"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"

Finished up some of my first 54mm gladiators for Doctor Merkury's upcoming Iron Ivan release "Victus"

 I built this little fighting pit to go along with Doc's round table fighting arena. This way we can run tournaments with multiple fights going at once. 

 Because our fearless leader Doc, decided to standardize the hexes used in the game based on flooring tiles that he bought several years ago and that don't appear to be available anywhere in the world anymore (apparently octagonal tiles are the in thing now) I went with the closest lasercut wooden hexes for the arena floor that I could find from LITKO. The sizing isn't too bad but the wood hexes are a bit small so I had to give them a wider spacing. It'll work though. 

 Thankfully Doc gave me a pile of the flooring hexes he had left so that I could at least base my Gladiators so that they'd all stand at the same height....

 ....except for the midget gladiator, ZING! ....midgets are short. 

 Doc uses the blood splatters to indicate front facing for movement in VICTUS. BRILLIANT! 

Distant relatives? Yep! 

I believe Victus is coming out at the upcoming Cold Wars convention. If you don't have gladiators there are even nifty paper minis and a hex grid fighting pit in the book! SELF CONTAINMENT!!! 

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed

Tonight my brother and a couple of his friends came over and we broke in my Death Star Table. The table is not quite finished yet, I have some detailing to do and some warping issues with the cheap foam core I used that I'd like to work out. It was good enough to play on though so we gave it a shot. We just played a regular dogfight since I haven't worked out all the trench run and turret rules yet. 

 Dan and I played Empire 

 Dan deployed Darth Vader and his wingman on the opposite side of the trench and had to make his way over to the fray. 

 It took us about 3 turns before we were all in firing position. 

 ...and they wasted no time taking out my Backstabber TIE. Fire doesn't burn in space, but it does burn in my mancave. 

 Dan, gingerly traveling over to help. 

 The Rebels, played by Nicholas, the Strongest Boy Alive and his friend "Fish" if that is his real name. They went with one X-Wing and two Y-wings. I thought that was an interesting combo. They were were all decked out with astromechs and ion turrets. 

 Nick and Fish really did a pretty good job of utilizing the ion turrets often stayinrg out of our firing arc and whittling away at our TIEs with their 360 degree firing arc.

 Dan and I kept rolling criticals like nobody's business, bypassing the shields of the Y-Wings and crippling them a lot faster than they normally would be....(this is what we will call a 'house rule'....meaning that I misinterpreted the rules and made everyone just go with it, 'cause I it's my game)

 It was another good battle. It came down to Vader and one Y-Wing...

...of course we all knew how that was gonna go.

I'll say it again, I love this game. It really is a blast and there is a great back and forth that keeps things interesting the whole time. You never feel like one side is ever rolling over the other. Another fun game in the bag. 

Friday Night Game Night! X-Wing going on two, count them TWO Tables!!!

On Friday night we had another one of our monthly game nights and we got to break out X-wing. We ended up having 8 people all together so we split up and played on two tables thinking that 8 players on one table might bog down the game. I had enough stuff to field two 100 point battles....with some ships left over. This tells me that I've spent far too much money on this game already.

 On table one (numbered as such, simply because it was the table I was on) we had a dogfight in an asteroid field between Wedge Antilles and a small faction of Red Squadron taking on Darth Vader and several TIE fighters. 

 Table two saw an atmospheric battle in which the Rebels, led by Luke Skywalker were tasked with destroying three atmospheric mining refineries. 

 We engaged pretty rapidly on the first table and were doing a nice job of picking off TIE Fighters. 

 Things went very badly for the Rebels on table two. They used their 100pts. to really power load 3 fighters and then went up the middle in a tight cluster. The Imperials took that opportunity to pincer in from each side  bringing a lot of firepower and lighting them up. 

 Luke ended up all by lonesome real fast. 

 After managing to destroy all the TIEs on the left side of the table all of our X-Wings started to cautiously make their way over to engage Lord Vader. 

Luke bought the moisture farm. 

On the Asteroid table we ended up bringing all four of our X-Wings into firing position on Darth Vader, but it was the Rookie Pilot that ended up taking him out which was a fun way to end things. 

Table two's Rebels really should have been given enough extra points to buy at least one more fighter, since they had to divide their fire between fighting and bombing, but all reports indicate that they also should have spread out and focused on the refineries rather than going up the middle and engaging the Imperial fighters. Hard lessons learned. 

A good time was had by all. We changed the history of the Star Wars Universe on both tables by killing both Luke and Vader, so I'd say that it was a productive evening. 

In space no one can hear your reaction to Disney buying Lucasfilm...

So I pulled the trigger on buying a bunch of the new Fantasy Flight X-wing stuff and tonight at my wife's family Thanksgiving dinner we got to fire it up for the first time. The players were my brother and our cousin chase on the Empire side and cousin Cody and I as the Rebels.

 We played 50 pts. on each team and we thought for certain that Dan and Chase were going to bring out Darth Vader but instead they laid out 3 Academy Pilots and a Black Squadron pilot all in standard TIE Fighters to take on Cody as Luke Skywalker and me as a Gold Squadron Y-Wing. 

 Cody doesn't show up in most of these early pics because he got into an awesome flanking position coming up behind all the TIEs

                                      

 Two of Dan's TIEs lure me into....

...this mess. Dan's two TIEs both pulled Koiogran turns so my keen Mongo piloting skills landed me in this spot with three TIEs' guns trained on me.  

I couldn't land any shots but luckily my Y-Wing wasn't taking too much damage.

 Somewhere in the distance Luke was considering whether or not to join the fight. 

 I pulled off my own Koiogran turn and managed to get into a little bit better of a position. Our point build didn't allow me to take Ion Cannons unfortunately which I understand to be the real bread and butter of the Y-Wings.

 Hey look Luke decided to show up for the party. I'm glad he did, because that's when the chipping away at the TIE's finally began....no thanks to me and my Y-Wing. 

 Behold the mini-van of starfigher combat. With 3 shields and 5 Hull strength the Y-Wing can take a real beating though. Another handy thing was the ability to move 1 straight length. That threw the TIE's for a loop a number of times as they would fly right past me and into my firing arc. I was like the little Y-Wing that could. 

 Luke and a TIE have an "in space" stare down. 

 Now you see it...

 ...Now you don't. 

It worked out well for us, as the  Empire pretty much decided they would consider it a moral victory if they could just take out my Y-Wing. So while I gingerly drifted through space taking a harder beating than Andy Dufresne took from "The Sisters" in the Shawshank Redemption, Luke was able to go around sweeping up the TIE's one by one. 

 Luke taking out the final TIE, while I limp away from the battle with 1 single Hull point remaining. 

 It's cool, I had Luke tow me back to base.

I got to say this game is fun. It's just fun. The weaving in and out of the other starfighters just really worked for me. This was pretty light in that we were using 4 players and only 50pts. a side, so I really can't wait to break it open with more ships and  power-up options. The game is definitely an investment, but if you approach it with the mindset of a miniature tabletop gamer, it ends up looking a lot more reasonable.