Fellow X-Wingers,

As it has been a topic that has come up now and again I thought I would provide an AAR of a game I recently ran at a convention that involved 29 fighters run by 6 players on a 3' x 6' table. It was only play tested once (shame on me), but turned out really well.

Terrain: 6x Asteroids and 1x CR90 Corvette. Asteroids functioned as normal, CR90 provided additional Defense Die if shooting overlapped base, but no damage die was rolled for crossing the base. If both shooter and target were on the CR90 base then the target did not get the extra die. It had no further interaction with the game as the scenario was that it was disabled and attempting to escape to hyperspace as Imperials were trying to destroy the fighter escort.

General Rule Modifications:

*Critical damage was ignored. Players were given printouts with their damage tracking and simply marked off shields/hulls as they took hits.

*All pilots were generic

*Pilot skill was tweaked so that there was no simultaneous shooting/moving

*If a player missed an Action it was assumed they were doing a focus.

Squadron lists:

Imperial:

Player 1: 3x TIE Fighters, 2x TIE Advanced

Player 2: 3x TIE Fighters, 3x TIE Interceptors

Player 3: 3x TIE Fighters, 3x TIE Bombers w/ 1 proton torpedo each

Rebel:

Player 1: 2x X-Wing, 2x A-Wing

Player 2: 2x X-Wing, 2x Y-Wing w/ 2 proton torpedoes each

Player 3: 2x X-Wing, 2x B-Wing

The Order of Movement went as follows:

-All TIE Fighters, Interceptors and Bombers

-All Rebel

-TIE Advanced

(shooting was in the opposite order)

Result of Play Test: Took just shy of 4 hrs and was an Imperial victory with several fighters on the table from both sides.

Result of Convention Game: Took about 3hrs and 20 mins. A B-Wing and Y-Wing were remaining on the table after splashing the final TIE Fighter.

Observations: The CR90 did not play a significant role in the game and only offered the extra defense in the play test once or twice. The rules modifications (made to speed up play for a convention format as well as be noob friendly) worked well and received positive feedback from players.

Improvements Suggested by Observers/Players: Make the CR90 interactive. Modifying the scenario so that the Imps had to clear the fighters in a set number of turns would have increased the tension of the game (maybe giving them a slight numbers advantage to accomplish this). Also, allow Imperials to target the CR90 and, after x damage, extend the number of game turns would have further added to the tension (i.e. attacking the CR90 delayed repairs).

Conclusion: With a couple tweaks very large space battles are not only manageable, but extremely fun. The game at the convention kept see-sawing back and forth with each faction appearing to have taken the advantage all the way up to the last few turns.