X-Wing Strategic Framework: Part 2 - Follow The Flow

Well as far as unexpectedly long waits before installments go this is starting to be up there with The Winds of Winter or The New Testament.  

• January 1st: X-Wing Strategic Framework Part 1.  
• The entirety of the first half of 2021 after that: Tumbleweed...

I'd almost stopped playing X-Wing entirely at that point because of the lockdown and not personally liking TTS, so the only thing keeping me going was writing the blog.  So when I hit writer's block on Part 2 of the Strategic Framework as well I just thought "aw to hell with it" and went to play the Marvel Champions LCG for a while instead (you can see my Marvel Champions blog here).  Marvel Champions turns out to be pretty good!  Not perfect, but fun enough if you don't get too wrapped up in it needing to be the greatest game of all time.

Now that the UK is starting to open up and real-life X-Wing play is happening I've dusted my ships off, got my paints back out, and it's looking like it might be "Pew Pew" season again very soon.

But I have some unfinished business to attend to first.  I'm going to power through my writer's block and force a semblence of Strategic Framework Part 2 down into black & white.

The whole of Part 1 is here for you to read in full, but I can summarise it into some bulletpoints now:

1. People sometimes talk about three pillars of X-Wing - Jousters, Turrets, Arc-Dodgers in a Rock-Scissors-Paper relationship.
   
   
2. This theory may have been right once but it's outdated and doesn't explain what is happening in most modern games of X-Wing.
   
   
3. Roles such as 'jouster' or 'arc dodger' aren't something you lock in during squadbuilding, they can and should change from game to game, or turn to turn.

That final point in particular is really where I think this second instalment of the Strategic Framework needs to begin...

UNLEARN WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED

"Braylen Stramm's B-Wing is a jouster"

"The CLT Jedi are great arc-dodgers"

"General Grievous is a flanker"

We're very used to talking about strategic roles that our ships perform in ways similar to this - they're attributes of the ship's chassis or of the individual pilot cards we're bringing.  Maybe it's even an attribute of how we've added upgrades to a ship to tailor it to perform a certain task - Vader in his TIE Advanced with or without Afterburners, for instance.  

But it isn't like that.  The role that a ship should play in your strategy cannot be set and locked in during squadbuilding, X-Wing is much more dynamic and fluid than that.

Let's look at those statements again with a more critical eye...

"Braylen Stramm's B-Wing is a jouster"

Is he?  All on his own?  He's going to joust the enemy on his own?  Being able to play a jouster role isn't an attribute any one ship can have because jousting is a team game that requires your own block of ships to have a better chance of destroying the opponent's block of ships in a head-on war of attrition.  This should tell us that not only is 'being a Jouster' not an attribute that is a property of Braylen Stramm or even of B-Wings in general - jousting is about what your squad as a whole can achieve.  But beyond that, being a jousting squad isn't even a property of your Rebel Alliance squad that has Braylen in either, because unless you've made the absolute apex predator of jousting squads you're going to find that there's some matchups where you would win a head-on fight with your opponent's squad, and there's some matchups where you would probably lose it and thus can't function as a jouster in that game.

"The CLT Jedi are great arc-dodgers"

The Jedi in their Aethersprite fighters tend to be fast pilots with medium to high initiative scores and a wealth of reposition options so they have the tools to work as arc-dodgers and control the engagement to ensure they come out on top.  But unless you're bringing an I6 pilot supported by a really deep points bid there's a good chance that at some point you're going to meet pilots who are going to move after you... can you function as an arc-dodger then?  And it may not even be about opponents moving after you, you may meet squads who simply fly so many ships and cover so much of the table in arcs that it's extremely difficult to fulfil your role as an arc-dodger.  Being an arc-dodger is less of a team game than jousting and it depends more on the individual attributes of the pilot or ship that you're using... but it's still ultimately dependent on how your pilot matches up to the opponent's pilots.

