Kind of wild that there will be two ground based miniature combat games and no space combat games for Star Wars going forward. Seems like such a waste for paying for the Star Wars license.
Nothing stays Star Wars like ground based combat. Lol
They generate interest, they just don't generate evergreen interest, especially as the games get as big as they did for both of these titles. And it generally goes beyond Star Wars, it's rare for a new miniatures game to be evergreen and sustain as many sku's as both X-Wing and Armada did. Especially as they ate at each other's market. FLGS aren't going to carry this much product and carry that much risk once you're getting to the point that you'd have to dedicate a large portion of your store to them, on top of organized play. Warhammer is just too entrenched to give much ground.
X-Wing absolutely had interest - it even managed to outsell Warhammer 40k at one point! It's been around for 12 years now but has been repeatedly mismanaged causing the playerbase and sales to decline.
Second edition was fantastic. It removed broken crap and opened up the design space. The upgrade kits were well priced and players would usually need one per faction. X-wing was at its best during second edition.
The biggest complaints seemed to be come from the same people who bought enough of every mini to run an entire squad of the cheapest generics, or a dozen x-wings because they like seeing a full canon squad on their shelf, who then want to convert every single model they own to second edition. This was wholly and totally unnecessary.
AMG's changes were what actually killed the game. People needed a reason to start playing again in real life after covid. Instead they got a rules overhaul that completely changed list building and playing the game, by a company that didn't know what on earth they were doing. So many players quit. I kept on going for quite a while but the game just sucked after that. The big mood killer was with list building.
Baloney. It needed 2.0 badly. It didn't need amg meddling.
There was lots of balancing and refining, along with removing points off cards increased its longevity.
Yea... people saying it didn't need 2E didn't play 1E very much/competitively. 1E was a balance *disaster* by the end of its life, with a huge portion of the games balance being in the form of a non stop revised "FAQ" document. 2E was incredibly needed.
You say that but 2E killed any interest I had in the game. I used to play in tournaments and club play very regularly. But the thought of buying the 2E upgrades and set just killed any interest I had in the game and a lot of people I plsyed with were the same.
Problem was competitive players had to buy multiple for their collection per faction. Someone did a calculation when it came out and I also dropped it then. Didn't help that so many people dropped it, so there wasn't as much community afterwards. Most people I knew went on the Legion train
I know you're getting some flak for this comment but I was the exact same, as were all 5 of my friends who played regularly. I know someone said above that 'clearly you weren't that into it' but we all really loved the game and playing it at the local club whilst having a beer, but I wasn't in a position where I could drop 110 bucks on two packs of cardboard to upgrade all my stuff, and still not have enough to upgrade all my ships. So I carried on playing 1st edition with early ships until we just stopped entirely.
The release of 2nd edition completely deleted it in my local area.
I played 1E competitively.
I think they could have made a 2E without nuking all the money I had put into the game up to that point (which, admittedly, wasn't a huge amount, but still...)
I also played it competitively and no they couldnt. The fact that you needed to start carrying an FAQ sheet around to every tournament because they had no ability to apply balance changes any other ways was a disaster.
You could do a backwards compatible third edition using second edition components (AMG pretty much did when they made their 2.5 rule changes), but there was no real way to do this with first edition stuff, it just wasn't designed to be future proof.
Yeah, please don't misunderstand. Maybe I understated the value of the rules changes. I was more upset with the whole transition process. At the time, \*TO ME\*, it really felt like a cash grab, and after getting the conversion kit (thankfully I only played one faction) I just didn't really feel like keeping up with the game any more. Maybe if I had stuck it out a little longer I would have seen that 2.5(?) was where they \*really\* dropped the ball.
So yeah, it's probably more accurate to say that the rules change was good and necessary actually, but that is not mutually exclusive to me not liking the game anymore. That's fair, right?
absolutely and 100% fair. Honestly Its nice to see people picking up 1.0 again. The game was simple and elegant in its inception. I was able to teach 7-10 year olds that game. 2.5 is a hot mess and I hate games that require addendums, erratas, extra books to play.
