Unconventional Warfare

Unconventional Warfare is a progressive format for XWing for leagues and multi-round events. On top of the existing rules it layers some list-building restrictions, where your style of list grants you a perk for each round.

I asked AI to generate an image of Star Wars unconventional warfare. I don't know what the hell's going on here, but it's definitely not conventional...

Strategic Approach

So your style of list is referred to as your Strategic Approach. The rules say that you declare your approach during setup, between Place Obstacles and Place Forces, but anyone looking at your list should be able to figure out what it is... You can build a standard 20 point list and play that, but if it doesn't fit either of the available approaches you can't claim the perks. (And in my limited experience with the format, they're worth having). The two approaches are:

Fighter Aces - you can only use small ships that are limited, and you must have a minimum of three

Heavy Hitters - you must have at least two medium ships or one large ship, and you may have up to two small ships

These approaches can place limits on some of the factions (unless you're prepared to give away deficit points). Separatists who want to play Heavy Hitters have to take Firesprays because they can't take a Gauntlet or Infiltrator and make a 20 point list. The Resistance can't play Heavy Hitters at all as they can't make a 20 point list. And with the Upsilon not being in Standard, the First Order player wanting to play Heavy Hitters has to take two Xi shuttles. Which may not be sensible...

Perks

Unconventional Warfare is played across three rounds; how long a round lasts is up to your TO - at a convention it could be a day, for a league at your FLGS it could be a week, a month or more. For each round you receive a new perk based on your strategic approach:

Round	Fighter Aces		Heavy Hitters
1	After a friendly ship moves through but does not overlap an obstacle or enemy ship, it gains one evade token.		Once per round, while a friendly medium or large ship defends at range 1, the attacker ignores the range 1 bonus.
2	While a friendly ship attacks, if the defender is in its bullseye and the attacking ship is not in the defenders rear arc, add one attack die.		Once per round while a friendly medium or large shp attacks at range 3, the defender ignores the range bonus.
3	While a friendly ship performs a barrel roll or boost, it may use the speed 2 straight template. After a friendly ship uses this perk, it gains 1 stress token.		Once per round, while a friendly medium or large ship attacks, it may suffer 1 face-up damage card to add two attack dice.

Alignments

There's support in the rules for tracking wins and losses for the Light and Dark sides; it doesn't have any mechanical effect but I know some stores run campaign maps thattrack which side has the upper hand. The Republic, Rebel Alliance and Resistance score victories for the Light Side, and the Separatists, Empire and First Order score for the Dark Side. Scum and Villainy can play for either side, but the S&V players must declare at the start of the event which side they are playing for.

So there you have it, all the rules you need for the format. And if this sounds like your cup of Whyrens Reserve, I'm running an Unconventional Warfare event at Aardvarks and Dragons in Woodbridge on 9th June. And there'll be some cards from Adepticon in the prize pool.

Worlds 2024 - Miscellany

I went to the XWing World Championships at Adepticon at the Renaissaance Hotel, Schaumburg, in Chicago for 2024. And I thought it might be useful for someone else in the future if I documented some useful odd bits and pieces.

Where To Stay

I stayed at the Hampton Inn & Suites, and I thought it was pretty good. It's less than two miles from the Renaissance where Adepticon is - I'm pretty sure it's walkable or it's about five minutes in an Uber. There's a free hot breakfast every day that was surprisingly better than I expected; there were waffle irons so you could make your own fresh waffles, and the hot items changed every day which I definitely didn't expect. There's also a pool and a gym.

There's a Whole Foods Market about ten minutes walk away so you can pick up water, wine, snacks etc. Woodfield Mall is also about a ten-minute walk.

Where To Eat

Woodfield Mall has a selection of the US chains, Cheesecake Factory is the only one I ate at. Next to the hotel there was a microbrewery bar and grill which looked good and had I had more time I would have tried. Five minutes walk from the hotel is the Weber Grill Restaurant and Cook School, where I had the best meal of the trip. I also ate two nights in the Schaumburg Public House in  the Renaissance, which was pretty good. And the food during the day at the convention center was good, I really liked the meatball sub there. 

