's discussion.

Trying to codify genre is a messy beast and tends to tell you more about the person who decides the genre than the thing being categorized. Case in point, everyone here is trying to categorize them based on mechanics, gameplay, or how the minis influence the game to see if this 'makes sense.' But this was a business restructuring, so maybe we should look at it from a business perspective.

I think from the perspective of Asmode, X-wing is a mini's game mostly because it has the table profile of one, despite attempting otherwise. If the game didn't basically require a playmat and a very large table surface it would be a different story, but I think this is a big reason B&N isn't having success with the game when it does with say... MTG, and why game stores have a weird relationship with the game: It takes up floorspace like 40k or Warmahordes, but it isn't bringing in that level of revenue. It was so succesful because sales wise the user can pick up ships like they pick up MTG booster packs, but a single cafatera style table on MTG night can hold 4 different games, while X-wing takes up 1 with the requirement for players to move about, and importantly you can't play it quickly on a lunch break (or in the cafeteria, MTG is super popular in elementary schools TRUST ME).

From that framework, X-wing is a poor fit with the 'one and done' board games FFG makes, and the card games that can be played quickly and sold anywhere. Like crisis protocol, your users don't necessarily NEED dedicated spaces to play the game (especially if you ignore the board size rules like I do when I ran X-wing for my students after school) but it biases way harder towards that. From a business perspective, what kind of game it is doesn't matter at all, it really more matters how they sell it and market it to their partners who stock it. So the term 'minis game' from FFGs perspective when explaining this restructuring seems to be 'this game needs floorspace in shops to be played.'

15 hours ago, S4ul0 said:

A third edition like the second is too much because I think the last edition was a mess. The kits, the reedition fails, the app...

The app was such a huge failure. Intending it to be a integral part of list-building, it should have made fan-created list building software obsolete, but instead it's become a running joke in the community. "There's an official app?"

And they could have taken all the development money and just bought out [insert your favorite list builder].

Selfish question.

As a second edition player does this mean that I might never get the missing re-releases, TIE Phantom, Lamda Shuttle, etc. (exluding second hand). My guess is that it won't be a hot product to resell seeing most of the player/buyer-base appears to be veteran players.

Will have to wait and see...

I'm hoping this will improve QC. Both my TIE Brutes had parts that were simply lacking glue and I had to glue them together myself. Not insurmountable, but I am supposedly paying for assembled and painted miniatures.

I really, really can’t take any more of this “what constitutes a miniature” discussion. WTF does it have to do with anything? Couldn’t we argue about something more productive, like whether an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer is a match for the Enterprise, or something? And don’t gimme any of that shite about teleporting a photon torpedo onto the bridge, that’s a cop-out and you know it!

But seriously, everyone needs to relax. This will all go smoothly, or it’ll be a cluster&){%! of epic proportions, or more likely something in-between. One of those three things is probably true. And when the dust settles, you’ll still have a few dozen plastic spaceships and some pretty sweet rules, and you can just, y’know, “Fly Casual,” even if you don’t like whatever the new guys bring to the table.

1 hour ago, C3gorach said:

Selfish question.

As a second edition player does this mean that I might never get the missing re-releases, TIE Phantom, Lamda Shuttle, etc. (exluding second hand). My guess is that it won't be a hot product to resell seeing most of the player/buyer-base appears to be veteran players.

Will have to wait and see...

Eh, why wait for reprints? I’m a 2.0 guy, and I just went and bought the ships on the secondary market, and got the Conversion Kits. Not the cheapest way to go, but I also wasn’t particularly careful or patient about waiting for great deals. I was lucky enough to be able to do it, and to have an understanding wife who knows I take the term “disposable income” very seriously.

In many cases, just getting a Conversion Kit and the plastic spaceship itself is way cheaper than buying a reprinted, reboxed, new-for-2.0 ship would be.

2 hours ago, Frimmel said:

No. But I can't let it go... 🤷‍♂️

Gold Star for Self-Awareness, my friend.

The miniature game discussion is silly, because the decision was likely made by people who are not that into the technicalities.

3 minutes ago, Sithborg said:

The miniature game discussion is silly, because the decision was likely made by people who are not that into the technicalities.

Or indeed, involved in with the product or even FFG as a company on anything other than a purely financial level.

The questions that really need to be answered are: Who are the designers that stayed and what will be their input. What is the direction the game is going to take, which can be effected by the new input of the new people assigned to the game. Will they keep the same quality and type of miniatures we have become accustomed to. What type of input will the community have. Have long range plans changed. Since there has been an inkling of this separation, have we missed other subtle signs of other changes. Have these changes been forced by the Covid crisis or has the business changed otherwise, remember this particular plan seems to pre-date Covid.

5 hours ago, Cpt ObVus said:

This “board game v. minis game” argument is definitely not THE most pedantic argument I’ve ever heard from gaming nerds, but it’s close.

Is it even relevant to the conversation?

for me a "miniatures game" is any game that has miniatures. But that isn't a exclusive to other descriptors. My favorite game is a miniatures board game, warhammer and X-Wing are miniature war games.

To me, the distinction is Boardgame vs Wargame. And for me what makes the distinction is whether you create your own army list from a pool of options, or have set forces (or very limited forces, and there are certainly games that blur the line).

Imperial Assault was interesting because it could be both. The default way of playing was more like a dungeon-crawl, RPG board game, but it could also be played as a wargame.

Woof, the “armada is dead” meme feel pretty flat in here. Seriously Sorry if I trampled anyone’s on toes, was trying to lighten the mood.

Armada, X-wing, Legion, destiny, Ia: we are all FFG vets on this burdensome day.