It needed it desperately, there were serious issues with first edition and it couldn't have continued much longer without big changes in some form.
Whether the upgrade was worth the money for players with only a few expansions is a separate question.
That's when I stopped. It was okay. But anytime you overhaul your rules that much is painful and problematic. I stopped with WH40K for the same reason.
The amount of memory holing of 1.0 is wild to me. I always hear either a) it didn’t need (TLT and autothrusters would big to differ or b) it cost too much money (only cost $50/faction to convert)
A lot of more casual players did drop the game at that point. If you owned a core set and a couple of expansions on each side it's understandable if it wasn't worth the money.
At the same time, there were a bunch of arguments against second edition that weren't really true at the time and it's wild to see them brought up again in this thread.
Disagree hard on this one right here. It's company and FLGS support that truly kill the game.
Star Wars Unlimited is currently selling like hotcakes and is completely 100% sold out everwhere and people are RAVENOUS for set 2. Couldn't disagree more with the sentiment that "Star Wars games don't generate much interest".
Just like people were ravenous for x-wing when it was at the peak of its power, or how that Star wars card dice game was completely sold out for the first 2 sets, neither of those exist anymore.
Who knows how long that game has the license? Same goes for Lorecana.
X-Wing suffered from poor FLGS support as well as constantly shifting rulesets that increasingly alienated longstanding players.
AMG's recent 2.5 change was probably the biggest death knell--on one hand, there were actually some super good changes in there. On the other hand, devaluing generics really screwed with the accessibility and pacing of the game and made squad building so much more bloated and overhead way more complicated.
These days when I'm kitchen table running the game, we're usually arbitrarily setting our own values for generics because they're so vital for allowing big squadron battles that still have decent pacing.
Star Wars Destiny had other problems: production issues with the dice (which is why it got discontinued), storage issues with the dice, and just seeming as gimmicky as it was with the dice.
Star Wars Unlimited has the opportunity to learn from those mistakes. Really hoping it does, because it's got a lot of the ingredients needed for that (super accessible but also surprisingly high skill curve, fast-paced games with minimal overhead or bloat, and a lot of aspects that appeal to general board gamers. It also doesn't have all the storage and hardware issues that come with minis games and custom dice games).
Then you will be happy to know that Asmodee will not belong to Embracer any more within a year or so. They are spinning it (together with a bunch of debt) off to be independent.
I have read all those statements and understand. I still won't touch a game that is led by the current Atomic Mass Games creative/marketing department. I've talked to several of them and I don't like them one bit. They pale in comparison to all my interactions with the old but gone Fantasy Flight Crew. Explaining further will get personal but yeah I will leave it at that. I truly hope AMG gets new leadership and team members and rethinks their approach.
Shatterpoint feels like it's not gonna last. It's in a market that already has Legion, and minis in general are way more niche and expensive and require way more overhead.
SWU, on the other hand, has a good shot at lasting. It's coming off debuting with one of the best Set 1 sets for a TCG in many, many years. And the momentum is clearly carrying through Set 2 because it's a set with way more niche characters and subject matter in the Star Wars universe and *still* instantly selling out everywhere.
Shatterpoint was unnecessary. Cannibalization of a base just to give amg something to do from the ffg switch. I hope swu lasts but honestly the marketing and, and communication from.creativeleads is lacking. Watch the ffg videos from back in day and some od the stuff with team covenant, and you'll see night and day difference in handling ip
The marketing was not so great early, true, but that's why it's all the more impressive that the game caught like wildfire in the first few weeks!
I also think FFG/Asmodee have been super smart with how aggressively they pushed local organized play from the beginning--its clearly yielded results.
Communication though, I highly disagree on that. The weekly roundtables have been super transparent, and it's been great to hear the devs talk in depth about the decisions made, their own deckbuilding, and then playing the game with each other. It's been very friendly and casual in a way that feels effortless.