"General Grievous is a flanker"

'Flanker' is a term that I find really interesting whenever I see it used because within the term 'flanker' is usually an implied acceptance that you're not going to cut it as either a 'jouster' or an 'arc dodger' for some reason - too fragile to joust, too low initiative to arc-dodge.  But just like with those roles we've already discussed being a flanker isn't an attribute of the ship in isolation.  For a start: in order to be a flanker you have to be able to run down a flank.  That means there has to be a shape to the engagement that creates a flank, which means being a flanker requires the rest of your squad to be able to draw the opponent's attention away from you.  So you can only be a flanker if you're in the right squad and the opponent responds the right way, so it can't be a property attached to a particular ship or pilot.  But more than that, sometimes you'll enter a match and find that your 'flanker' is actually an arc-dodger after all because he's the highest initiative ship on the table.

So the role that your ship performs clearly isn't a property that we can lock in during squadbuilding.  We can absolutely attempt to ensure that we'll get to perform that role as often as possible (and doing so is probably THE key underlying skill to squadbuilding) but we can never guarantee that we are going to get the role we want.

I used an example of this in my Part 1, about how often Jesper Winstrom would take the triple CLT Jedi in his squad, which everyone assumed were arc-dodging aces, and recognise that with all their additional dice modification abilities and Force he could afford to ram them down the throat of the enemy and joust.  So instead of being fixed to our ship, or our pilot, or even our squad, the role that our ship performs is a property of the individual matchup that we're playing - how our squad matches up against the opponent's squad. 

No, it's even more dynamic than that.  

Our ship's ideal strategic role isn't a property of the matchup, it's a property of the game state at that precise moment in time.  We might well have a ship that's an arc dodger one turn but then should flip to being a jouster another.  That might sound counterintuitive but in fact it's something most of us would recognise as happening once we know what we're looking for.  

Think of pilots like Boba Fett or Rey who often play quite cautiously and control engagements in the early game but then will flip onto the offense once the opponent is weakened, trusting their highly reliable firepower to PS-kill wounded enemy ships in head-on combat.  While the opponent has 200pts of ships with full health on the table it's often too dangerous for Boba or Rey to fly into the fight head-on and brawl it out - the current game state makes playing as a jouster an unacceptable risk.  But once your opponent has a lost a ship and two more are only a few damage cards away from being destroyed the game state has changed and now becoming a jouster becomes your best route to victory.  Diving into range 1 and looking to finish off wounded ships before they can fire means offense has become your best form of defense, and thus the strategic role you should now be adopting.

That's a positive example but it may also flip for negative reasons - if your arc-dodger gets a Panicked Pilot or Damaged Engine critical hit then how successfully can it still function as an arc-dodger?  Maybe it needs to change role and do something else.

Those game state changes that lead to role changes can happen by chance or by circumstance, but it's also possible to plan for them when you're squadbuilding.  Indeed I think a lot of the more nuanced tricks to squadbuilding are precisely planning for how to respond to these contingencies where you don't get the role that you want and how you're going to change the game state to get it.  A really great example of this was in mid-2020 when the successful Boba/Koshka partnership gave way to a lot of players using Boba/Dengar instead.  That was a clear case where the Boba players knew that they wanted Boba Fett to be able to play that role of flipping from Arc Dodger into Jouster but knowing that they were struggling to do that when the opponent brought an I6 pilot that Boba Fett couldn't work as an arc dodger against.  The solution was to bring a wingman in Dengar who could hunt the opponent's I6 pilot and thus change the game state to one where Boba Fett could run his Arc Dodger/Jouster routine.

FOLLOW THE FLOW

I've used the word 'role' sixteen times in this blog already but I've never once explained what I think those roles might be.  

I would suggest that there are six strategic roles for your ships to perform in X-Wing: three Primary Roles that are the most powerful roles and one you'd typically want to adopt if possible, two Secondary Roles that you might be able to adopt if you can't be successful in any of the Primary Roles, and finally there are what I call 'Unpurposed' ships that aren't currently able to fulfil any of the Primary or Secondary Roles and are left in a kind of strategic limbo.

