Riding the Star Wars High

Like I said before, the X-Wing miniatures game is pretty cool.  Plus there's a player at work who's picked it up(typically miniature games haven't been popular with the other gamers I work with).

FYI, The Indy Knights are putting on a sort-of-tournament for X-Wing at the South side GP on Saturday.

X-Wing has got me craving all thing Star Wars(except the prequels.  Never Again!).  I read "Choices of One" and "Outboud Flight" by Timothy Zahn, and I'm re-reading Stackpole's X-Wing series.  I also dusted off my old collection of  Star Wars CCG cards.  The good Star Wars CCG; the one printed by Decipher back in the late nineties.

The Star Wars CCG was what got me into gaming.  I saw a commercial for it during afternoon cartoons back when I was in 7th or 8th grade.  I bought it with birthday money, and tried to inflict it on some of my friends.   I'd never played a game like it before, and most of the concepts where difficult for me to pick up at first.  My friends never really got into it.  They liked Star Wars as much as me, but they where strictly in to computer and console games at the time.  I went to a small private grade school, so there wasn't a big pool of potential gamer nerds to draw from.  I continued to collect and build decks over the next few years.  I pretty much only played them against myself.  I didn't really know about the whole FLGS scene, or where to look for tournaments.  I found one other player at the larger, but still private, high school I attended.

In 99 I got my first job at a local Fazoli's.  I met two guys there name Jared and Jason.  They where only a year older than me, and they happened to play Star Wars too.  After that I finally had some regular opponents to play.  They also happened to play this cool miniature game called Warhammer 40,000 at the local game store every weekend.  My bank account has never been the same since.

I really loved playing the Star Wars CCG back in the day.  It was a very cool game, and it competed well with Magic.  So much so that WotC decided to just to buy up the Star Wars license for themselves, leaving Decipher out in the cold.

Surprisingly though, the game is still alive.  Decipher ceded the game to an independent player's committee.  And they have kept the game going by running tournaments and releasing virtual expansions.  The game is not as popular as it once was, but it's doing better than any other OOP CCG I can think of.  Probably better than some in print ones too.

I'm working on building some updated decks.  Hopefully I can find some new people to inflict the game onto.

Hoorah! - New Dust units for early next year

I guess the first take away from this news is that the Axis for dust are getting jet fighters.   Though what's really important is that the Allies get the USMC!  It looks like just heavy weapons teams for now, hopefully they will add a few trooper squads as well.  Can't wait to be able to field some Rangers, British Paras, FFL, and US marines all int the same army.  Epic Win.

BTW, the Dust Warfare tournament last weekend run by Indy40K was really fun.   We didn't have too many show up.  Luckily, I think we hooked a few bystanders into the game.  I kind of got distracted by 6th, Necrons, X-wing, and Kickstarter, but Dust Warfare is a pretty cool game and I hope we can build some more local interest in it.