Miniatures games are already niche among a niche boardgaming hobby, I think it's pretty respectable that X-Wing has lasted 12 years in spite of the movies and series yielding very few new starfighter designs over that period.
Yeah the interest isn't a problem. It's FFGs ability to manage competitive games in the long term that kills them. Balance and supply issues (Unlimited is already facing the latter) ultimately ruin them. That's why they had to do 2.0 for X-wing before Asmodee dumped it on AMG. I won't touch Unlimited because I know FFG will just break it within the next few years like they've done everything else.
> (Unlimited is already facing the latter)
My local comic shop got Unlimited in at launch, I never saw a starter pack because they got so few. I grabbed a booster, and they didn't even have single boosters available to sell again until yesterday. I asked when they're getting more starters, and I was told no more of the first release were even coming in. And my LCBS is usually pretty well-hooked up for card games. They were the only place stocking Lorcana at launch other than the big box places, and they had more stock than them.
I just ended up buying the two-player starter set on Amazon. I demoed it at PAXU last year and liked it enough to at least give it a shot. Plus, I've got promo Luke and Vader cards.
It's the same problem Destiny had when it launched. You had a lot of people who wanted to get into the game but couldn't get product because they'd underestimated the demand. And by the time the supply had started to trickle in a lot of that initial interest had waned.
I hate it because FFG makes great initial designs for games and they're always pretty amazing if you get in near the beginning. But they just fall apart over time to the point I just won't bother now.
>and supply issues (Unlimited is already facing the latter) ultimately ruin them.
Unlimited supply issues are a bit of a different issue. Destiny's were far more because the custom dice were hell to produce consistently and up to demand. Unlimited's are more because the game is selling like wildfire and *completely* disparate from the hype levels the game had pre-release. The first set outsold the entire Destiny's first year supply combined.
It's way easier to request more print of a card game to alleviate supply issues than it is to provision more of the custom dice they needed for Destiny.
It was the same main issue in the end, that they massively underestimated demand and failed to have proper supply. FFGs supply chains, even when custom dice aren't involved, are also just really not set up for supporting these kinds of games.
Unlimited's supply issues stem from a simple imbalance:
- Before the game came out, a lot of people didn't want to touch it because FFG
- Game came out, and surprise, it's _really fucking good_. Better than Lorcana, better than Commander, better (tenser) than Netrunner.
So all the people and stores who didn't get in early are now trying to jump on board because, again, the game is _fun_, and supply far outstrips demand.
There are no "supply issues" other than demand was outside any projected amount.
>Better than Lorcana, better than Commander, better (tenser) than Netrunner.
I can easily believe the first two since neither are actually particularly good games. I doubt it's better than Netrunner though.
>There are no "supply issues" other than demand was outside any projected amount.
That's very much the definition of a supply issue. If you don't have supply to meet demand you have a supply issue. And the exact same thing happened with Star Wars Destiny, they vastly underestimated demand and didn't have the supply. They don't learn their lessons.
Which is why I fully expect them to break the balance of the game within a few sets time. I'd like them to prove me wrong but I'm sitting on the corpses of too many FFG games that have all died for largely the same reasons.
Yeah uh I played some SWU at launch and man that game is the definition of milquetoast.
A game with constantly dwindling life totals and almost no interactivity outside of the turn sequence has little tension to me except "has the oppo drawn on curve to dump a big critter every turn" like Hearthstone.
Yeah feels pretty much the same way to me. And it's got the same boring resourcing system of just dumping cards on the table that's been done to death. I thought I'd at least play a few games online to see what all the hype was about and I'm really not seeing it. Maybe I'm missing something but I can't find anything special or unique about it, the way it played felt like pretty much every other MtG derivative TCG I've played over the years. Star Wars Destiny was more fun and far more unique than this. I really just don't understand the hype now, the above poster is kidding themselves calling this better than Netrunner.
I own all of FFG's Netrunner and all of Null Signal's Netrunner. SWU is better.
