Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game Review

Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures Game is a starship combat game released by Fantasy Flight Games. FFG is a company that within the last few years has exploded with high-quality games both homemade as well as licensed games. In the Star Wars universe, they have two-star ship games, a card game, and an RPG. Other major properties they have made games for include Lord Of The Rings, Battlestar Galactica, Game Of Thrones, Warhammer and much more.



Learning this game is pretty easy, mastering the game is hard. To play you'll need at least one opponent and at a minimum the starter set. Besides containing the rule book the starter set has all the tokens, maneuver templates, dials, cards, rules, dice, etc. that you'll need to get started.

You play the game with starship miniatures. Each ship mini is generic which makes each X-Wing miniature different from each other is the ship cards. The starter set comes with only one X-Wing miniature but you get four different X-Wing ship cards representing a rookie pilot, a Red Squadron pilot, Biggs Darklighter and Luke Skywalker. So your one X-Wing mini becomes four different X-Wings with four different ways to play. The different cards almost represent different difficulties levels. Playing with Luke Skywalker is going to be easier than playing with the generic rookie pilot. Of course, to play more than one at a time you would need to buy more X-Wing miniatures.

Once you and your opponent have chosen their faction and ships you gather all related equipment for each of your ships and place them on the table to begin play. Each game round has four phases.

Phase 1 Planning Phase: Each player chooses a maneuver for their ships.

Phase 2 Activation Phase: Each ship executes their chosen maneuver based on ascending order of their ships pilot's skill.

Phase 3 Combat Phase:  Each ship performs one combat action based on descending order of their ships pilot's skill.

Phase 4 End Phase: Players remove all unused action tokens from ships, except target locks, and if the player has a card that has "End Phase" abilities they do so now.

Once Phase 4 is complete go back to step one and repeat until all ships of one faction are destroyed.

That is the basics of how you play the game. In a future article, I will demonstrate in detail what each part entails. If you want to get into the game I recommend buying the starter set. Like I mentioned above you get the rules and counters and whatnot to be able to play the game but it also comes with one X-Wing and two TIE fighters and the two TIEs against the one X-Wing is the perfect ratio to learn how to play the game as well as to teach it to someone else.

For anyone who has played Wings of War/Wings of Glory the World War One airplane game, X-Wing will be easy to pick up because the two games are very similar. The game is easy to learn and a lot of fun to play and I highly recommended it to anyone that's a fan of Star Wars or of starship combat games. This game is a "snub" fighter game and involves ships that only have one pilot or up to a handful. If you are more interested in big capital ship battles Fantasy Flight Games released Star Wars Armada.

If you would like to buy the game you can get it from Amazon for $29.86.