What To See in Chicago

If you want to visit Chicago itself, you can get there on the train. Take an Uber to the airport or to Rosemont station, and then get the train to Clark/Lake. From there the sights that I visited were a short walk along the river, then through to Millennium Park as I really wanted to see the Cloud Gate. It's an easy walk from the Cloud Gate down to the shore of Lake Michigan. After that it's a slightly longer, but well worth it, walk to Willis Tower. 

Worlds 2024 - Doubles and Prize Wall

Last time, I talked about the LCQ and Unconventional Warfare events at Adepticon, which covers Thursday and Friday. This week I'll cover the Doubles event and the Prize Wall and finish up with some final thoughts.

A Missed Opportunity
I have to start by confessing to a missed opportunity. As I got to the Renaissance on Saturday morning and picked up my coffee, I walked past the Battletech setup to get to the XWing area. They had a special guest on their stand - Michael Stackpole, author of the Rogue Squadron series, some of the best Star Wars books and source of a number of elements in the XWing game. But I did not take the opportunity to go and speak to him, I figured he'd be around the rest of the weekend and he'd be invested enough in XWing that he'd come over at some point to have a look at us. He did not (or if he did I missed it) and my opportunity was gone.

via GIPHY

Doubles
On Friday night we had an email from Chris Allen saying that more space was being opened up for the Doubles event, and if anyone wanted to play in a scratch pairing to rock up to the Judges tables Saturday lunchtime.

On one of the chats I was in, Dale Cromwell posted on Saturday morning that he was looking for a partner, so despite having never met him and feeling ever so slightly out of my depth I offered to pair with him as long as he was OK to carry my dead weight. I made my way up to the venue and set up to play a round of Unconventional, and Dale put his stuff down next to me, so I introduced myself and we had a chat, it turned out we were both playing FO so all seemed good. Unfortunately it wasn't to be as Dale had already paired up with someone else before he saw my message - he was very apologetic and offered to help me get paired up with someone else, and I ended up with the exceedingly lovely Cam Galloway, who was playing Republic. (Dale also gave me a consolatory prize ticket, which we'll talk about later)

So at this point we should talk about the Doubles format. Both players on a team bring a 9 point list, and all the ships between you were friendly to each other. Beyond that, you could mix factions, and limited pilots were only limited within your 9 points - so you could have, say, two Darth Vaders, or Darth Vader flying alongside Wedge. (We heard one team had two Bodica Venj's, fortunately we didn't have to play against them). You play to 18 points, not the standard 20; each player brings two obstacles for a total of eight, but you only place six of them on the board. We were only playing for prize tickets, of which we received plenty!

So our squad consisted of:

Team That's A Great Option
Major Vonreg
     Crack Shot
     Marksmanship
     Pattern Analyser
     Magpulse Warheads
Ember
     Proud Tradition
     Cluster Missiles
Broadside
Matchstick
Contrail

(Someone asked us our team name in the first game, and I said 'That's a great question!', and it stuck, then Kris Sheriff misread my writing on the form and Team That's A Great Option was born)

The first game was Chance Engagement, and we were paired with Clan Hall, Mark and Josh from Exile Squadron. They had a Scum list with Emon Azzameen loaded with Thermal Detonators as a main piece. I managed to keep my TIEs away from the bombs, and we got a kill - not the Firespray, we left it too late to bring that down. We won 13-8.

Which put us on the top table for round two, for Scramble The Transmissions against Team Many Bothans. We won this as well, 17-18.

Round three was Salvage Mission, and we moved down a table to face the Imperial lists of Team Whatever You Want. Cam and I really had our rhythm by now, we were communicating and working really well together. For Team WYW it was going slightly less well, there was at least one bump and some accidental bombing of friendly ships. Which meant we pulled away in the scoring, I think by the end we were carrying four crates, and they conceded.

