Well the wait was finally over. Due to living in the UK, I had to wait even longer for my game to arrive. It finally came on Wednesday 26th, but I was at work and I was unable to collect it until the Friday. But again had to go to work and so couldn't do anything with it - but atleast I had it. I was busy with friends over the weekend, they wouldn't have wanted to play and they have very young children who I didn't want getting close to the very delicate looking miniatures.
And so the wait was finally over late on Sunday, once they had gone. I opened up the box, punched everything out and set up my first game - the quick play example. My wife is not massively into these games and so I thought it best to try it out solo first until I know how to play and can help her best. I decided to play rebel (Rookie Pilot) and do random spins for the Imperials (Academy Pilot, Obsidian Squadron). The game was fine, but ended quite quickly, the Imperials did rubbish turns and never had a chance and went down quite quickly - I don't think they even did any damage to my X-wing. All-in-all I had fun, but was disappointed by the ineffective random AI.
Later that night I dislocated my shoulder and so have had trouble playing since, with only one arm. I managed to play a second game today, again solo. This time using the forces from Mission 1, but not the Mission itself. Again I chose Rebels (Red Squadron) against AI Imperials (2x Academy Pilot), this time I chose to roll for the Imperials flights, which someone else suggested in another thread. This game worked alot better, the AI still did random things - but this often saved them from my predicatable movements! I did one early good shot on one ship, doing two damage - one of which was a critical (the one where you roll at the beginning of each combat phase and gain a point of damage if you roll a hit) As he only had one hull point left I thought that it was only time before he blew up and so went after the second ship. It then became a chase of him avoiding me and me trying to hunt him down, with little success but lots of fun! At one point they managed to fly out of my arc of fire and both get their weapons trained on me, I was annoyed but a little impressed. They managed to take both shields off me because of this move. I kept having pot shots at the second fighter, but he rolled awesome defense dice and I only managed 1 hit, a critical which gave him stress. Eventually I caught him again, but this time I rolled awesomely and did 4 hits, which he failed to save. After all this time, my plan to wait for the first fighter to blow up by himself failed, so I had to do it myself. It didn't take too long before I had caught him and finished him off.
Some notes about the game - The Imps did well, they often flew out of my sights because they did the unusual manouver.
They struggled with stress, they both gained stress early on but struggled to roll green manouvers to get rid of them, although this did help them evade me a couple of times, as I was expecting a green manouver and they didn't do it.
I won due to my higher Pilot Skill, both final kills were done when the Imperials also had shots on me, but due to my higher skill level I fired first. I tried their shots afterwards - just to see what could have happened, and between them they would have blown me up!
A question did arise from the game. The critical card that I mentioned above, does the fighter only take damage on a roll of a hit icon, or does it take damage on the roll of a critical too? I played it that it didn't.
Overall I liked the game playing solo and look forward to more games and hopefully some against a real person!