Hey everyone,

So, I'm sure we've all heard this forum is on its way to the great wayback machine in the sky by this point, but while we still have it, I was curious if there were any topics people would like to see me tackle on my blog ( https://www.maxbrooke.com/articles ).

I just put up a new piece with some reflections back on X-Wing (as well as other games), and while writing it, I realized that I should see what folks here would be interested in hearing about. Obviously I can't promise I'll address any specific area. Still, if there are any particular design topics you're interested in hearing my thoughts on, let me know!

While I'm here, I also wanted to say how appreciative I am of the X-Wing community. You've been a great crowd to meet at conventions, hear from online, and generally interact with over the past five years. I'll miss this place, and I'll probably pop up in other venues where X-Wing is discussed in the future!

Thanks for saying hi Max! I think it's fair to say that most of the folks on the forum will be glad of any input and communication at the moment, and I imagine there'll be plenty of questions flying your way! There's a bit of a drive going on to move to the forum's at BoardGameGeek when this one sadly closes. Hopefully we'll see you there!

I think one thing some of the players would probably like to know about would be what plans there were to further develop and support Epic play and Huge ships in the game.

Obviously, timing ended up being pretty awful for the re-release of Epic - it made an appearance at Worlds, then the 2nd Edition Conversion Kit, Tantive IV and C-ROC hit stores about 3 months before everything started to go downhill. We know that the 2nd Ed Raider expansion was cancelled due to 1st Ed stock still being available, and any plans for inclusion in Organised Play went out the window as well.

It would be good to know where FFG had planned to take Epic, if there were other huge ships in development, whether campaigns or narrative play were on the table. As a big fan of Epic in 1st edition, the overhauled rules for the huge ships and wing mechanics all looked like a lot of fun and promising for future content.

Thanks for all your hard work on the game; it really is a joy to play!

I like 🦈

Hi Max,

Loving the blog 🦈

31 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

Thanks for all your hard work on the game; it really is a joy to play!

Seconded, and for getting us hooked to a game that we can't even play (in its intended setting). 🙂

I guess you are prepared to get those questions first that you can answer the least. Anyway, interesting topics to read about could be: how to deal with power creep, lessons from playtesting, or even failures in design (that may or may not have appeared in public) ...

The Illusion of Choice, maybe? Auto-include upgrades, things that remove the ability of other players to meaningfully affect the game (looking at you, 1.0 Miranda slam-bomb).

The opposite is dud upgrades / pilots / ships and what to do about them.

The things you think about when deciding on what to "patch" (point change, rules change, etc)

Blog has been a great read.

Anything that digs further into the challenges/nuances of mobility & repositioning in game design would be neat. Not even X-Wing specific, though that is my only real context for miniatures.

The interaction of the following always struck me as probably the most difficult thing imaginable to design.

• Dial Options
• Reposition Options
• Linked Reposition Options
• Timing/Initiative of Reposition Options
• Passive Modification paired with Reposition Options
• Available Arc Coverage
• Stress/Strain/Deplete as a Cost
• Base Size

Boiling the topic down...any additional discussion of Miniature Movement Mechanics would be hugely interesting.

Just wanted to say thank you for your hard work and dedication to the game. Hope to hear more from you in the future and share some x-wing discussion.

I second the motion about digging into power and complexity creep and balancing casual and competitive play.

The splitting into formats, what the goals of each format are, and how you change things to make them achieve those goals.

Hi Max! Been loving your blog and I really appreciate everything you've put into X-Wing. I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts about alternate formats and especially cooperative (vs competitive) play, so I'd always love to hear more about that.

Thanks for all of your work Max, for your level-headedness and creativity about the game over these past years.

The easy question is how was the viability of campaign play analyzed, and how did you arrive at epic battles as a sort of compromise between a lot of factors, I imagine.

The hard question is the elephant in the room. I'm guessing you can't divulge too much information but we really are peering into the abyss of no news - how confident was the team that 1) x-wing will survive into 2021+ and 2) FFG and its beloved board games (I'm concerned I'll never get my hands on a TI4 reprint for example). I understand if you can't say anything about those.