Going into the last game, we were 3-0 - which is clearly a new experience for me… We were back on the top table for Assault At The Satellite Array, facing off against Sebastien and Jeff of Team Maple Syrup. And then Chris Allen revealed that there were after all prizes available for going 4-0, in the form of Adepticon medals. 

Unfortunately for us, the Canadians took an early lead when they managed to bring down Ember, the first time he'd been killed that day. And we were never able to get the lead back; I can't remember the score but I think it was something like 8-13, the reverse of our score from the first game. 

So we didn't get to claim the medals, but everyone who played Doubles had an amazingly fun time with a lot of laughs. There are some great (broken) combinations when you start mixing factions! Kris Sheriff told me Adepticon had asked for a Doubles event to be put on, as Adepticon is known for their Doubles games. It was also very 'feels different' having someone to confer with, and I feel like I learned a lot from playing with Cam and seeing his approach to the game, I'm looking forward to trying out some ideas in my next games.

Prize Wall
With (effectively) all my games played I could look at the prize wall and start spending some of my tickets. In the LCQ and the Worlds tournament we received five tickets each, plus one extra for the winner. In Unconventional Warfare you could claim six tickets per game, up to four games per day. And we received twenty-five for playing in the Doubles.
Everything at the prize wall was priced in multiples of five, meaning anyone who got an extra ticket for winning couldn't do anything with it unless they went on to win four more games. I came out of the LCQ with 21, combined with the 24 I picked up on Friday made 45. And the single that Dale gave me combined with my 24 on the Saturday for another multiple of 5. Plus the 25 I got for playing Doubles.

The prize wall itself, overall I found somewhat meh. There was nothing that screamed 'ohmygoditmustbemine' at me, and the pricing for some things was a bit weird. There were alt art cards for Soontir and Lando for the BoE set, and Anakin and Dooku (I think) for the SoC set, and a nice Marksmanship alt card that I wanted a few copies of (Marksmanship is a go-to card for me).The other available alt art cards were from this seasons Store Champs kit. They were priced at five tickets each.

Next up were dice, at ten tickets for one of each colour; there were sparkly dice, and also dice that looked almost excatly like the standard Core Set dice which is what I thought they were until someone told me they had a very subtle marbling in them. So subtle that it would be far too easy to get them mixed up with someone else' regular dice when you're packing your stuff up at the end of the night.

For twenty tickets you could have foil versions of some of the regular cards - Han Solo, the Scimitar title, Malice, um, Enhanced Jamming Suite, and I think one or two others. If there'd been perhaps foil versions of the faction talents (Hopeful/Heroic/Ruthless etc) I might have gone for one or two of these but as it was I didn't think there was much appeal there.

Jumping up to fifty tickets they had the Inferno Squadron damage deck, challenge coin and the acrylic Resistance Chewie and Captain Jonus cards. If memory serves these were all from the System Opens from 2020, and I strongly suspect everyone who came to Adepticon already had at least one of each of these. 

For seventy-five tickets there was Plo Koon's custom paint job Jedi starfighter with the accompanying punch. I really like getting custom punch for my pilots, and the ship was very pretty - but I don't play Republic.

Getting to the limits of what was possible to get, at 100 prize tickets there were movement templates, and bumper mats for each system (XWing, Armada, Legion, Shatterpoint) to lay your cards out on at the table. The bumper mats are nice, but if you had one would you take it with you to your FLGS? Or have it out at home? I think it's a nice idea, but not very practical. For 150 tickets there was the set of templates plus a template tray, or full size 3' x 3' mats.

I went for three pairs of the sparkly dice, the alt Soontir and Lando cards and some Marksmanships. I gave ten tickets to Louis Leong who was trading his own fabulous merch for prize tickets to collect prizes to distribute to groups around the world, and in return I got one of his Darksaber range rulers I've been hankering after plus a custom Soontir dial cover he'd done for the 186th players. 

