Hi there

As mentioned but do you have to tell your opponent what upgrades you have on your ships?

As mentioned but do you have to tell your opponent what upgrades you have on your ships?

Yes, in fact you have to have any upgrades you might have on the table somewhere. There is no hiden information in this game, other then the dial.

Rules on page 4 state:

Prepare Gathered Cards: Each player takes the cards matching his forces and places them faceup outside the play area in view of all players

As noted the X-Wing game has almost perfect information between the two players and a little randomness as well.

Perfect Information: Just like in Chess you know all about WHAT your opponent can do. The only things you don't know are how he's going to move (which is covered by the movement dial) or shoot at.

Randomness: Unlike Chess there is a random factor in X-Wing in the form of throwing down dice instead of having predetermined results.

Another realated question is if you should be a gentleman and either inform or remind of your abilities to your rival when he is about to make an obvious mistake during play... like for example, passing a focus token to a ship that is 'blocked' by Carnor Jax's ability.

You couldn't pick an example from a pilot that's actually out?

Anyway, I think it depends a bit on the situation. Playing on Vassal, normally, opponents and I will give each other little heads up. Sometimes out of sportsmanship, sometimes out of self preservation "actually, you can't fire your turret at range 3. Actually you just spent your focus on defense, so you can't fire you blaster turret. Actually, that's not how that ability works..."

But I've also pointed out that an opponent forgot to take an extra die for range 1/3, or forgot to announce they were using Jan Ors, let them redo a move on occasion if they meant to go left and got the directions confused.

Friends and I usually play somewhat "snooze you lose" just because sometimes that's the only way to learn and remember certain abilities. Mess it up once and have it cost you and you're probably going to get it right the next time.

In a competitive tournament setting? I honestly don't know. I guess it would kind of depend a bit on my opponent. If they seemed cool and it was competitive but friendly, I'd probably cut them a break unless it was clear they wouldn't do the same. If it was obvious they were looking for any little edge to exploit and destroy me, their own mistakes would probably be fair game at that point.

I think it depends a lot on what your opponent is actually forgetting.

If they forget to use an action or an optional ability, say Luke's pseudo-focus, that's a matter of sportsmanship and will be up to individual players and affected by the competitive environment. Personally, I'll almost always remind them.

But non-optional abilities are exactly that - not optional. If your opponent forgets his Stealth Device and rolls one less dice than he should, he didn't make a choice, he played it wrong, and you have just as much responsibility to correct that as if he'd rolled one too many. Selectively correcting flat-out mistakes isn't a matter of sportsmanship, it's a matter of cheating.

Selectively correcting flat-out mistakes isn't a matter of sportsmanship, it's a matter of cheating.

Yeah, it's one thing to let someone suffer for bad play, like forgetting to focus, or to spend an evade token. Not making them play by the rules is something else.

Myself I have a sliding scale, the newer someone is to the game, the more advice and forgiviness I'll give them. If they're as good or better then me, then I tend to more competitive. Winning because someone else helped me isn't nearly the same thnig as winning because I played better then the other guy.

I think it depends a lot on what your opponent is actually forgetting.

If they forget to use an action or an optional ability, say Luke's pseudo-focus, that's a matter of sportsmanship and will be up to individual players and affected by the competitive environment. Personally, I'll almost always remind them.

But non-optional abilities are exactly that - not optional. If your opponent forgets his Stealth Device and rolls one less dice than he should, he didn't make a choice, he played it wrong, and you have just as much responsibility to correct that as if he'd rolled one too many. Selectively correcting flat-out mistakes isn't a matter of sportsmanship, it's a matter of cheating.

Ugggggh ok MOM.

But what if he's a real jerk?

Kidding, by the way. You raise a good point. And in my defense, I don't like to win that way anyway - I usually give people who are about to fly off the map a chance to reverse their move if they want. Unless I'm losing. Or they're a jerk.

I keeed, I keeed.