I'd be interested in hearing more of the top-level thoughts on how and why certain things were priced. This was most notably a recent issue for the Nantex, where their dip into the 6x Arena Ace created one of those algae blooms you discuss in your most recent article. Meanwhile, ships like the VCX have yet to find a competitive price point.

Thanks for all your hard work over the years. Even if I didn't always like it 😆 . Everyone's a critic, I'm just one with a keyboard 😜

I've got a good one for you. Since you were in the Dev side at FFG, and I was at one point in the playtester side for Armada, I would be SUPER curious to hear about your thoughts on the playtesting process from the Dev perspective. Thoughts on where it succeeded, where it failed, where it caused huge changes, what was the smallest change, etc. I used to like hearing stories from WotC when they deigned share background stories to cards of how they evolve. Or where they thought they had something figured out and then totally didn't.

I know there's a ton of folk aspiring to take their designs and go professional game producer one day who love hearing about that stuff.

Thanks for all the great work. Anything with the creative proces of translation a pilots personality or way of flying into one ability would be fun to read about. What inspirered you and how many different abilities many of the main characters went trough. Also why some big named characters never got a ship or crew. Thanks.

13 hours ago, Canopus said:

Anyway, interesting topics to read about could be: how to deal with power creep, lessons from playtesting, or even failures in design (that may or may not have appeared in public) ...

12 hours ago, pheaver said:

Auto-include upgrades, things that remove the ability of other players to meaningfully affect the game (looking at you, 1.0 Miranda slam-bomb).

The opposite is dud upgrades / pilots / ships and what to do about them.

The things you think about when deciding on what to "patch" (point change, rules change, etc)

I'd like to second these ideas. I'd boil them down to these:

1. How do you recognize that a pilot or upgrade is problematically overpowered or conspicuously underpowered after an expansion launched? Certainly player feedback is a thing, but we are also biased sources of information.
2. How did you decide and prioritize what needed to be fixed/neutered/upgraded after you recognized the problem versus what could be ignored or relegated to a different date?
3. What did consider when adding the repair into the system?

For my suggestions:

• I'd like to read about deciding to do a new edition. Many games have made the move to new editions that fix power creep or exploits; it would be nice to see the developers viewpoint on that.
• A thought that you kind of covered with swimming with sharks is how you dealt with feedback from the community. could you go more in depth on that? How did you deal with praise? How did you deal with doom-sayers and ad hominem attacks? (i.e. FFG has no clue what they are doing) Did a more analytical criticisms garner more of your attention over the more emotional feedback? Did you read community blogs or listen to community podcasts for feedback?
• On a more personal level, when you are able to talk about it, I would be interesting in hearing what the experience of the FFG to AMG switch felt like. Did you feel betrayed? Were you given an opportunity to transfer, as well? Do you worry that someone will screw up the games you cared for?

I've always been curious about the time scale/pressure on designing, play testing, iterating, etc. and how much time/data/pure guess work is involved before you have to call it done and move on. I'm curious what that experience is like as a professional developer vs. as an amateur. What is it like to go into work and have to do creative work under time pressure? How do you deal with that and maintain focus/enthusiasm etc. in a sustainable way?

Great Blog, enjoyed reading all thise articles, many thanks.

Hi Max,

First of all, thanks for your contributions to everything that made this game awesome. And thank you for sharing your time in talking about game design; often hearing how the game came to be is a fun as playing it (at least for me).

So as to not clog up this thread, I was very intested in your notion of "DIY stickiness," and wondered if there were ways that you (and others) might think that non-standard game elements and play might gain future traction. My initial thoughts are posted there.

Also, I second everything that @FTS Gecko posted about Epic and your thoughts on that aspect of XWM.

Lastly, from that same blog, why was this concept never explored by FFG for XWM:

While in a standard competitive game of X-Wing, sacrificing a pilot might be expected, losing your pilot, who has advanced across numerous games and has a name and perhaps even a backstory, is a much more concerning prospect. By bringing a player’s loss aversion into the equation, defensive strategies and upgrades suddenly become more appealing than they would be in the standard game.

