Rogue Squadron- End is the Beginning

Recently, the miniatures game X-Wing was officially canceled. I played X-Wing for about a decade and it was my primary subject when I was writing for d20 Radio. So it was a bit of a disappointment when they made that announcement.

I wouldn’t say it was much of a surprise though. The game had been transferred from FFG to AMG a few years ago. There’s no clear understanding of why this happened, but corporate shenanigans of some type is a clear factor. Regardless of the reasons, the end result was X-Wing ended up with a company that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, invest many resources into maintaining. Couple this with a world altering pandemic that killed local play for a year plus, and a switch in a rule system that was met with the internet’s usual calm and reasoned response, and the game started to fade from popularity.

Now, the game is officially dead and there will be no more plastic spaceships sold. However, this may well be the best thing to happen to the game in the last few years. Picking up the pieces, a group of well regarded community members have established the X-Wing Alliance, and pledged to continue game development. Just this weekend, they released their first version of updated game rules and point changes.

Overall, the changes are both minor and dramatic. On the micro level, they did not make any major rule changes or tried to seriously alter the game. There were some serious point changes but nothing beyond what the previous developers had done on countless occasions. On that left, it’s a fairly standard update.

However, beyond this was a more fundamentally important shift. For a long time, the game existed in two states; Standard and Extended. This came about after the game entered its second edition. All of the ships were ported over from 1.0 but only ships that saw a re-release, or new release in the case of all the new ships, were legal in Standard play. Standard play was the official one used for tournaments. That left a hefty collection of ships and upgrades locked out of official tournaments.

One of the first things XWA did was eliminate this disparity. Now all ships existed under one rule set. Since the game isn’t for sale anymore, who cares about this separation? All the ships will become harder to get. Which, yes, will be problematic for getting anyone to play but there’s hope there too.

All play is now community run, so there is no one need to conform to corporate policies. Are you using a Lego figure in place of a ship you don’t own? Did you 3D print your own custom TIE variant? Are you using pilot cards you printed off the internet? Who cares? Just play the game. All of these things happened all the time before now, but never in tournaments. Stores had to uphold certain standards to get the tournament kits. Which made sense, they wanted to sell product too.

It is a nice change to see. The local Houston group has embraced these changes so it might be different in other places. But given that the XWA is staffed by people from the X-Wing community world-wide, there’s a non-zero chance this will be accepted across a wide range of players.