• Primary Roles - Jouster, Arc Dodger, Support

• Secondary Roles - Blocker, Flanker

• Tertiary Roles - Unpurposed

Moreover, I think not only is there a hierarchy of roles, there's also actually a strict order for how you should appraise them, and that's what I call The Flow.

Your entry point is deciding if your squad in a position for this matchup where your ships can be a Jouster as part of a jousting block.  This covers a lot of the ground that decades-old game theories like "Who's The Beatdown" deal with in evaluating which of the two players at the table is best equipped to be the protagonist, and it's exactly the matchup-specific decision that Jesper Winstrom made when he would decide to joust with his apparently fragile Jedi.  Ultimately if you can joust then you probably should joust.  Being the dominant jousting threat puts so much more of the burden of execution onto the opponent to find a way to engage with your squad safely, so if you can play that role with confidence that the dice will favour you then your journey down the strategic Flow probably stops here.

But if you can't joust then the next stop is to decide if your ship can function as an Arc Dodger.  Firstly, are you going to move later than your opponent so that you know where their arcs are going to be (in order to dodge them).  And secondly, do you have access to reposition abilities that will allow you take advantage of that extra information and 'dodge' those arcs?  If you fail either of those tests you're going to struggle to make it as an Arc Dodger - an Alpha Squadron Interceptor may have linked boosts and barrel rolls but at I1 he's not got the information to take advantage of it, but at the other extreme Midnight may be an I6 TIE Fighter pilot but he doesn't have the reposition effects that he needs to leverage his high initiative.  Finally, an important factor to consider is that the opponent's squad may be making it much harder/impossible to function as an arc-dodger, which would typically be if they're covering so much of the table in arcs (either with turret arcs or just having lots of ship) that there's very little safe space to 'dodge' into while still being proactive in the match.

If you can't joust and you don't have what it takes to arc-dodge your opponent's ships then the last Primary Role you could be suited to a Support role.  Support ships will usually have some specific ability or action (like Coordinate) that works with the rest of their squad and so it's not a Role that most 'normal' ships can just jump into when it doesn't work out as a Jouster or Arc Dodger.  As a Support ship your job in the game is usually defined by the ships you're supporting - if you're supporting jousters you'll need to join the joust, if you're supporting Arc-Dodgers you'll probably need to act like an Arc-Dodger yourself!

If you've been following the Flow this far and still haven't found a role for your ship then things are starting to get a bit less hopeful, but never fear as you may be able to jump into one of the Secondary Roles...

The first of these is to try and be a Blocker and like being an Arc Dodger that often requires your ship to have the right traits.  Firstly you really need to be moving before the ships that you're trying to block so a low Initiative is important for this role.  Secondly you probably need to have a pretty good maneuver dial and/or repositions to ensure that you can put your ship into exactly the right spot on the table.  Those aren't the only considerations - having a medium or large base can help because you cover so much more table, for instance, and you usually want a blocker to be a relatively cheap or ineffective ship because you still need enough of your squad left to take advantage of having blocked the enemy ship, or if you take more guns out of the fight by committing a blocker than you gain in setting up an attack for your team.

The other Secondary role is to be a Flanker.  This is a term you'll hear a lot already and I think it's important for my to be clear about the differences between being an Arc Dodger and being a Flanker because a lot of you may be thinking they're just different words for the same thing.  I would say that being able to play an Arc Dodger role is primarily about the strengths of your ship (fast, high initiative, reposition) while adopting a Flanker role is primarily about using the strengths of the rest of your squad to pull attention away from the weaknesses of your flanking ship - like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park keeping you looking forward while the kill actually comes from the side.  Even then a flanker will usually (though not always) want to be a fast ship so that it can cover the ground to get out into a flanking position in time for the fighting to start.  It also tends to assume that your ship has enough firepower to meaningfully affect the battle - flanking with a lone Vulture Droid won't change much, but General Grievous certainly would.  The challenge is ensuring that your flanking threat isn't greater than the threat from the rest of your squad, otherwise you could well find your flanking action turning into the joust you were trying to avoid if the opponent turns to follow your flanker!