Not picking on anyone over it

I just think it's a very important distinction. Honestly, it rarely seems to be a problem - the X-wing community is generally very laid-back and friendly.

I bring it up partially because I apply the same standard as a spectator or TO. I try not to interfere in games, and I certainly won't poke my nose into a game that isn't mine to say "Hey, you forgot your action". But if it's not optional, and someone's actually playing it wrong, I'll point that out.

I played a guy the other night playing Rebels for almost the first time, using Wedge and two HWKs for the first time.

That game took twice as long as it needed to because I had to keep reminding him of stuff or correcting te way he'd interpreted different abilities. It was to my advantage quite often (can't fire Blaster, you used your focus on defense; can't fire Blaster, you have focus now but we're at range 3."

But other times I'd remind him that he wanted to spend his TL, or use Jan, or whatever. He flew Kyle to the point of no return near the end and I offered to let him redo the turn the other direction. He was a nice guy using a terrible squad, so it was easy to be pretty sportsmanlike.

so it was easy to be pretty sportsmanlike.

Have a quible here...

I'd say what you did was being kind, not sportsmanlike. To me sportsmanship is playing fairly but taht doesn't mean giving the other guy a break if they make a mistake. There was a thread on BGG I think where someone showed a YT that had the base 1/64th or less off the edge, and wanted to know peoples opinion on if he should of counted it destroyed or not.

The rules are quite clear the ship should be considered destroyed, because the base was off the edge. The rules don't say if most, or even 1/4th of the base, but rather any. Most people said that they'd most likely let the person keep the ship unless it was a tourny or something.

Someone said that counting the ship as destroyed would be poor sportsmanship. To which I replyed "Since when is following the rules poor sportsmanship?"

Myself if I'm playing for fun I tend to be a little bit lax with the rules. But at the same time there is nothing wrong with playing to win, and if the other guy messes up that's part of the game.

so it was easy to be pretty sportsmanlike.

Have a quible here...

I'd say what you did was being kind, not sportsmanlike. To me sportsmanship is playing fairly but taht doesn't mean giving the other guy a break if they make a mistake. There was a thread on BGG I think where someone showed a YT that had the base 1/64th or less off the edge, and wanted to know peoples opinion on if he should of counted it destroyed or not.

The rules are quite clear the ship should be considered destroyed, because the base was off the edge. The rules don't say if most, or even 1/4th of the base, but rather any. Most people said that they'd most likely let the person keep the ship unless it was a tourny or something.

Someone said that counting the ship as destroyed would be poor sportsmanship. To which I replyed "Since when is following the rules poor sportsmanship?"

Myself if I'm playing for fun I tend to be a little bit lax with the rules. But at the same time there is nothing wrong with playing to win, and if the other guy messes up that's part of the game.

Ugh, semantics.

To be fair, in this case, his ship hadn't gone off the board. But on its next move it had nowhere to go but off the board. Which is why I offered him an out and basically said "you know, if you meant to go left there, you can redo the move" and to his credit he said "no, I meant to go right. It's my fault - I just didn't think I'd wind up quite so close to the edge."

Call it what you want - mercy, sportsmanship, kindness, puppy love, but I felt like if he moved off, fine. Rules are rules. But I thought it was only fair to give him the opportunity to have an out there before he went off the map, rather than just kind of crowing at him "say goodbye to your HWK, son!"

Ugh, semantics.

See that's just it, to me it's not a matter of semantics, it's a matter of what the term actually means.

Sportsmanship is IMO becoming changed to mean something it's not. A bit like being over politically correct. Sportsmanship really just means playing by the rules and not being a jerk.

Sportsmanship in sports is pretty clean, IMHO. Play hard, don't run up the score in an obvious mismatch, don't kick the guy you just hammered into the turf as you're standing up.

In tabletop gaming, it's come to mean a lot of very different things. A lot of players seem to think playing competitively and adhering to the rules means you're being unsporting. I blame GW for this - their games have always been so horribly balanced a massive number of player-mandated standards have evolved to try and compensate, one of them being that playing competitively just isn't balanced, so not fun, so not sportsmanlike.