10 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

[...]

Lastly, from that same blog, why was this concept never explored by FFG for XWM:

While in a standard competitive game of X-Wing, sacrificing a pilot might be expected, losing your pilot, who has advanced across numerous games and has a name and perhaps even a backstory, is a much more concerning prospect. By bringing a player’s loss aversion into the equation, defensive strategies and upgrades suddenly become more appealing than they would be in the standard game.

So I play a lot of RPGs, and often wondered if I could run a series of combat encounters with some narrative fluff between, where I "GM'd" the opposing forces and the players each had a single grunt ship.

Each scenario a player survived would enabled them to "level up" getting a new upgrade or becoming a higher cost pilot of the same ship. And dying would reset them to a grunt.

I feel a 1v3 would be viable as a Legacy/RPG inspired format.

22 minutes ago, Scum4Life said:

So I play a lot of RPGs, and often wondered if I could run a series of combat encounters with some narrative fluff between, where I "GM'd" the opposing forces and the players each had a single grunt ship.

Each scenario a player survived would enabled them to "level up" getting a new upgrade or becoming a higher cost pilot of the same ship. And dying would reset them to a grunt.

I feel a 1v3 would be viable as a Legacy/RPG inspired format.

In all the mission campaigns I wrote, pilot mortality was a part of it.

If Luke Skywalker got shot down, you're done flying Luke Skywalker. Sometimes killing a hero was a win even if you lost the match.

Lastly, I just want to say I think the Epic Battle set was a great product. And it's something I'd like to see explored rather than tossed as "non-enduring." But having tried my hand at it plenty of times, I know that writing an interesting and effective mission is HARD.

So one of the things I guess I'm trying to ask, and not just to Max, is what are the key elements to a GREAT mission?

9 hours ago, Darth Meanie said:

In all the mission campaigns I wrote, pilot mortality was a part of it.

If Luke Skywalker got shot down, you're done flying Luke Skywalker. Sometimes killing a hero was a win even if you lost the match.

Lastly, I just want to say I think the Epic Battle set was a great product. And it's something I'd like to see explored rather than tossed as "non-enduring." But having tried my hand at it plenty of times, I know that writing an interesting and effective mission is HARD.

So one of the things I guess I'm trying to ask, and not just to Max, is what are the key elements to a GREAT mission?

Unfortunately, while this sort of perma-death game mechanic sounds both thematic, as something that helps raising the stakes, and fun "on paper", it is also the kind of game mechanic which is just not really fun "on the table". Let me explain:

Imagine you really love playing Luke Skywalker, as you mention, and due to a mistake he dies in the first game. That now means that for the rest of the tournament you have to fly without him. In standard play, loosing your favorite ship might make the rest of the current game less fun, but the for next game you get everything back, a reset, and this time around you are likely going to learn from you mistakes and play differently. In standard play, you are not punished for the rest of the tournament for that mistake, and still have a chance to save the day. The other type of game mechanic is the type of game mechanic that punishes the weaker players as they tend to loose more important game pieces early on, thus going into the second game the outcome of that game is already more or less predetermined you have less skill and you have a weaker army - this is not fun for either player. The designers of X-wing have wisely steared away from this type of game mechanics.

9 hours ago, Sciencius said:

Unfortunately, while this sort of perma-death game mechanic sounds both thematic, as something that helps raising the stakes, and fun "on paper", it is also the kind of game mechanic which is just not really fun "on the table". Let me explain:

Imagine you really love playing Luke Skywalker,

If the only way you can have fun in XWM is flying Luke Skywalker, you're doing it wrong, IMHO.

Moreover, however, I'm not talking about this mechanic for tournaments, I'm talking about if for an ongoing campaign-style scenario.

Heck, the point of pilot mortality is to get players to stop playing Soontir Fel as their only Imperial Ace for a change. And 2.0 is currently balanced enough that this should not mean a player without Luke automatically loses.

