The box is actually quite nice - FFG do nice boxes. The outer is a nicely printed cardboard which is thick enough to do it's job, but not the strongest - mine has a pair of rips in it that look like it's been grabbed by the cut-out that allows you to see the three included minis and then mishandled before it was shrink-wrapped. Inside is a vacuum formed plastic tray with three partitions, two to hold the various cards, dice and cardboard tokens and templates that come with the game, with the third partition dedicated to the two-part plastic box containing the miniatures. It's the usual thin, almost flimsy plastic that we all expect, but it's fit for purpose, combined with the cardboard outer I'd have no worries about anything inside getting damaged were I to drop it into my bag before making the epic journey across the road to the cave of the local miniature giant space dwarf we call the Beard.
Anybody that has played any of the Wings of War/Wings of Glory (which I'm told is Wings of War WWII edition after FFG lost the publishing rights, and so will write as though it is) games will be able to pick this up with very little effort - certain core mechanics are very similar but the game as a whole is different enough that the games are not the same. Jason Little, the writer of X-Wing has done a fantastic job of creating an even more streamlined, faster-paced game than those it bares a similarity to, and has at the same time addressed some of my own issues with those games. FFG has a nice set of tutorial videos here that cover pretty much everything about the game. Go watch them. For those that can't or don't want to, I'll go over some of the things I've seen that I like so far.
With the Wings of War/Glory games mentioned above, players can simply use cards instead of miniatures - this is how I have always played it, as it was one of those games that while I was eager to play it, I was also the only person eager to play it, so I couldn't bring myself to sink money into miniatures that wouldn't see much use. Cards are also used for controlling the movement of your aircraft. It provides plenty of flexibility, but I find in some circumstances it can be quite fiddly and awkward - you'll put the maneuver card in place, reposition your aircraft, slide the maneuver template away and either nudge your aircraft as you do, or nudge it as you lift your finger off of it, or somebody else will nudge it. A minor issue, I know, but when everybody is in the same area and overlapping each other during play, cards get jostled, millimetres are lost and gained, angles are changed, and what was a range band one shot on the enemy becomes range band two and out of arc. X-Wing gives you no choice in the matter of minis and comes with them pre-painted and ready to play with. It then does away with maneuver cards and replaces them with simple maneuver dials and templates that fit in between two notches on the forward and rear faces of the miniatures bases - no fiddly arrows to line up! The maneuver dials also mean you aren't shuffling through a deck of cards looking for the right card and can't accidentally set yourself the wrong speed token for the maneuver you want to perform.
With Wings of War/Glory, everybody moves and shoots simultaneously in the respective movement and shooting phases. It does work, and is part of what makes them fun and interesting games, but in X-Wing there is a clearly defined initiative system that I've not seen anywhere else before. Every pilot has an initiative rating, and during the movement phase, each pilot moves in turn, starting from the lowest initiative to the highest, and any situations of two players having matching initiative is simple to solve - Imperial craft have priority over Rebel craft. In the shooting phase the higher a pilots initiative is, the sooner they shoot, which I think will give an overall feel of more experience, higher initiative pilots being able to react to the movements of less experienced, lower initiative pilots and being able to fire upon them first.
Something else that really excites me about this game is the list building, in that it has it. All the various aerial combat games I've seen before either completely ignore the concept, saying play whatever fighter you like against whatever fighter your opponent likes and have fun with it, or they provide scenarios, saying player 1 will use A, B and C while player 2 will use X, Y and Z. The only exceptions to this I've found so far are Forge World's Aeronautica Imperialis and Star Wars X-Wing. A Pilot and his craft have their own points value, and icons on the card representing what upgrades are available to them, such as extra weapons, Astromechs or actual talents applied to the pilot themselves, and these too have their own points cost. Imperials will just about always have a numerical advantage over Rebels, but Rebels will generally have better ships and pilots. There's also character pilots - you can play Luke Skywalker if you want to! This also leads us to my only gripe with the game - and it's not actually with the game itself. With the exception of Darth Vader, there are no Imperial pilots of note like there are for the Rebels, so they've been made up like call-signs, and it's the call-signs chosen I don't like, Mauler Mithel, Dark Curse and Night Beast. They're all a bit dark sounding. All a bit evil. Good and Evil are points of view. We can see the original Star Wars trilogy as the tale of Luke Skywalker leaving home to join the Alliance and fight against the Empire because we see it from the Alliance viewpoint. What if the story was told from the Imperial point of view? Would we have a story about the noble Darth Vader and his mission to save the Empire from the terrorism of the Rebel Alliance? Or to put it in a Wings of War/Glory point of view, do you think Adolf Hitler thought of himself as evil?
X-Wing uses a d8 system, the faces of which are above. The dice-based system allows the player to roll extra dice to their attack or defence rolls based on events in the game, or count certain die faces that would normally be considered a failure as a success. It's more interactive than Wings of War/Glory where if you fired upon the enemy plane, the opposing player simply drew damage tokens from a pile and applied any effect necessary. Damage itself is also simplified, which I like. Upon taking damage, you take a card from the pile and it counts as a simple +1 damage, and if it's a critical hit, you take into account the text on the card, which I think will keep things like mathematics to a minimum and game play fast and fluid.
The only problem with semi-proprietary dice is if you lose them, right? Pretty much. It looks like FFG thought about that ahead of time though. While they sell additional/replacement dice, they also have a smart phone app available for Android and iOS. It features dice for X-Wing, FFG's Star Wars RPG series and also has the option to roll common polyhedral dice too. It's easy to use, very pretty to look at, has nicely themed audio and supports up to twenty dice at a time. It seems to be a little power thirsty, but not terribly so - using the app for around 5 minutes near constantly resulted in around 1% to 2% use of battery. It is a purchased app, but for £3.20 I'm quite pleased with it, especially when you consider that the RRP on a pack of the six dice in the image above is £6.99! I can, already have, and will spend silly amounts of money on dice, and I'm really liking what I've seen of the game so far, but I'm not going to spend £1.16 and a half pence on dice for it when the phone app costs less than half a pack of six and will provide me with all the dice I'll ever need for it - the only thing I can see using twenty dice is a Star Destroyer!
The last thing to talk about is the miniatures. They are nicely detailed, but I'm not sure about the paint job on them. I know that with pre-painted minis the quality is never going to be fantastic, but I look at them and can't help but think they look a bit rushed. The painting around the cockpits and red markings on the X-Wing are well done, but the actual bodywork looks rushed and lacking in effort. I'm no painting expert though, and I'm not used to seeing this sort of thing at this sort of scale either, so I'm going to ask the Beard for his opinion when I get chance, since painting is his area of experience! Maybe I shouldn't complain - this is the only game I have where everything is fully painted!
I've spent much of this post comparing Star Wars X-Wing to Wings of War/Glory, which isn't fair.
Star Wars X-Wing is not Wings of War or Wings of Glory.
Star Wars X-Wing is better!
As stated Mr Ash, the models are rushed on flat areas. But the decals are nice. Would I repaint or touch up, probably . But only when the paint station is empty,alas as we all know it's never empty. As for the cave comment. It's not a cave in live in, I couldn't afford one. It's an upscale hole! :-P
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