546 - Playing Catch-up: A Cornucopia of Posts (Pt 3: X-Wing)

Again, this'll be in reverse order, but fewer pics this time (it wasn't me taking them!). In this post, two games, from last week.

My stalwart Imperial opponent - DS - wanted to try out some new toys, so he cobbled together a fab little narrative mission which would enable us to do just that. 

New toys:

• HW-290
• Imperial Raider
• My scratchbuilt Moonbase

Our off-the-cuff scenario went essentially thus:

An imperial raider has stumbled upon a rebel outpost moonbase which appears to have the trace signal of a stolen imperial shuttle emanating from it. The raider steers a course to investigate but is spotted by one of two flights of clapped-out Z-95s guarding the place. The second flight is scrambled, as is Jan Ors in her HWK - her mission has suddenly changed, and she now needs to escape with the (inevitable) stolen imperial plans. It's not that easy though: she'll have to brave swooping past the raider for two turns first, so that her on-board intelligence agent can scan the enemy vessel to find out just how much the Imperials know...

Forces and Objectives:

To achieve a victory, I had to either destroy the raider(!) or keep the HWK within range 1-2 for two turns then fly off the board; For his part, DS had to either destroy my HWK or get destroy the moonbase. DS created a great little stat card for the moonbase and came up with the rather clever special rule that his raider could target only the nearest ship in each of its arcs (otherwise he'd just immediately blast the HWK out of existence). 

I had the moonbase, two flights of three Z-95s (with the second flight being more up-gunned 'Tala' pilots led by Airen Cracken) and the HWK. DS had just the raider.

Why does blogger still do this?

Summary:

What a cracking game! The moonbase didn't get a look-in to the action, but the scramble round the raider gave both of us a nice additional chance to explore the mechanics of fightier huge ships, and DS's scenario worked an absolute treat! In the end, it was very very close, but Jan Ors in the HWK escaped by the skin of her teeth with just one hull point remaining, as the brave, brave Z-95 pilot behind him sold his life very dearly indeed. He also flew his little Headhunter brilliantly well around the raider, even whilst it rammed four of his comrades into futile smithereens. 

Jan Ors makes her escape with the plans...or blueprints...or whatever.

Great fun!

In our second game of the evening, of which - sadly - there are no pictures, we tried three other 'firsts': (1) DS played rebels for a change, (2) I fielded my new Scum and Villainy, and (3) we actually played a straight, non-narrative 100 point face-down. 

Forces-wise, DS took three Y-Wings and a B-Wing (with one of the cool named Y-Wing pilots) and I took a Scummy Y-Wing, a Firspray and N'Dru Suhlak in his Z-95. Long story short, after a fairly close start I pulled ahead and stayed ahead. 

DS is a more tactical player than me, but for once I actually manoeuvred well during the course of these two games, and either way it was wonderful to get a couple of games in. I suspect we'll stick to narrative games in future...

Cheers,

- Drax.