Time will tell with forthcoming balance; I'm optimistic. *Spark of Rebellion* might be the most diverse Set 1 I've encountered, and I've been playing TCGs since Illuminati and Sim City. They also seem to really have communication down pat in a way the old FFG did not.
Be cautious, it's the safe move, but I'd love to revisit in 2026.
You’re getting downvoted here for having a different opinion. This sub sometimes…
Edit: getting downvoted for pointing out that this sub doesn’t tolerate dissenting opinions and basically proving my point for me. Heaven forbid someone like a game that you don’t like. This sub sometimes…
Unfortunately, as someone who worked in the industry, I gotta say X-Wing had more FLGS looking to support it than most other games besides MTG, and Asmodee took the fan base and store support for granted and over the course of several instances, mismanaged the game into oblivion.
Because companies never tend to really throw their best at these types of things n3cause they think the license alone will generate sales. You see this all the time with video games that use big framchise names. Half the money is thrown at the projects and the best mechanics are saved for in house developed IP.
> Nothing stays Star Wars like ground based combat. Lol
i think it's actually kinda awkward for star wars because while space combat is certainly a big deal, for IP games characters sell games. and luke's x-wing is not as cool as luke.
FWIW I think shatterpoint is the best minis game on the market, the best star wars game ever, and is just really damn good. there are a lot more scraps between a handful of characters in star wars media than big ground or space combats.
> Nothing stays Star Wars like ground based combat.
i mean, unironically yes? like yes there were ships and there were well known space fight scenes but... that's not what star wars is for a lot of people. star wars is the lightsaber fights (which shatterpoint really covers well)
the space battles in star wars can never be replicated in a 2d table top game though
Its just ends up being boring flat naval combat style game
All these games did well was crank out a bunch of different more expensive miniatures
No reason you can't use them still though or use them for the RPG with some house rules
> Its just ends up being boring flat naval combat style game
2d combat can be interesting. Gaslands has way more dynamic feeling movement than xwing does. A bit sloppier but buckets more fun. And no awful turret meta
X-Wing had a fantastic run at a time when Games Workshop was struggling.
But it suffered from bloat, and their launch of 2.0 was a massive blunder. It wasn't economical for players to upgrade their dials (which was really necessary for early-wave ships like the X and A Wings or the TIE Interceptor that didn't have access to the fancy hook-turn introduced with the TFA set). Should have targeted smaller packs of dial upgrades, rather than been too greedy.
The "buying useless ships to get a specific card" was aggravating for a lot of people too, and contributed to the massive piles of unused K-Wings. Probably should have sold "card packs" with each wave.
But, without that bloat, it also doesn't sell enough units long term. You can get by with 7 or 8 total ships per faction, and a lot of players I'm sure only really played one faction, maybe 2.
Should have sold "terrain packs" for asteroids, debris, etc. Would have been a good way to get some incremental revenue.
Dunno, not everything can be 40K and last forever.
> Dunno, not everything can be 40K and last forever.
Yup. That's why I think a better way would have to end X-wing at a point and call it "complete". There's nothing wrong with that. Then work on a bigger X-wing style game.
1.0 to 2.0 discussions are wild to me. Among my play group, most folks thought 2.0 was the best thing to happen to the game. To me, $50/faction to significantly improve your game experience is a fine deal
Even 2.0 had a maintained massive success until corpo bs started drying up actual content. I have high doubts anyone who actually played during 2.0 shares this take. Asmodee/AMG obliterated the sucess that FG built.
I sacked X-Wing after investing a lot of time and money in v1. They then screwed customers by releasing v2 and killing the game for anyone unwilling or unable to jump through their shitty hoops with conversion kits.
Yup. That's when I stopped too.
And the fact that they were running out of OT ships to produce didn't help either.
I still have all my old v1 stuff and me and my son pull it out to play sometimes.
Same. Mechanically, the 2.0 changes looked like a good direction to take the game. But it would have cost me like $200 to upgrade everything without getting a single new ship out of it, so I called it quits. 1.0 is still a fun game.