X-wing is odd, and largely seems to trend towards being pretty forgiving as long as there's no decision-making involved. If you fly off the board, that happened and I think you deal with it. Same for flying over a rock. But if you forget an action, I'm generally forgiving as long as it's obvious - if you've taken Marksmanship the entire game, and forgot it last turn, I'll probably let you add it on. "Oh, wait, I meant to barrel roll now that I see where I moved my next ship" though, not so much.

Language is fluid, and meanings are always changing and are interpreted differently by different people. The concept of what constitutes sportsmanship may be very different to you than it is to me, or someone else. There's no one rigid explanation for what does or does not fall under the heading of sportsmanship. In fact, I would argue that if it was simple as "these actions are sportsmanlike, these are not," it would sort of negate the entire concept of sportsmanship, because then you're just back to hard and fast following of the rules and have thrown the spirit of the thing out the window.

I have a friend who has some insane, cockamamie explanation for why baseball is the only true "sport." He's adamant about this, but he's also applying some very narrow, arbitrary definition to the word sport when he does so, and it's not one that I have any inclination to subscribe to. Or that most of the rest of the planet does, or 'professional sports' wouldn't be a thing.

I see where you're coming from, but if the idea of sportsmanship is changing, it's entirely possible that for better or worse, the idea of sportsmanship is changing. You may not like it, any more than you might like the figurative meaning of "literal" being added to the definition of the word 'literal' in the dictionary, but clinging to the word as you understand it and rejecting any other definition doesn't necessarily make it any more right.

Sportsmanship in sports is pretty clean, IMHO. Play hard, don't run up the score in an obvious mismatch, don't kick the guy you just hammered into the turf as you're standing up.

In tabletop gaming, it's come to mean a lot of very different things. A lot of players seem to think playing competitively and adhering to the rules means you're being unsporting. I blame GW for this - their games have always been so horribly balanced a massive number of player-mandated standards have evolved to try and compensate, one of them being that playing competitively just isn't balanced, so not fun, so not sportsmanlike.

X-wing is odd, and largely seems to trend towards being pretty forgiving as long as there's no decision-making involved. If you fly off the board, that happened and I think you deal with it. Same for flying over a rock. But if you forget an action, I'm generally forgiving as long as it's obvious - if you've taken Marksmanship the entire game, and forgot it last turn, I'll probably let you add it on. "Oh, wait, I meant to barrel roll now that I see where I moved my next ship" though, not so much.

How many games have you been in where somebody moves a ship, then moves another ship, then takes ship #2s action, then stops and says "oh, I forgot - I was going to {whatever} ship #1! Let me just do that quick." ?

Now according to the rules, he passed on his action for ship #1, and you could throw a stink and refuse to let him take that action. You'd be well within the rules to do so once his next ship's activation has begun. Is it sporting?

Like Buhalin said, it means different things to different people. One guy may think that he's following the letter of the rules, he's applying them fairly, he would be perfectly willing to apply the same standard to himself should he forget an action, and he considers that perfectly sporting.

The guy who forgot the action, on the other hand, probably thinks you're being anything but sporting if you don't let something like that slide once in a while, and he'd be willing to do the same for you if you forgot. He considers that sporting.

There's no one right answer there, because sportsmanship is a concept, a philosophy, and not a hard and fast set of rules. It's going to mean very different things to different people, in different situations (see the whole "friendly game vs tournament game" idea), and thus you can't really just stamp it 'sporting' 'unsporting' and call it a day.

How many games have you been in where somebody moves a ship, then moves another ship, then takes ship #2s action, then stops and says "oh, I forgot - I was going to {whatever} ship #1! Let me just do that quick." ?

Now according to the rules, he passed on his action for ship #1, and you could throw a stink and refuse to let him take that action. You'd be well within the rules to do so once his next ship's activation has begun. Is it sporting?

