This is mental health awareness week and so I’m going to write a bit of an odd blog about something that is a current issue for me and is affecting my approach to the UK Games Expo.. First, though.  I’m not a person who usually ever talks or write about mental health.  I’m 46 years old and right at the tail end of the generation that just reckons you should suck it up and get on with things, and so even when I have in past struggled with mental health I’ve virtually never sought help or support, I’ve just sucked it up and got on with things.  It’s always been a completely ..read more

The World Championships has basically consumed a quarter of my X-Wing year.  I wrapped up my participation in a little Star Wars: Legion league in between Christmas and New Year then from January 1st I had my gaming mind fixed on Chicago pretty much right up to the moment when I wrapped up my last game of Adepticon. The blank slate of being able to do whatever I wanted and play whatever I wanted spread out before me like a glorious fresh canvas.  I could play any squad I wanted, any bad idea or janky combo that came to mind.  Hell, I didn't even have to play X-Wing I could go ba ..read more

How the heck are you supposed to write about the World Championships?  I manage to fill a blog with just a four round tournament that takes half a day and I was in Chicago for a week! To avoid this being the longest blog in the world ever I'm going to try really hard to keep it brief and tight as much as I can.  You might still want to go and have a wee before you start this, though... THE STORY SO FAR... If you've not been following my blogs this year then they've laid out my journey in preparing for the World Championships.  I started by reflecting on how I'd need to raise my ..read more

This past weekend was the long-awaiting Sith Taker Open, a large event held by my local team (the Sith Takers) at Element Games in Stockport.  The STO had already become a fixture on the UK tournament pre-Covid, but in the absence of any major official organised play events it's now the biggest event in the UK calendar.  With 105 players it's also bigger than the recent Las Vegas Open in the US and will be, until the World Championships at Adepticon, the biggest 'X-Wing 2.5' tournament ever held.  And because it's positioned right before Worlds it's also attracted lots of big na ..read more

There’s been a bit of break in my regular blog updates on Worlds Prep because, well… there’s been a bit of a break in my Worlds prep.  A couple of weekly game nights have come and gone without me getting a chance to play and so I’m actually not very much further on than I was at the end of the Wampa Warm-Up despite that fact that my second 'gate' is fast approaching in the form of the Sith Taker Open. Just like in the Resistance cartoon: not a lot has been happening. This is clearly bad news, but it’s not as bad as it could be for two main reasons: My post-Wampa plan was to expe ..read more

In the last blog I shared how I’d quickly managed to cut my virtually infinite World Championships squad options down from being ‘faction-agnostic’ to being able to commit (almost) fully to First Order, as I was confident I could find something in that faction that I would like and feel comfortable with. I want to share a bit of how that’s been going, and if you remember I shared my Worlds prep timeline with you and how there were three key gates I needed to pass through on the way, and the first of those was this past weekend: the Wampa Warm-Up at Element Games. Before we get there, though ..read more

I'm going to play in the World Championships of X-Wing at the end of March, at Adepticon. This is exciting, and because it's probably the biggest competitive event I've played in for a long time I want to be well prepared.  I want to share some of the journey in that preparation with you, and along the way I'd appreciate any feedback and help I get back in return! In one way this World Championships is landing at a perfect time: we've just had a points update and three expansions worth of new ships dropped into the game (Hotshots & Aces II, Battle of Yavin, Battle of Coruscant) so the ..read more

I had an interesting conversation yesterday on the X-Wing Second Edition Discord that I think is worth pulling out and sharing as a blog entry.  We started off talking about a First Order squad and then wombled our way across a few topics like the maths behind Heroic and Advanced Optics and finished on the RZ2 A-Wing. Advanced Optics in particular is a topic that I think is worth talking about because I suspect it's an upgrade card that players don't really fully understand the maths of.  As a result I think it's consistently overestimated and put into squads that it shouldn't reall ..read more

Finishing up my review of how I think the July 2020 points changes will play out for the various factions I'm going to look at Resistance in this blog, and also cast an eye on some changes to Generic Upgrades that I've not talked about already as part of the previous blogs. If you recall my original totem pole of faction power level before the points change I had Resistance pegged in the second tier along with the First Order.   Much like the First Order I think the Resistance has tons of very good and solid ships but a lack of any really super-strong S-Tier guys who you can bu ..read more

Continuing my review of how the seven factions will respond to the recent points changes, this time I want to look at two factions who were at the top of their games: Separatists and Scum. Below is my faction tiering as I thought it was and you can see that Separatists and Scum are right at the top of the totem pole.  Separatist swarms of various flavours have been hugely strong ever since they arrived in the game, while Scum is arguably the single strongest faction in the game with multiple vectors - Boba at the top, but also the hugely efficient Scyks and Fangs too. Do the July poin ..read more