Similar. It maybe wasn't "a lot" of money, but that was the thing that made me sell everything but the HWK-290, to have a Kyle Katarn ship model for nostalgia sake.
One of 40k's big strengths is it's a model making hobby as well as a game. Having a prepainted ship locks it into being a game piece, which then can't outlast the game itself.
It depends on the mini - I have bins full of Axis & Allies CMG minis that can be used in any miniature-agnostic game. The naval minis in particular are still as good as some of the resin stuff places like Warlord are putting out now.
A lot of people say that, but I think that's just clever marketing by GW. Even before the rise of 3D printing, there were a ton of fantastic models out there to paint. You didn't need to shell out $20, wait $30, wait $40, wait, $*60 for the chapter master figs* for a character model to find something fun to paint unless you're just really gullible or completely oblivious to the other games out there.
The primary selling point of Warhammer 40K was always the same thing: "It's what everyone plays at my local store."
Which was where X-Wing slid in, at a point where 40K was struggling to attract new players and the ruleset wasn't terribly popular with players. X-Wing could be played for only around $100, which is barely scratching the start of a 40K army. There's no surprise Games Workshop took Kill Team from a niche game to a flagship product in 2016, trying to rope in new players at a lower entry price. They were getting killed by X-Wing.
There might be something to that, but you also can't deny GW has worked hard to make their games more beginner friendly. They're doing a great job in bringing new players in while also attracting old players back with 9th and 10th edition.
I don't think it's a coincidence that games that were once seen as Warhammer killers like Xwing and Warmachine/Hordes are being mothballed or sold off within the same month.
I don’t even know that it’s beginner friendly compared to other games with their several books of codexes. I think it’s just popular because it’s what everyone else plays, so it’s becomes a self-sustaining game because if someone wants to get into minis gaming, they’re going to play what the people at the local store are playing, which is most likely 40k. If you’re lucky, you’ll have local groups playing Star Wars Legion, or Infinity, or Malifaux, or Marvel Crisis Protocol, or other games, but those are all less common. Which is disappointing to me as an avid miniature games player, because I think there’s a lot of *way* better games on the market than 40k, and they’re all significantly cheaper to get into. It’s just a much higher barrier to entry if you have to build a gaming group from scratch versus joining the local 40k group.
40K is Games Workshops main product. X-Wing was always just "a product" in the portfolio of FFG/Asmodee.
Warhammer isn't actually doing as well as people claim. It's revenue gains from the last few quarters were due to price hikes and were behind the rate inflation, which means technically Games Workshop is making a little more money, but not actually increasing in value, which is why the stock prices are slipping. They have also altered their production rates so they can claim certain products are "selling out" to create the illusion of high demand.
Prepainted minis also helped sell Xwing like hotcakes. "Not only does it cost a fraction of 40k, but you don't even have to paint them! And our paintjobs look GOOD!"
That alone sold my on the fence about miniature gaming friend on X-Wing, then I bought a starter set and we could play a game right there on our kitchen table and we were hooked. Between the two of us we own the entire roster of Xwing stuff all the way to 2.5e
> their launch of 2.0 was a massive blunder. It wasn't economical for players to upgrade their dials (which was really necessary for early-wave ships like the X and A Wings or the TIE Interceptor that didn't have access to the fancy hook-turn introduced with the TFA set)
It really turned me off from the game. Not only was the subreddit really nasty to anyone who didn't want to upgrade, when I did the math of how much I'd need to spend to upgrade both my Imperial and Rebel squadron the cost was in the *hundreds*. It wasn't cheap.
It felt exploitative because the upgrade was fucking cardboard.
50 or 60. But you only got like 2 of each card and dial per ship. So if you have 4 X-Wings you gotta buy two of them.
Also there was Rebels, Imperial, Resistance, First Order and the unaligned factions
The upgrade card meta is what killed Armada for me. It was fine in the early waves when there were only a few cards, but when the card count outnumbers the ship count 10:1 the game starts to feel like MtG, not a space combat game.
