My friend Tony (a.k.a. "El_Tonio") and I played a couple of games Thursday night at Empire Games in Mesa, AZ. My primary focus was to further test my Rebel Swarm concept against two squads I thought would be pretty formidable against it - a TIE Swarm and triple firesprays. Below is the session report for the first of those matches:

My Squad: Prototype Pilot A-Wing * 2, Rookie Pilot X-Wing * 2, Gold Squadron Pilot Y-Wing + Ion Turret

El Tonio's squad: Howlrunner + Stealth, Obsidian Squadron * 5, Academy Pilot

After a first round consisting of forward 3's by the TIEs and forward 2's by the Rebels, the second round saw the start of combat. I flew my A-Wings forward 5 and boosted to try to break up their swarm formation - a maneuver that absolutely worked as intended. It also absolutely left my A-Wings in range one of several Howlrunner-modified PS3 shots shooting before my PS1 A-Wings could counter. I didn't even get a picture before the TIEs blew the Prototype Pilots to smithereens. I did take out an Obsidian Squadron Pilot with my X-Wings in exchange, and ionized another TIE, but it was not an even exchange by any stretch.

Here's what A-Wings look like after a TIE Swarm eats them for breakfast in the first round of combat (see below).

Clearly, I needed to use tactics that would result in two things: making the most of moving first, and not getting blown up. So my X-Wings took turn 3's in different directions, assuming they wouldn't have shots but also assuming the same would be said for the TIEs. One TIE had a shot that missed, and the Y-Wing took a shot that missed with his ion turret. My X-Wings took TLs out on Howlrunner for use in a later round.

Every ship on the board did a k-turn next, the TIE swarm took shields off the Y-Wing, and the Y-Wing hit with the ion turret. The X-Wings landed amazing range 3 shots and the dice gods cursed Tony's evade dice, so another TIE went down and a third was injured.

On the next round, I assumed his remaining swarm would come after the lone X-wing on the left so I turned hard to get out of his firing arcs, allowing my k-turn stress to stay on the ship. My other two ships closed to take advantage of the situation should I guess correctly (which I did, thankfully) and I took out the injured TIE while evading two close range shots through an asteroid. Things were starting to look up for the rebels despite heavy casualties at the beginning.

I did a green maneuver on the left X-Wing the following turn, managed to evade damage, and then a K-turn the following round while my other X-Wing and Y-Wing tried to take some more hull off the remaining TIEs. The Swarm turned around to come back at me, and took more hull off of the Y-Wing and X-Wing in their arcs. My right X-Wing managed to get the stealth off of Howlrunner with the TL I had taken several turns before. Then, matters got worse.

My right X-Wing took a hard turn 3 up towards enemy territory to try to get out of the line of fire while my other X-Wing regrouped, but one of Tony's TIEs anticipated it and barrel rolled into perfect position to take a range one shot that spelled that X-Wing's doom.

Before

After

From there things went downhill for the Rebels. My Y-Wing was gunned down mercilessly. I did manage to kill Howlrunner with the other X-Wing and its TL from earlier, but that left an X-Wing with 3 hull left against three TIEs when time was called. Victory went to the imperials.