If none of the Secondary roles really fit your ship and squad then you drop to the bottom of the pile...

And if you haven't found a home yet then your ship is Unpurposed.  That means your ship is not suited to taking any of the strategic roles in the game - it's going to lose a joust, isn't good at arc-dodging, has no support abilities, can't really block effectively and the squad it's with is in the same boat so you won't be able to create a flank to exploit.  An Unpurposed ship does not have any particular advantages over the opponent's squad that you can exploit and you're on the back foot.  But don't worry: I think ships end up in this position very frequently so you're likely in good company, and in a lot of ways this is where the hard work of X-Wing strategy really comes to the fore.  

Your main role as an Unpurposed ship is twofold: avoid direct confrontations (because you'll lose them) and try to create opportunities to change the game state so that you can adopt one of the roles.  Break up the opponent's formation so you can become a jouster, kill the enemy's I6 ace so you can be an arc-dodger, use the time limit to force your opponent into an engagement you can win, that sort of thing.

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I want to talk in a little bit more depth about how some of these roles and decisions work, but first I want to make a little detour.  I was coming up with this strategic framework around the back end of 2020 (the first part was published Jan 1st 2021) and so that matched up to when I was thinking about what certain ships would be good for.  The ETA-Actis in particular is a great example and I think applying this framework gave me a lot of clarity and structure to how I evaluated that ship which I think we can now see coming to the fore in how they are actually being used.

To put you back inside my head at the end of 2020... was the ETA-Actis going to be a Jouster in a lot of matchups?  With just 2 red dice and 3 hull for your 45-50 points there wouldn't be many opponents your could bully with your ETA's raw muscle.  Ok, so was it going to be an Arc Dodger?  Well the Aethersprite functions like an Arc Dodger a lot of the time but with a System Phase preposition replacing the Aethersprite's Fine Tuned Controls the ETA wasn't particularly well suited to seeing the opponent's moves and responding to them - it was actually going to give information to the opponent and let them respond instead!  Aside from Yoda there wasn't a clear Support use for the ETA-Actis, and with high Initiative it wasn't a natural Blocker.

Following the Flow for the ETA-Actis very rapidly left me with only two real options - Flanker and Unpurposed - and knowing that I didn't want to be Unpurposed meant that I focused my squad designs around how to present a strong threat with the rest of the squad that would allow the little ETA-Actis to get into a flanking position and wreak havoc with it's uncancellable Autoblaster crits.  With impeccable timing, that pretty much exactly describes the squad that just came 2nd at this weekend's Bespin GSP Qualifier - Autoblaster Shaak Ti and three Delta-7B Jedi Knights who could front up to the enemy and let Shaak get into position!

It's also, on a personal note, helped me to better explain precisely why I hate B-Wings so much.  I've decided it's because they're so poorly cut out for any role other than Jousting that they almost inevitably fall right down to Unpurposed the second that Rebel Beef isn't one of the strongest jousting squads in the metagame.   If B-Wings can't joust they're certainly not Arc-Dodgers, they don't have any Support abilities, their dial is too crappy to be Blockers even if they've got low initiative, and they're so slow that it's hard for them to be Flankers.

B-Wings suck.

// End of detour

JOUSTING & ARC-DODGING - KNOW YOUR ROLE

Having introduced the Flow and we should go about evaluating what roles our ships can play I think I need to spend some more time really explaining what perhaps the three most common, and thus most important, roles actually mean, and maybe some guides for the sort of things you'd need to consider when deciding if that's a role you can play.

