Back in January, I had started on a plan to make an X-wing Uglies variant where players would choose their ships parts and make their ships to fly in a free-for-all, last man standing game.
At this year’s CabinCon, I was able to complete enough of the rough beta to try it out.
First, I had to lay down some of the rules and concepts of building your ship. I decided to base most of the rules on the ship’s “chassis.” This would be the main decision the player would make and would control the ship’s base stats and maneuverability.
In the sample above, we have the generic template for the X-wing body. It gives an inherent pilot skill of 4 and base stats for Attack, Agility, Hull, and Shield. Since these values may change based on the ship mounts you choose, the final values on the left side are left blank for the user to fill in after they have built their ship. The action bar has the native actions that the ship will be able to use and the status bar at the bottom determines how you can build your ship. Since there is no build cost in this variant, it is to your best interest to max out all the slots. The lower right has a spot for the maneuver dial the body uses (blank in this version as I hadn’t filled those in yet).
In the X-wing Body example, it has two “mount” slots, one illicit slot, and one astromech slot. The mount slots are how many different mountings your ship can have and will make the biggest effect on how your ship looks and flies. The other slots are card additions from a pre-built selection of cards intended to balance the different ship types. These cards come from the X-wing game itself and are generic upgrade cards to keep the balance in check.
For the “mount” cards, I had to custom this card as well. At its heart, the mount cards help augment the base stats of the ship’s body and may add additional actions or other abilities. For stat calculations, the nearest whole number rounding down determines your total value for the stat.
After the build is complete, the game plays like any regular X-wing miniatures game.
For CabinCon, we had five players so I put 6 “bodies” out to choose from and enough “mounts” to have leftovers. The players selected their ships/configurations and we set out a standard 3′ x 3′ map with asteroids and took flight. But before that, let’s look at the ships.
I built an AT-ST with X-wing S-foils for a beefy attack platform. The AT-ST comes with a crew slot so I added a gunner. Likely a bad move as most ships have low agility in the Uglies arena.
Reese built a TIE monstrosity that featured two Y-wing engines and a pair of S-foils. This gave him a nice balance of attack, defense, and hull.
Sterling made a slippery TIE fighter featuring a pair of S-foils to make the glass cannon of our Uglies group.
Colton had your standard TYE-wing with the Y-wing body and TIE fighter solar arrays.
Lastly, Jeremy used the X-wing body and TIE fighter solar arrays to have the highest pilot skill in our game.
Having built our ships, we then played a standard free-for-all. This is basically the “Four Corners” idea but with five players. Four Corners is a free-for-all variant where each player starts in a different corner of a 3×3 map and then play until there is one ship left.
I got into trouble a little early when the Y-whatever (nicknamed the “Slippery Piggy”) banked into my flight path and proceeded to ion me. Having played enough X-wing, I knew I was dead in the water from turn one after that as I didn’t have the maneuverability or defense to stay out of the ion turret threat and it looked like I was in a slow spiral to either die by ion or eat it on that asteroid directly in front of me.
I convinced the Slippery Piggy that it was in his best interest to keep me alive and have me hunt something down and kill it so he stopped Ion-ing me and let me go play well with others.
The other ships were all on the other side of the map so I decided to aim and maybe catch the TIE-S-Foils ship.
It worked and I was able to catch a piece of him but the range let him come away unscathed. The ensuing joust between him and the Xwing-panel ugly did some damage on both sides of the fight and the TIE-S-foil-Y-not thingie blasted me on my flank.
It’s times like these I ask, “where did it all go wrong?” I’ll never know as the Xwing-panel guy blasted me apart and then promptly blew up against the TIE-X-Y-not ship.
Later, the TIE-S-Foils lit up the TIE-X-Y-not and was facing down the Slippery Piggy. The Piggy whiffed it’s ion turret roll and the TIE escaped.
The TIE managed to get around to the Slippery Piggy’s six and the Ion Turret didn’t hold up to repeated full firepower.
The TIE-S-Foils ugly took the win for a pretty funny and different X-wing game. There are some adjustments that will need to be made before the full variant goes “live” at Gen Con this year but this first foray gives me confidence that the variant will work and it will be a fun affair for all.