On 12/28/2020 at 10:44 PM, PhantomFO said:

I'd be interested in hearing more of the top-level thoughts on how and why certain things were priced. This was most notably a recent issue for the Nantex, where their dip into the 6x Arena Ace created one of those algae blooms you discuss in your most recent article.

For what it's worth, I don't view 6x Arena Ace as an algal bloom, because it wasn't created by accretion of things people really liked . It was just way, way too strong for its environment, and it resulted from the downcosting of a game piece that the data available at the time suggested wasn't efficient enough. We were trying to find the fair price for the Nantex where people who were already inclined to play it would feel like it was worth its points, we just overshot the mark. It was a very similar situation to the JumpMaster 2000 in 1st Edition, albeit one that occurred after release rather than prior.

I'd say in the ecology metaphor, it's closer to a really successful invasive species that gets imported unintentionally. Fortunately (unlike invasive species in real life), that also made it somewhat easier to fix - changing one thing (the points cost) put a check on it.

The original 4 generics with Ensnare lists that cropped up after the Nantex was released are actually much closer to the algal blooms I'm talking about. The data we had said people enjoyed the Nantex with Ensnare, but generally in playtests it was showing up as a one or two-of with other list elements. Spam lists were tested but didn't seem to succeed. So the tournament prevalence of 4 generics with Ensnare lists was pretty unexpected - and, interestingly, this list wasn't actually good at winning tournaments - but it was just successful enough to become a gatekeeper. And because this list concentrated fun in the hands of one player, a decent number of people chose to play it (because of the "choose to prioritize your own fun" principle discussed in the article). They were sort of akin to that all-counterspell deck you run into in Magic. Is it good? Most of the time, no. Is it dramatically more fun for one person than the other? Yes.

Here are some other lists I see as algal blooms:

-1st Edition Palp Aces

-Triple Defenders

-Atanni Mindlink

-Certain iterations of Imperial Aces and Rebel Beef in 2nd Edition

Overall, great stuff in this thread! While some of these topics are things I won't be able to touch upon (I can't comment in detail on things that didn't happen, for instance, nor can I speculate on the game's future), I'm making sure to hold onto many of these for future consideration!

I’m loving the blog so far @Stormshrug ! Thank you for writing.

Going with the algal blooms metaphor: I’d be curious to know about the designers’ perspectives on late-1.0’s plethora of potent upgrades, versus the 2.0 design work taking place at the time. Maybe that’s an overly narrow topic, but I also see broader applicability. My hypothesis is that the end of 1.0 was suffering from power creep that could only be mitigated by directing that creep to different locations, whereas 2.0 was designed with several safety valves in terms of tweakable points and a generally tighter rules design philosophy. From a designer’s perspective, how did it feel to have both of those things receiving active design work at once? Was there a sense of “bailing water” with late-1.0, and a belief that the design of 2.0 should future-proof that better?

One thing I used to think a lot about with regard to X-Wing is what the ideal design goal should be when it comes to just how influential various factors should be in determining the outcomes of games. A lot of things influence outcomes, including but not limited to deliberate player choices during the game, randomness (from multiple sources such as dice, critical damage cards, etc.), and list-building / match-up (innate strengths/weaknesses between the two builds).

Games are spread across a great spectrum. In a game like Chess, only the players' decisions determine the outcome of the game, while in CandyLand there is no player agency and the outcome is entirely dependent on the randomness of the deck, as the drawn cards fully determine each turn.

Games like X-Wing are an interesting coalescence of so many factors that can be hugely influential to the game's outcome. On the one hand, you certainly want to reward great list-building, but on the other hand you don't want rock-paper-scissors matchups where games are basically decided when squads are revealed. Randomness (dice, damage cards, etc.) are another big influence. Having sources of randomness keeps games surprising and exciting, but I know a lot of veteran competitive players have felt that X-Wing 2.0 has moved closer and closer to an RNG-fest, as so much dice-fixing reliability that was available in 1.0 listbuilding has been removed.

As a designer of a game like X-Wing, was there a "golden ratio" that ought to be aimed for in balancing how various forces contribute to the outcome of the game? I assume not, but how then how does one approach those different elements during design?