And then I picked up another two each of the Lando and Soontir cards and another six Marksmanships that I'll use as prize support at local events.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, what would I have liked to see on the prize wall? I think some of the pricing could be reviewed so that folks who ended up with spare tickets could do something useful with them, and some items are either effectively out of reach for a single player, or you could end up using all your tickets for the whole event on one or maybe two things.
As to the actual items that were available, alt art cards are always nice to show off, it woud have been even better if there'd been more of a selection from the existing pool of official alts that are available (and especially some of the new full artwork ones). As I said above, the foil versions were not a compelling thing - if there'd been more generics, or a full spread across the factions maybe I'd have picked some up. I've covered the stuff that was old already. Punch, and ship repaints - yes, more of this please (and we know the designs already exist for quite a few of these) but again, it needs to cover all the factions.

As a slight aside, I was also somewhat disappointed that AMG didn't seem to have any product with them to sell. When I've been to UKGE AMG and FFG before them have had a stand to show off all their products both current and upcoming to other gamers to attract them into trying their games. At Adepticon they had nothing, and I could only find two stands that had any XWing product at all. One of the things I'd planned to do was pick up a copy of Battle Over Endor before it was out in the UK, if AMG had had copies with them I daresay they'd have sold one to every player from outside the US who attended, plus if they'd had everything else that's current there's always the chance to make a few sales for people who've forgotten the odd dial/card etc.

OP Kit Library
Something AMG had available that I thought was a neat idea was a set of OP kits that were available for players to use. The kits available were:

• Aces High
• Children of Mandalore
• The Droids You're Looking For
• Battle of Yavin
• Siege of Coruscant
• Battle Over Endor

I would have used this, particularly as I haven't had chance to play The Droids You're Looking For yet; however, you couldn't earn any prize tickets from it plus it would suffer the same limitations of space that we were having with Unconventional Warfare. As a result I doubt any of it saw any use.

Final Thoughts
Overall I had a really good time at Adepticon. I made some new friends, and reconnected with some of the UK players I already knew. I got to visit a new city, and eat some amazing food.

The Doubles event was some of the most fun I've ever had in ten years of playing XWing; the campaign to make Doubles an official format starts here, get on board! 

I remembered my triggers.

And I managed to avoid doing my back in from bending over the table to push plastic spaceships around.

Would I go again? With an invite, yes, but I wouldn't try the LCQ route again. So I'd best see if I can get to more store champs when the new season starts!

Worlds 2024 - LCQ & Unconventional

In September my friend Robin won the World Open Qualifier at the London Grand Tournament, which meant he was going to Worlds at Adepticon. And seven weeks ago I decided to throw caution to the wind, go with him and try to get through the Last Chance Qualifier. How hard can it be? 

My List 

I've had thoughts for a little while about leveraging Null's ability and Swarm Tactics to shoot at I7, and I'd been playing a list with Null, Vonreg, Quickdraw and Silencer Kylo Ren. But three weeks before Worlds I made a decision that Kylo had too many points bundled up, and I swapped him out for Ember and Commander Malarus. Which meant my list was: 

FO Sevens

"Null"

  Swarm Tactics 

Major Vonreg 

  Marksmanship 

  Crack Shot

  Pattern Analyzer 

  Mag-Pulse Warheads 

"Quickdraw"

  Swarm Tactics

  Pattern Analyzer

  Special Forces Gunner

  Fire-Control System 

Commander Malarus

  Cluster Missiles 

"Ember"

  Proud Tradition

  Swarm Tactics 

With four ships shooting at I7 and one at "only" I6 or 5, I hoped this would give me the possibility of initiative-kills on I6 ships like Vader, Anakin and Han while also giving me a five-ship list that had the ability to do objective work. But changing my list when I did meant I had practically no table time with it. 