Jouster

The term 'jouster' has been with X-Wing pretty much from the game's inception at the start of First Edition, when players would often just fly directly at other and roll a bunch of dice, then K-Turn and do it all over again... repeat until until somebody has lost.  Since then the definition of jousting has become a bit more woolly but the underlying dynamic of deciding whether you can take up the role of a Jouster is actually very simple:

Jouster: a ship that is pursuing of strategy of allowing everyone to roll dice.  They're confident that they have good chance of victory if everybody rolls all their dice every turn.

This is ultimately what makes a jouster into a jouster: it's a mathematical confidence in the probable outcomes of everyone rolling lots of dice if they've got free rein to fire at whatever they like.  It's important to note at this point that any time you invoke the dice in X-Wing you're inviting variance into the game so deciding that you're a jouster is rarely a matter of complete certainty and more about accepting the level of risk that you're exposing yourself to.

Trying to be too complete about how to make this decision is where my writer's block kicked in back in January because it's a subject that becomes incredibly complex incredibly quickly.  To save my sanity I'm not going to take that approach this time, but I'll touch on the sort of factors that might affect a decision to be a jouster or not, and how those factors may change from matchup to matchup, or turn to turn.

• Team Game - I've already mentioned how jousting is usually a team sport, but it's worth underlining that here.  Poe Dameron may have survived a solo run on the First Order's Dreadnaught but it's not something a normal mortal will be able to get away with, so for anything to do with jousting you need to consider what the blocks as a whole will achieve, on both sides.

• Do Some Maths - a lot of people don't like to think about 'Mathwing' but that's really what jousting is all about - the likely mathemetical outcomes of a bunch of probabilities.  If you're not going to try and use maths in this decision then you may as well just base your decision to joust or not on which models weigh the most as they're probably tougher ships.  I'm not suggesting getting our your calculator at the start of every game, but when you're squadbuilding I would recommend using something like the excellent X-Wing Probability Calculator to give yourself some ballpark expectations around when you are the top dog and when you'll need to put your tail between your legs.  Maybe throw some scenarios into the calculator around common opponent squads that may want to joust you and see if your assumptions are right.

• Range Control - a range band can win or lose a game between two jousting squads.  As a general rule of thumb if you're bossing the maths of a joust already - hitting harder, surviving longer, firing earlier - then you probably want to engage as close as possible and maximise that advantage.  But on the flip side if your ships are more vulnerable or have a lower Initiative you'll often do better by engaging at long range initially.  Ships with lots of hull and low agility like it R1, flimsier ships with lots of Agility like getting the extra green dice at R3, especially if the opponent is only flinging 2 red dice.  If you think you can control the range of an engagement that may easily change your decision to accept a joust or not.

• Variance & Risk - there's no line drawn in the sand of X-Wing maths that says "if your odds of success are greater than this you should joust".  Players have different acceptance of the level of variance and risk they're prepared to accept so the tipping point for where one player may go "I think I'm 55/45 to win if we joust, that's good enough for me!" another player may decide that's still too risky.  I think this is tied to looking at the rest of the flow and seeing what other roles are available.  Refusing a 55/45 joust makes a lot more sense when you know you can also operate as an Arc Dodger in the matchup, but if your ships would be dropping all the way down to Unpurposed then maybe 55/45 is good enough.  Hell, maybe even being 45/55 to win is good enough at that point!

• PS-Kill/Alpha - I've touched on this when I talked about how Rey and Boba Fett can often flip into being jousters mid-game once they stand a better chance of PS-killing opponents.  Understanding your odds of getting a whole ship ahead in the game before the opponent can fire is important and it can be a really powerful incentive to joust.  This is the reason the Torkil Mux squads were so successful, for instance.  When you're playing Roshambo there's a really big advantage in getting your shots in first!  But you'll need to check just how likely you are to actually kill one of the enemy ships, because if you leave it hanging around even on just 1 Hull it could be enough to swing the maths against you.