It depends, again, on whether there was choice involved. If you moved #2, realized you misjudged your maneuver and needed to barrel roll #1, then I'd probably stick you with it. But if it's just "Move 1, Move 2, Focus both" that doesn't bug me. If you gain extra information between when you should have done it and when you try to do it, that's a problem.

I think the golden rule of sportsmanship is "I lose." You can rarely go wrong in a dispute by just conceding. But expecting your opponent to let you undo a mistake, and calling him a bad sport if he doesn't, is NOT good sportsmanship. That's why I despise the concept of "sportsmanship" which has evolved in GW circles. Their "soft scoring" of "sportsmanship" usually comes down to "I don't like the army you wanted to play, so you get bad sportsmanship marks even though you were a perfect gentleman at the table."

This, again IMHO, is the most common form of poor sportsmanship in tabletop gaming - trying to beat your opponent about the head with the "bad sportsmanship" tag in order to get your way is, ironically, the height of bad sportsmanship.

Why does anyone PLAY that game? I swear every person who talks about it sounds like they're having flashbacks to their time served in a war zone.

Here's my thing about it.

I think most people would agree that being a good sport is what's expected. It's the default behavior most people would expect everyone to abide by.

If I'm playing in a sport, I expect the other people to be good sports about it, to play fairly and not be jerks. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

But when you call letting someone redo an action or take back a stupid move sportsmanship, then you are elevating that to expected behavior. It's not an option to let someone take back that move, or add that focus token after the fact; it's the basic expected behavior.

I tend to be pretty laid back and allow people to do things like add a focus token after they’ve already gone on to the other ship, or use marksmanship even though they didn’t say so. But my issue is once again that this should not be what’s expected of me.

Why does anyone PLAY that game? I swear every person who talks about it sounds like they're having flashbacks to their time served in a war zone.

Because it was one of the first games out there. It's also attracted a fair number of ***hats for some reason. As heated as some of the rules disscussions have gotten here... It's nothing compared to what you'll see in a 40k fourm.

It's just kind of funny - every player on here who talks about the old days playing 40k, you'd swear they were the grizzled old vet who's covered in scars, talking about how you don't know the horrors he's seen. I swear every time you guys mention 40k I can feel you shudder from across the country.

It kind of reminds me - Buhalin, did you see over on TC when Rojo Cinco popped on and was complaining about the tournament finals video from GenCon?

I swear every time you guys mention 40k I can feel you shudder from across the country.

There's some truth to that. I was going to list all the issues I have with 40k... But the more I typed the more depressing it got so I'll just leave it with this.

The best thing I've done with my 40k army, was sell it and use the money to pay for X-Wing.

Sportsmanship is just "how you play the game" and it fall along a line from great to horrible. Now we can probably argue about what "great sportsmanship" takes but horrible sportsmanship is often easy to see. I know I might argue that some things someone would think boost a person's sportsmanship (like after turn take-backs/changes, altering maneuvers) are at best neutral and maybe even a bit negative; oh they may help your opponent which could be seen as sporting but they also hurt your other competitors in some ways. I haven't been in a tournament scene in some time but the idea of "conceding to a friend" in a tournament just so that s/he can make the cut to the final rounds is extremely unsporting to anyone else who is actually trying to play into that final group; the extreme generosity toward one penalizes many others who are working to get the same thing you just gave away.

I watch a lot of UFC, and some of my favorite fights are when two guys that are friends get in there. The good ones touch gloves, they might high five after a good exchange, or hug between rounds, but they're in there to win. There's no malice, there's no hard feelings, they'll go out to an afterparty together post fight, but they don't let their friendship get in the way of their record or their win bonus. I have a lot of respect for that - more respect than I do for guys who refuse to fight each other because they're friends.

I think I'd be much the same way in a tournament setting. If I've got friends in there, great. I'll cheer you on in every match you're in except the one where you're across the table from me.