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!