• It's Not A One Night Stand - this is the flipside of the PS-Kill/Alpha question.  If you can't conclusively win a joust in one big flurry of offense then you need to remember that deciding to joust is committing you to multiple turns of engagement.  Make sure you're not going into a joust because the maths say you'll be half a ship ahead after the first round of firing, only to find they also say you'll be a ship behind after the second round. 

• Turrets & Bombs - we tend to think about jousting as being purely a front-arc thing where we fly towards each other blasting lasers, while in the classic 'Three Pillars' theory Turrets and even Bombs were their own pillar.  In modern X-Wing I think Turrets and Bombs really serve to support jousting.  Firstly they make it harder for an Arc Dodger to safely approach you so it's easier to enforce a joust, but secondly having turrets or bombs can make it harder for the opponent to operate in subsequent turns.  If the opponent is having to k-turn without dice mods or split their fire while your turrets can simply turn and keep your dice mods, and all keep focus firing into the best targets, then they're a big factor.  This was a lot of the reason why the Sloane Aggressors squad was/is so powerful - it was hard to avoid the joust, and once you got sucked into close quarters against them they would always have access to the best shots at the best targets.

I've spent a lot more time talking about the decision to joust or not than I will any of the others.  This is both because it's the most complex decision as it's about how multiple ships in your squads will interact with multiple ships in your opponent's squad, but also because it's the most important and the implications of misjudging it can be very difficult to recover from.

Arc Dodger

Having that really clear definition about what a jouster is - somebody who wants to see everyone roll all their dice - may have seemed like an unnecessary step at the time but it really pays back now in making it clear what an Arc Dodger is by comparison. 

Arc Dodger: a ship that is pursuing of strategy of controlling what dice get rolled.  Using positioning on the table to reduce the opponent's ability to roll dice while still rolling as many of their own dice as possible

Often players will have a very clear image in mind of what an Arc Dodger is, and often that image will be a TIE Interceptor or similar small knife-fighting ship that gets in close and looks for gaps in the opponent's arcs to get behind them.  I think we need to expand that mental image to include ships like Firesprays and Millenium Falcons because although they may look very different, and pursue those goals in very different ways - often hanging out on the edge of Range 3 rather than getting in close to win a dogfight - the end strategic goal is the same: control what dice the opponent gets to roll.

So while I'm using the term 'Arc Dodger' and that may conjure up images of boosting and barrel-rolling round behind an opponent at close range I'd like to underline that it's more inclusive than that.  First of all, Arc-Dodging doesn't mean playing exclusively to never get shot, but just to control how many dice are rolled so that they're likely to go in your favour.  So it includes those games where you skirt the edges of R3 so that only some of the opponents ships can fire on you just as much as it does those close and dirty dogfights.

When I was formulating this framework one of the ships that most bothered me was Boba Fett and I discussed how to approach Boba in terms of the framework with several players.  Was he a Jouster, was an Arc Dodger, was he Unpurposed and the onus was on the player to get him into a position where he could be a Jouster?  At different times Boba must have sat in most of the roles as I tried to find a home for him but it was the realisation that even though they were very different the strategic goals of Soontir Fel and Boba Fett were actually identical - to control the dice that were being thrown - and it crystallised a lot of my thoughts.  It was also Boba who made me acutely aware that roles were a game state property because of how he was designed to Arc Dodge until he could Joust.  

Unpurposed

Of all the roles in my Flow the Unpurposed one is the one you're least likely to have heard of.  And it sounds crap doesn't it... who would want to have that label attached to your ship?  You mean my ship is good at nothing?  That stinks!  

I can well understand players being unhappy at the very idea that this 'role' even exists, but I think from a purely dispassionate and strategic point of view - if I can get you there - it's incredibly important to understand that it does exist, and how to react to it.  I don't think anybody sets out to create squads with Unpurposed ships in squadbuilding but I hope by now you've seen that you can't lock your roles in at that point and they'll depend on the matchup you're facing and the game state you're in.  I guarantee you that having Unpurposed ships has happened to you and it'll happen again.

