I drove a little over 90 minutes away to the Tucson, AZ regional event today.
The good news is that I won the event (I came home with the trophy and the world championship weekend pass), and everyone got lots of great prizes. In addition to the 10 acrylic focus tokens, a patch, and a dice bag, we also got 5 pair of target lock tokens (number 1-5) and a huge Boba Fett / Han Solo card that were left over from an earlier organized play event.
The bad news is that only two players showed up (including me). The ironic thing is that the other player lives about 4 miles from me and also drove down to Tucson (so, we joked that we could just have easily have had the event in Tempe and called in the winner). So, it wasn’t much of an event, and I’m not overly proud of my accomplishment, but we were both pretty good players and had fun playing, and I thought I’d write up a quick battle report just for the heck of it.
I played 3 Academy Pilots and 3 Alpha Squadron Pilots with Stealth Devices (99 points total).
My opponent played 5 Avenger Squadron Pilots with no upgrades (100 points total).
Here is how the board was set up at the start (we played on his GF9 matt… note the cool asteroids my opponent brought – there is a close up of them at the end of this report):
Overall, he played very aggressively and I probably erred on the side of caution (2/3 evade over focus).
Round 1: I was not planning to engage until round 2 and started with all 3 straight moves with evade. He did all 5 straight moves, and then boosted to get within range 3. All 5 of his ships were within range three of 4 of my ships (and vice versa). He felt certain it was important to take out my TIE Interceptors with Stealth Devices ASAP, so took mostly risky shots at these ships (3 attack dice vs. 5 agility dice and focus for three attacks, and then 3 attack dice against 4 agility dice plus evade for the other two attacks). Statistically, 1-2 should have probably gotten through, but with 4-5 agility dice, evade, and a little luck, not a single shot hit either ship. I then returned fire with 2 of my TIE Fighters and 2 of my TIE Interceptors and ended up taking out one of his Interceptors (he was now down to 4 ships to 6).
I don’t remember the rest of the rounds in detail, but this first round really changed the tone of the game in my favor. He did have one exceptionally good round where he set things up so he had 2-3 shots at me but I could not return fire at all (either because of poor location or because our ships were touching and I didn’t have another target). I did make him run into my ships several times to lose actions (and ran into my own ships only twice to lose actions). He also did a surprise but risky K-Turn through an asteroid with one hull left (and the Force was with me because he ended up destroying his own ship with a 50/50 roll). Overall, I tended to take out a ship of his ever 1.5-2 rounds or so, and he took out a ship of mine every 3 rounds or so. I ended up with 2 undamaged Interceptors and 1 undamaged Fighter when I took out his last ship.
All in all it was a good game (never a huge lead, except perhaps towards the end), but I think between his playing a little risky (and having a little bad luck with rolls), my playing somewhat cautiously (and having a little good luck with rolls), in tandem with the fact that he had 15 attack dice, 15 evade dice, and 15 hull, whereas I had 15 attack dice, 18 evade dice, and 18 hull allowed me to come out on top.
I don’t think I’ll play this exact squad again, but overall it was quite fun (good mix of offense, defense, and maneuverability), so I’m sure I’ll play something close at my next regional. I just hope I get to test it out against a few more people.
Finally, as promised, here is the close up of the asteroids he created. Note that he used Starship Battles parts for the wrecked ships. Very clever idea (they fit very nicely on the cardboard asteroids, which we placed under them), and these are my favorite asteroids I’ve seen.
