GenCon 2017 - Part V (Sunday)

X-Wing Scenario: Rebels board and steal a Nebulon B Frigate (outline on game mat)

SUNDAY

Finally able to sleep in, where "sleeping in" means a 7am wakeup.  We meandered the gaming hall, then found our table and watched our GMs set up for our X-Wing scenario.  Chatting a bit, we realized we had done a different scenario with the same guys last year.

This was a 4hr, 6 player game and we had one no-show.  Mrs. Zoxe and I joined one other random as Rebels, and the other two guys took Imperials.  The scenario was that the Rebels disabled an Imperial Nebulon B Frigate and were attempting to steal it.

The Frigate was an outline on the map with turrets marked (engines offline, but point defense active) and a pair of docking rings that we needed to get the Rebel Transport to.  If we held the Transport on point for 2 rounds, we'd successfully capture and win the scenario.

Pew Pew Pew

The past two years at GenCon, these scenarios have always become an attrition fight that ends up being a frenzy against the clock at the end, so I pushed our side to aggressively deploy and push the Transport fast before the Imperials were in position to focus firepower.

"I've got a bad feeling about this...."  We were making good headway, with many TIEs dying for the Emperor, but alas the Imperials had sent a distress beacon and reinforcements arrived.  Placed directly behind our Transport, the poor girl didn't survive the next round.  Thinking all was lost, we were told that the Rebels could then choose to destroy the Frigate instead of Capturing and still yield a victory for the Rebellion.

So, a new Frigate hull point to attack was added, and the rebels lurched forward for vengeance.  As hits resolved during the next turn, the Frigate's hull was stripped away until there was just one point left.  We resolved the rest of the combat sequence, trying to kill a couple of annoying TIE Interceptors, but then Mrs. Zoxe realized that our last ship had a single shot on the Frigate.  She rolled hot, got the last point we needed, and the Rebels scattered into Hyperspace.  We were done in about 2 1/2 hours.  We stayed and chatted with the GM for another 30 minutes, picking apart different points in the scenario.

Bragging rights:

• We brought the Transport in more aggressively than any other public-play group to date. Mrs. Zoxe was congratulated for her flying skill with the ship.
• We are the FIRST Rebel squad to 'win' in public-play.  In private tests, the win ratio of the scenario is about 50/50, but in public play with first-timers, Imperials almost always win due to swarm tactics.
• During deployment, we put our Y-wing and B-wings out front, which have far more hull and shield than the X-wings.  We lost few ships, and while most everyone had taken some significant damage, the Imperials started to die faster than they could focus fire.  As I described to our partner, the B-wings were performing as ablative shielding to draw fire while the X-wings maneuvered en masse almost unmolested.
• During that final round, MOST of the kill shots were from our protected X-wing squadrons, tho the final killshot was from a sneaky A-wing.

I had forgotten how much fun "original trilogy" X-wing was.  During our postgame banter, most everyone had played the older game and lamented the direction FFG has taken the game engine (i.e. weird ships and the focus on tourney play).  It kind of came off like a bunch of old timers vets pining for the 'better' days of yore, but considering that our GMs were part of the original X-Wing beta test (and had some of the handmade pre-production dice to prove it), it was an interesting chat where I was nodding my head a lot.

Finding ourselves with far more time, we returned to the vendor hall and did a 'greatest hits tour' of the floor, and found our way down aisles we'd only been through once.  We were surprised to find that by 2pm, the floor was starting to empty and we could look at almost anything.  Speculation: Sunday AM is probably heavy with people buying last minute things, but as people start to head to the airport or get on the road, the load lessens.

I went back to Kingdom Death to take pictures and one of the demo tables begged me to join, so I died horribly a 4th time.  We finally got off the floor around 3:45, with a show close of 4pm.  Still a little sad to leave, we realized we had skipped lunch due to X-wing and had Lunch/Dinner at a restaurant not far from the convention center.

And from there, we began the trip home.

So on Sunday we added:

• Demo: KDM - Lion
• Event:  X-Wing boarding action scenario

Closing:
It was a good year, and possibly a turning point for Mrs. Zoxe and I.  We've been following specific designers far more closely thanks to Kickstarter, and we felt more engaged and willing to start a conversation.  I recognized many more faces in the crowd - from specific staff to Youtubers.  The entire experience simply felt 'different' with more knowledge and more understanding of the ins and outs of the vendors on display.

And we had a great time.