Hi there,

Thanks for all your strats, ideas and hours of fun I had in reading the forums!

The last couple of weeks my neighbors are more into the X-wing game (yes I infected them!) and we made up our own format Free For All. The reason is simple; as long as more people are playing together you come to the point that someone gets eliminated and enter spectator mode. In the case of our poker evenings it's a nice feature; yes boys we have ourselves a dealer! Lucky us! But with this game the fun is over for the eliminated player…

So we fixed it and started out Free For All. We play 31 points each en start at the edge of the table like a regular game, but now we shoot at anyone. Pf course friendships are made and most of the time the best player gets chased a lot and friendships get to an end if you can seriously hurt someone (that's the real fun of table top gaming over online gaming; to see real frustration in the eyes of you opponents!). If your ship or ties gets blown to pieces then you 'respawn' at your start position but have to wait a full round to rejoin the action. This makes using rockets and torpedoes so much more fun The winner of the evening is the player with to most kills and least respawns.

We played this type of game for 4 weeks (12 game hours) and it is a lot of fun. The Y-wing is a real threat with the ion canon because there is a lot of action going on and with the 360 arc it really gets tricky. Also; players won't focus fire solely on the real threat, after all if your back is against somebody's respawn spot, it isn;t a smart move to shoot that player out of business; and get a fresh ship on your tail!

Please let me know what you guys think.

MechWolf said:

gr8 format. i like it alot. i did something similar when i was running my wings of war ww1 campaign for the same reasons as you listed. its a gr8 was to keep people in the action after they have been shot down. depending on numbers you could also have team-ups/allianced ddecided at the start. would be cool to see rebels and imperials teamup up

Am I the only one who would run an Outer Rim Smuggler with 4 points of upgrades in this format? I'd probably run the ORS with stealth and the Falcon title card, just to give it a little bit better survivability to reduce deaths. Or Chewie. Or the engine upgrade… 4 points isn't a lot, but 10 hull/shield when everyone else is running around with 8 (Y-wings) or 5 or less (anything else) with a 360 degree primary arc is pretty nice in a free for all

That plays sort of like a video game, but I'm sure it's fun. I might try this with my kids.

Keeping wiht that video game feeling, have you thought of bonus points for upgrades? Such as, if you get a kill, you can add 2 points of upgrades, and if you get a death you lose one point of upgrades for your next respawn?

I don't know. Might be fun to add more variety to builds and give incentives for kills.

The upgrade option sounds pretty cool, kinda like getting the extra ship in Galaga! Plus you could work your way up to missiles or torps, imagine the assault missles into a field of ties and you get like 8 pts off of one shot :-)

Bringing the smuggler to the table hahaha You are making me jealous, I got the Millenium on presale order so no smuggler for me at this point. Like Insaid; the strongest player always get hit the most. It isn't rare that you got shot by three people after famous words like; hey I only took one shot the whole evening!

We tried teams with this format and that also works very well. Because the destroyed player starts over from his respawn spot, it's wise to lure the opponents back to your base when you get heavy damage. The ties with their 5 movement are always back into the action in no time. The more rocks, the more fun. With 4 players trying to outsmart each other it's always hilarious how we manage to get all the ships in one big collision at the center of the table.

Bonus droppings are yet to come, but the ties will get the advantage because of their speed. The evade token rules in FFA and the Y-Wing with R2D2 is also hard to stop (he isn't killing anyone but the idea of getting hit by ion cannon and nailed by three players is a spooky idea)

Any ideas on the bonusses?

Last match FFA was won by two ties (0 respawns) vs Xwing,Xwing and Y-Wing. It's nice that people hold a grudge to players who killed them and go for the revenge as soon as they respawn, so little wars are fought even when it's FFA is gets personal in the end

How about everyone starts off either as an academy pilot or rookie pilot, then you earn upgrade points based on kills--killing a higher ranked pilot could give you 2 points and equal or lesser 1 point. These points could be used for upgrades or increased to pilot skill ( but you have to return to spawn to upgrade pilot).

I don't know if this would be viable---what about if you make it to an opponents spawn you recover 1 shield or hull?

~Ron

As long as you are going full video game mode, how about placing some tracking or satellite tokens on the board and providing a bonus to upgrade points or HP regeneration if you cam land on one of them?