Last weekend was KC Game Fair, the local Kansas City gaming convention I help organize via the Roleplayers Guild of Kansas City, Ltd. We had a good turnout, and everyone seemed to have a good time. This year, I ran three rounds of the Star Wars Edge of the Empire Beta RPG, and two rounds of X-Wing Miniatures, using the Death Star Trench Run scenario by Dagobah Dave. I'll look at the RPG next week. This week, it's all X-wing.
Rob Quillen, former RPGKC president and long time gamer, and I decided to run a Trench Run scenario sometime after GenCon. We're both pretty busy, so we were a bit relieved when he later discovered that Dagobah Dave and others put together Trench Run scenario rules and terrain suggestions on the FFG forums. We set about getting the board together, but ran into a serious time crunch.
Rob bought the terrain pdf and had it printed on a nice color printer on full sheet sized labels.
We trimmed them down and stuck them to some foam core I recycled from some old architecture presentation boards. The first went together well, the rest were more challenging. Cutting the sheets and the foam core turned out to be a bigger challenge than we thought. It produced some gaps between sheets, but it worked.
The ships looked really good on the board.
We had intended to build an actual 3D trench, but ran out of time. In the end, it was more of a gutter, but from a playablity standpoint it worked fine. I'll go back and finish it at some point.
The scenario worked well. Everyone had fun and it was a good emulation of what we saw in the movies. In both sessions, the Rebels really only got one attack run in the time allotted, but with more planning, multiple runs are likely possible. One squad building note - we included a Y-wing with the ion cannon option, leaving all other Rebels with proton torpedoes. The ion cannon made a difference in both runs.
The Imperials follow the Rebels down the trench.
In the first game, we had 3 players to a side, flying 5 ships each. The Rebels fielded 3 X-wings and 2 Y-wings. The Imperials had Vader and 5 TIE fighters. The Rebels made it all the way down the trench, with an ion cannon equipped Y-wing escorting the attacking X-wing. The turrets and TIEs had taken their toll, though, and while the X-wing made it to the firing position, it had a single hull point left and was destroyed just before it had a chance to fire. The remaining Rebels couldn't regroup for a second run before the time ran out.
The image shows the last moments of the Rebel attack. Everyone at the table was hanging on the die rolls when the turrets and TIE fired.
The second time around the Rebels got a bigger jump on the Imperials, but still fired with the timer down to only 2 rounds left, and that was with some help to gain a bit more time. Again, it was an X-wing with an ion cannon Y-wing escort. This time, they fired and scored a direct hit. It was even Luke Skywalker's ship making the final attack.
All in all, it was a good game and the scenario felt right. We'll probably try some kind of Trench Run 2.0 after the Falcon becomes available. Even without the scenario, the boards make for a great play surface for any regular X-wing game.
Next week, I'll talk about the RPG scenario.