This blog entry is a little different than what I usually write, and hopefully you find it as interesting to read as I did to write. It turned out to be rather long, so I’ve decided to split it into two parts.

“What does writing have to do with X-Wings?”

Excellent question. Glad you asked. But I’m going to start with a little background. Fantasy Flight Games produces many high-end card, miniature and board games. I use “high-end” here to mean products fancier than the stuff you find at your local Walmart – FFG produces products that are more tailored to specialty stores and that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. You certainly pay more for The Adventurers: Temple of Chac than you would for Scrabble, but they’re completely different animals. I love both, for the record.

Now, about two years ago, FFG brought out the X-Wing Miniatures Game which, as the name kind of implies, is a game based around miniatures and Star Wars. I guess it more explicitly states that fact rather than implies it. While I have never really been into miniatures games despite friends trying for years to get me into things like Warhammer and Warmachine, but what I am into in a big way is Star Wars. Have been since I got my first Star Wars action figure – C3PO – when I was three. I still have him, by the way.

The basic premise of the game is two players squaring off against each other, one as the Rebel Alliance, one as the Imperial Navy, weaving their fighters amongst the asteroids littered about the playing field and dog fighting until a victor emerges.

How does this relate to writing? It didn’t actually occur to until ruminating on my recent resounding defeat (I said I loved the game, not that I was particularly good at it), but the process of preparing for and playing out a game of X-Wing has a lot parallels to the writing process. Or my writing process at any rate. As I say in most of my blog entries, there’s no one correct way to write a story.

Squadron Building

I should start off by saying there are several different rule sets for X-Wing depending on the type of game you want to play. The most common set I have used in casual and tournament play is 100 point squads. Long story short, each ship, pilot and upgrade has a point value assigned to it. The better the ship, pilot or upgrade, the higher the point cost, so when you only have 100 points to spend, you need to plan very carefully. For example, who wouldn’t want to bring in Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon? It certainly seems like a fun idea, but the Han/Falcon combo will cost you 47 of your 100 available squad points. And that’s without any upgrades.

So you need to figure out your strategy. Do you want to fly two or three ships with top-end pilots and significant upgrades? Do you want to have lower level pilots and more ships in play? Do you want heavily armored ships with less maneuverability or lighter but very agile fighters? Making these decisions are critical to your game, because every ship has different stats and different moves they can make. If you just randomly throw together a squad without first planning the kind of game you want to play, you’re going to have a rough time.

The squad building process is as much about you as it is about the ships and pilots. Some players excel with small, agile fighters, while some excel with the big, tank-like ships.

I liken the squad building process to the beginnings of your story development. You need to first decide what kind of story you want to tell. Genre of course, but also the overall feel, even the pacing to a certain degree (i.e. a fast-paced adventure like Star Wars or a slow meander like Lord of the Rings). You also need to, just like choosing your ships and pilots, choose you characters and begin mapping out the core story and major events. And just like building a squadron, you need to make decisions on what parts you consider critical and need to build around versus what might be cool, but needs to be set aside to keep your list from straying from the goal.

It’s easier said than done, I know. Just like I sometimes get carried away with the “cool” factor of some of my squad builds, I also sometimes get carried away with the “cool” factor of a story I’m developing. In both instances I get caught up in the details and lose sight of what I’m trying to work toward.

For example, lets talk about the tank-like build I mentioned earlier with which I had awful results. There’s a picture of the two-ship list in play above. Quick note on the pic — the miniatures from FFG come pre-painted, but I gave mine a paint job anyway because that’s the kind of thing I’m prone to do.

The squad in question seemed like a great idea. I had two ships – the Millennium Falcon, piloted by Chewbacca, and a YT-2400 piloted by Leebo – that I pumped up with several fantastic upgrades. Without getting into too much detail, these were two fairly powerful ships with really good pilots. It was a really cool looking squad build and everyone who saw it agreed it looked really cool.

And I couldn’t fly it for shit. I’d built it to be cool, not really considering that I’d need to figure out how to fly it properly in order for it to be effective. I built it based on upgrades not based on how I like to play or geared toward the style of play on which I have a relatively good handle. The end result was that both games were losses (by a significant margin) marked by poor maneuvering and overall shoddy play on my part.

In other words, a lot like a couple of my abandoned writing projects.

A few years ago, I started working of a horror story to which I gave the painfully generic name Pandora’s Box. It was and remains an interesting idea with some scenes that I still really like, but like my poorly-planned X-Wing list, I had no idea how to fly the story. I was simply cobbling together “this would be cool” ideas with no real plan in place for how I wanted to execute. Really it wasn’t a story at all, but a collection of scenes. Pandora’s Box – what little of it I ended up actually writing – meandered aimlessly in the same way my Falcon and YT-2400 slogged around the playing area like they were piloted by drunks. In both cases, there was nowhere near enough thought put into the initial planning stage. Neither the story nor the squad build had a firm direction.

Setup & Planning Phase

The first stage in the actual game of X-Wing involves setup of the playing area and of the ships each player will be flying. One of the key parts of setup is placing of obstacles – usually asteroids, but sometimes debris fields or even a disabled ship. Placement of obstacles is done one at a time, with the players taking turns. There is some element of strategy here, as you want to try to place the obstacles – at least those you have control over – in such a way that may disrupt your opponent’s ability to exucte his maneuvers while having as little impact as possible on your own.
That is virtually impossible, for reasons I’ll discuss in part two of this article.

The planning phase involves each player selecting the first move that each of their ships will make. This move selection is done in secret, so that when the ship moves, it’s movement is a surprise to your opponent. This is your first opportunity to set your strategy into motion. Do you want to sit back a bit, make a few small moves and see what your opponent does before committing? Or do you come out of the gate with an aggressive first move, perhaps catching your opponent off-guard and causing them to rethink their own strategy?

In the photo above, you see my squadron — two B-Wings and three A-Wings (one is out of the shot) — in among a cluster of TIE Fighters. My opponent’s strategy was predicated upon keeping his seven TIEs flying in formation in order to have them all focus their fire on one ship each turn. His hope was by doing that, he’d be able to take out my ships fairly quickly. He wasn’t counting on m aggressive start, flying by fighters straight at him and forcing him to break up his formation and completely rethink his strategy.

Of course, during setup and planning you don’t know any of this, you’re making assumptions based on the way you want to fly and the way you think, based on your opponent’s list, he will fly. But you could be entirely wrong.

I would liken the setup and planning phases to the construction of your “final” outline of your writing project. Setting up the obstacles your characters will face, preparing your first moves and your overall strategy of tackling the story. You have your characters and your themes and all that — your squad build so to speak — and you’ve set up your major obstacles. Now you decide on your first move. How are you going to play it? A slower, perhaps more cautious start? A prologue, perhaps, or a chapter or two of background before the real plot gets underway? Or do you jump straight into the core issues in the first few pages, more aggressive opening move?

Whatever you do, you’d better make sure you built your squadron properly or you’re screwed. Trust me.

That’s all for this entry. I’ll continue in part two, covering Activation & Combat phases.

Until next time.

– DW