But first of all let's look back at why you wound up in Unpurposed to begin with, to hopefully illustrate that perfectly good ships can find themselves in this position when the matchup isn't right:

You're outgunned.  If you weren't outgunned you'd be a Jouster.  This can happen to anyone - there's always a bigger fish!

You're not cut out to be an Arc Dodger or a Support ship, those roles really need skills and attributes your ships don't have.

You're not really suited to being a Blocker, maybe your initiative is too high or your dial too inflexible.

The rest of your squad doesn't lend itself to letting you work this one ship as a Flanker.

One last time: there's no crime in being an Unpurposed ship or pilot and there's no stigma attached to that label. The 'crime' is not recognising that fact and responding to it appropriately.

Ok so... what's the appropriate way to respond to being Unpurposed?

There's no one answer to this question as it's as matchup-dependent as the reasons why you're Unpurposed to begin with, but the underlying strategic goal is actually very clear.

Unpurposed: a ship that is lacking in effective tools for the current game state thus requiring the player to create an opportunity for it to adopt a role.

That's right - when the ship is Unpurposed is when it's time for us as players to step up to the plate.  That ship can't wade into a fight because it'll melt and it doesn't have the skills to fly rings around the opponent... so it's up to us.  We as players have to be smart, reactive and creative.  We have to improvise with our surroundings on the table and we have to be unexpected with our maneuvers.

If our ships can't shoot their way out of the problem and they can't react to the opponent's maneuvers then we need to make sure that we are deploying them in the right way, with the right plans for how to avoid a direct confrontation and create an engagement that does favour us.  We need to put our ships in the right place on the table with our maneuvers first time, before we've seen where the opponent is going to move.  We're going to try and stretch the enemy's formation out or even break it up entirely so that we adopt a Jousting role against parts of the enemy's squad at a time.

If the enemy has an ace pilot who can hunt our own would-be Arc Dodger then we're going to try and avoid flying our ace into that mismatch, or even to use our would-be Arc Dodger as bait.  Or we may even focus on taking down the enemy's ace pilot, even at great cost to the rest of our squad, knowing that it allows our ship to then function as an Arc Dodger later in the game.

We may have to take bold risks that will change the game state in a meaningful way, which we wouldn't otherwise take.  It's easy to confuse 'good strategy' for 'minimising risks' because they're so often closely related ideas but when you find yourself the underdog those safe plays you're used to making may only serve to deliver the defeat that you're apparently on track to receive.  A big decision to guess what an opponent is going to do, and then to commit everything you've got to the possibility that you're right instead of hedging your bets, may be just what you need to turn a matchup on its head and create the opportunity to steal a role for your ships.

And finally we may, if we have to, we may even have to use the rules of the game or the tournament to our advantage.  We may decide to play for time and threaten going to final salvo in order to force the opponent into making a mistake.  We may decide we need to limit the number of turns that we're fighting in - not by slow playing! - by avoiding the engagement as long as possible and hoping to nip in at the end and sneak just enough points to win.

Nobody plans for their ships to be Unpurposed because it's hard work winning those games!  But it's also the part of the game where the best players really shine because they can turn those matchups around with a clear understanding of what role they're trying to achieve and how they're going to create a game state that lets them adopt that role.

THE END

Trying to write out a comprehensive Strategic Framework for X-Wing nearly broke me, and the result is a lot less comprehensive than I would have liked... but that's in part because I realised the size of the task I'd set myself!

It may not be the strategic 'Bible' I'd hoped to write when I started but I hope I've written at least some amount of sense and helped you to understand the game a little better in the process.  If nothing else, I feel better for having tied up a loose end that I'd left dangling and I can now get on with the rest of my life and write about other stuff without feeling like I was leaving something unfinished.

But there's things that are much more important.  Like the fact that I played X-Wing last week.  For real.  With real people on a real table.  It's been a while.

It's good to be back.