LCQ 

I don't have a play-by-play of my games, in part because I took no notes and I'm bad at remembering to take photos. But in thinking back about them to write this, I have recognised a couple of mistakes that I made and I'm hoping that writing them down will help me avoid making them again. 

In the first round I was paired with Nathan and his RAC list: 

Rear Admiral Chiraneau

  Ruthless

  Darth Vader

  Death Troopers

  Agile Gunner

  Electronic Baffle

  Dauntless 

Tomax Bren (TBE) 

“Vizier”

  Emperor Palpatine 

Obsidian Squadron Pilot 

Obsidian Squadron Pilot 

Obsidian Squadron Pilot 

It was Salvage Mission, and I lost it by not doing the objectives; I'm still struggling with 2.5 and doing objectives vs killing ships. I took too long to kill Tomax while Nathan was earning points using his TIEs, and by the time I started to work on RAC I didn't have enough time left to recover. Loss 5-20. 

So I probably wasn't going to qualify, so the pressure was off and I could have fun... 

In round 2 I played against Joe and a Battle Over Endor list. 

Braylen Stramm 

Gina Moonsong 

Wedge Antilles 

Gemmer Sojan 

Keo Venzee

  Juke

  Vectored Cannons 

I made three mistakes here that cost me the game. The first was target selection - I saw Wedge at I6 and I was so keen to make my 'look, I shoot at I7' shenanigan work that I didn't think rationally about anything else. In turn 2 I made my other two mistakes. I bumped Quickdraw into the back of Malarus and lost a shield; Quickdraw took the extra attack on Wedge but did nothing significant. My third mistake was not shooting Wedge with a MagPulse to knock off his Target Lock on Ember. At the end of the I7 shooting, Wedge was not dead, and Wedge proceeded to one-shot Ember with an APT. The B-wings then killed Quickdraw, leaving me 9-0 down, and unsurprisingly I did not recover from this position. 

We both agreed I'd had bad green dice, but I think with hindsight given the mistakes I made, the outcome wouldn't have been different. Loss 3-23. 

The only good thing to come from that drubbing was that I had a bye in round three. 

In round 4, I was against Sean's Republic list. 

“Odd Ball” (SoC) 

“Jag” (SoC) 

“Sicko”

  Electronic Baffle

  Wolfpack

  Cluster Missiles

  Saturation Salvo 

Padmé Amidala

  Ion Torpedoes

  Passive Sensors

  Juke 

“Contrail” 

  Alpha-3B “Besh”

  Synchronized Console

  R7-A7 

  Crack Shot 

I have to be honest here, I can't remember anything about this game. Loss 13-21. 

So at the end of the day my result was 1-3, and the win came from having the bye. But everyone I played against was lovely, and even when things were going badly for me, I didn't get salty about it and I hope they found me a good opponent. I'm also fairly sure I remembered all my triggers, which some days can feel like an achievement on its' own.

Unconventional Warfare 

Having had a reasonable suspicion (based on my competitive history) that I probably wasn't going to make it through the LCQ, I'd already registered for the Unconventional Warfare league side event. I'll put up a separate post on the Unconventional Warfare format, but it was completely casual with no need for printed lists or pairings, and you could play anywhere at the venue, or at your hotel. You picked up six prize tickets per game, to a maximum of four games per day. 

So I'd packed a whole mess of Imperial ships to improvise lists with, including three Defenders with the intention of picking up the Battle Over Endor pack at Adepticon to play with. But with 311 Players playing in Day 1 of Worlds, and plenty of people around who didn't make it through the LCQ there was a lot of trouble finding space to play in until lunchtime when we got some spare mats and set them up in one of the other gaming halls. I played until mid-afternoon when I'd booked in for a demo of the new Star Trek: Into The Unknown game (summary: not for me, although the demo didn't really show it off very well).

Wrap Up

So that was my Thursday and Friday at Adepticon. Next time I'll talk about Doubles (spoiler: massive fun) and the Prize Wall. All glory to the Emperor!