X-Wing at Home

With us all at home a bit more, our FLGS closed and organized play shut down for the foreseeable future, we have to wonder, how the heck do we play X-Wing? I’m sure everyone needs their fix. Fortunately, there are a number of options out there for you.

Fly Casual

First, if you live by yourself and don’t want to get into any online games, there’s a perfect option out there. Fly Casual is a single player desktop app that allows you to play X-wing on your computer. It has all the rules, cards and ships entered in so you can play any combination of ships against any other combination of ships, regardless of what you own. Beyond just being able to get some games in, it also works as a great way to test out some build options before going out to buy eight copies of a ship.

The game does all the heavy lifting for you, just as you’d expect a computer game to do. You just pick your dials, pick your actions and it’s all taken care of. And animated. That’s one of the coolest features. I would have expected something like this to involve a 2D top down view but all the ships are 3D models with explosion and blaster animations. The ships even flip when they barrel roll.

All that said, the game has some limitations. X-wing is not altogether sure how its rules are supposed to work so expect some rules to not do what you expect. It’s updated regularly but not as frequently as weird interactions come up in regular play. Also not all the pilots and cards are included. Some cards have proven more difficult to program a proper response and they remain out of the game until the designer figures it out.

You can play the game against a computer opponent or you can fly both sides. The computer opponent isn’t completely useless, but it is an AI designed by a guy for free around a complicated game that tricks up regular people all the time. Just pretend you’re playing against a newbie and it’s about the same experience. Sometimes they’ll do something that you weren’t expecting and get you. But the advantage is that you can design their list for them so they won’t lose that stage of the game.

Tabletop Simulator

Another virtual X-wing option is Tabletop Simulator available on Steam. This is a great program with a lot of utility beyond X-wing. There are mod packages out there for almost any table top game that you can find and play. So it’s highly recommended just as a purchase. It goes on sale a lot for $10.

Compared to Fly Casual, TTS is a bit of a steeper learning curve. For starters, you buy the game but that just buys you access to things. You have to go find and figure out how to install things. The X-wing module can be found here and will have to be installed before you can play X-wing.

I used it a year or more ago, and I am currently having some trouble getting it to update properly. So I can’t speak to the current state of the module. But a lot of people use it and there are upcoming online tournaments, so it’s worth checking out.

Home Tournament

If you are lucky enough to live with someone who also likes X-Wing, you can of course get games in like normal. There are lots of game format options you can use nowadays thanks to Epic and the card packs. But if you’re also missing March Madness and need your fix of brackets, you could try an X-Wing bracket tournament.

My son and I each built one list per faction with an 8th Wildcard list. We then set up the bracket with all of his lists on one side, paired by era, and mine on the other. Then we started playing. Doing it this way gives you a variety of lists to try out. You’ll each play lists you didn’t create, which can be fun. And in the end, the final championship game, will be your best list versus your opponent’s best list.

So don’t despair X-wing players. Lock S-foils and keep flying.