Our local group played a few rounds of the new Battle of Yavin scenario pack this week so I thought I'd offer my thoughts on the experience! TL;DR, it's a LOT of good, clean fun and I think every X-Wing player should try it at least once. I ended up playing two games having rolled into the store with my special components already punched out and couple of 35-point squads already built. I had my special little Death Star targeting countdown tracker and a speaker with my Star Wars soundtrack playlist ready to go for a night of thematic fun. The Setup Here are the basics: Rebels vs. Empire, 35 ..read more

Well, we got a points change! Or...maybe a points adjustment is more accurate. We'll need time to see what, if any, impact the minor adjustments and addition of the Battle of Yavin Scenario Pack content will have, but blogs are for blazing hot takes, so here come a few of mine! I'll admit that I was excited for a sweeping points shake-up. I enjoy nothing more than wiping my squad building apps clean and starting from scratch and would highly recommend that approach to anyone in place of trying to modify your existing lists to fit new points. So satisfying. I had already begun that process whe ..read more

X-Wing is cool. X-Wing is fun. Some of us just like getting together with our friends and a few beverages to play a round with house rules, others know no greater thrill than making the cut at a major tournament. It’s worth celebrating how many different ways we enjoy collecting and playing with our fully licensed plastic and cardboard. Welcome to the Dice and Cardboard Cantina, where we chat about what makes X-Wing fun and, well, just about everything else! Well, I normally think that I'm not so great at making up new content for this game but these posts generally prompt the most discussion ..read more

We'll take a quick break this week from the thematic squad series for some gameplay tips and tricks. I often hesitate to write these tactics articles because I am, in the grand scheme, not a successful competitive player. I wonder, "who am I to tell people how to play X-Wing?" That said, I feel that many of us objectively understand these core concepts but the hardest part is applying them on the table. Learning to adapt takes time and practice and the best way to do it is to put in the reps and have fun playing X-Wing with your friends. Remember that you can sit and talk theoretical tactics ..read more

It's no secret that one of my my favorite parts of Star Wars: X-Wing is Stars Wars. And X-Wings! I'm excited to see the thematic, just-for-fun elements of this game brought to the fore with the upcoming Battle Packs from AMG. True, building a list based on characters, ships, and scenarios from the movies probably isn't going to win you a major X-Wing tournament, but it's often a fun way to exercise your list-building skills and will give you a fun squad to play casually and to introduce new players to the game. Last week's entry in this little miniseries covered the prequel era so let's move ..read more

Welcome to the Dice and Cardboard Briefing Room, pilot! In this series I'll write about a pilot or upgrade that I've been experimenting with or enjoying. Even occasional readers of this blog will likely have picked up on the fact that L'ulo L'ampar is a top 10 Star Wars character to me. I think what makes L'ulo one of my favorites is that just about all of our main characters in Star Wars are human. Aside from Chewbacca, it's a relative rarity to get such an immediately likable nonhuman character playing an important part. Strap yourself in for the Dice and Cardboard ode to Uncle L'ulo L'ampa ..read more

It's no secret that one of my my favorite parts of Star Wars: X-Wing is Stars Wars. And X-Wings! I'm excited to see the thematic, just-for-fun elements of this game brought to the fore with the upcoming Battle Packs from AMG. Before we get some more "official" options for cinematic squad building I thought I'd take a pass at building one or two themed squads for each on-screen canon installment of the Star Wars saga. I'm guessing it won't always be easy but the goal is to build a squad that may not be fully competitive but decent enough to put on the table and use. Let's start with the Preque ..read more

Welcome to The Hangar, pilot! In this series we talk about starfighters, freighters, shuttles, racers, bombers, gunships, and everything else in between. This is the chance to look "under the hood," as it were, and explore what makes our favorite ships great. Sorry I missed last week! A busy work schedule and preparation for my Private Pilot checkride left me very little time for writing. I thought about throwing together a quick article comparing single piston engine training airplanes to X-Wing ships but after some consideration I realized nobody wants to read that... Filling the first spac ..read more

This past weekend I played in my second tournament and my biggest one yet! I had a great time hanging out with my friends from Apollo Squadron in Houston who I haven't seen since I moved away last month and played 8 games of X-Wing over two days, which is more than I've played in at least the past two months combined! Shoutout to our TOs for a really nice event. The sense of community was very real and I made more than a few new friends. My goals for the weekend were to: Have fun: I certainly did! It was great to see my friends from Houston's Apollo Squadron after I moved away about a month ..read more

Welcome to the Dice and Cardboard Briefing Room, pilot! In this series I'll write about a pilot or upgrade that I've been experimenting with or enjoying. The subject of this week's article is a fixture of Scum and Villainy. It's Gamut Key! Gamut has always been a popular choice in Scum lists but is a particularly efficient choice at time of writing, costing 3 Squad Points with 8 Loadout Value which is less LV than his pricier contemporaries but still enough to get some work done. Who is Gamut Key? Gamut Key belongs in that rare company of characters who almost all X-Wing players know well bu ..read more