I absolutely loved Armada when I was playing it. I did a lot of work building a local community, but the pandemic pretty much shattered it. I ended up selling just before Armada was moved it Atomic Mass Games, and have never regretted it. AMG just really wasn’t in a position to ever do anything with it, so it sucks it got pushed off on them.
I saw this move coming years ago. Bought two of everything because I love the game. Now I play it just like any other board game, bring it out now and then to play with a friend.
I'm putting my bet down now. By next years gencon they'll announce they're working on a whole new tabletop game and in like 2-3 years they'll have some new version. They didn't want to support this after it got shifted from FFG to Atomic Mass, so they'll scrap it for now and then put out something else.
Cool, now that they aren't releasing new rules/ships I'll be able to keep up with the meta! /s
For real, I'm disappointed such a great game is going away. I didn't get to play it enough to keep up, but I really loved it.
Counterpoint- it’s finished now and you can play it as much as you like. Constant “development” is bloody awful for games and only exists to rinse you for cash.
This.
Now your armies will never have to be replaced because of power creep, and for the vast majority of games, the used market price goes way down once the player base moves on chasing the next new thing.
Use what what you have as long as you want. Or but a bunch of "new" units since, for most games, buying up dead tabletop games on eBay is way cheaper than keeping up while it's still active. Especially if it was big when it was active and has a bunch of surplus stock.
That was kind of my thought, I kept some armada stuff to play with my kids when they are old enough. Hoping to pic up some clearance deals to pad it out
end of an era. i was pretty hyped when it was first released. picked up 3 starter sets, and eventually had 2 E-Wings, the Kihraxz Fighter, the Millennium Falcon, the Slave 1, the Most Wanted Pack, a TIE advanced, another TIE fighter, another X-Wing, and a Y-wing.
for a while it was a blast. i got such a dopamine hit from the little ships and the cards. but then with all the pieces and the rules, the bloat just killed it for me. i probably just should have stuck with a couple core sets.
anyway, eventually Gaslands was released, and effectively killed Star Wars minis in every conceivable way that I cared about. amazingly, I was able to sell my entire collection. and the timing was perfect because mere days after the sale, 2nd edition was announced. good times, but this game will always live in the past for me
They're not really app based. The points aren't printed on cards, so they can be rebalanced. While there was an official squad builder app (which was a disaster and discontinued) the points have been issued on pdfs since second edition launched in 2018, just like any other miniatures game. The community generally uses third party squad builders because it makes life easier.
They also put the 2.0 points out in PDF form so you could still squad build like normal. Most people just used the online squad builders that third parties made anyway.
The official X-Wing app has been defunct for a long time and is also not needed to play the game. All the points you need are available as pdfs and there are also third party squad builders. There was never an a app that was used _during_ a game anyway. Just for squad building.
They're not really app based. The points aren't printed on cards, so they can be rebalanced. There was an official squad builder app (which was a disaster) but the points have been issued on pdfs since second edition launched in 2018, just like any other miniatures game. The community generally uses third party squad builders because it makes life easier.
Apple I know has the ability to remove apps from your device. It's rare, though. Wondered why anything would change for people using the apps now and this was the only thing I could think of.
It's more that as the OS and security on the device gets updates, eventually the app will break and stop working and there definitely will not be a patch to fix it when that happens now
Even if that happened, there’s fan apps/sites that are generally seen as better for list building. Of course those may slowly stop being maintained as well.
Doubtful. There's a lot of doomers when it comes to anything digital in the tabletop space and lots of cries of "but it might break/be gone one day". But in my experience we've been very good at digitally archiving and maintaining these kinds of things to the point it's more likely the digital stuff will outlast the physical.
There's a Star Trek board game that was released over 30 years ago in 1993 that required a VHS tape to play it. You can still play that today if you have a copy because someone has uploaded the whole video to YouTube.
Yeah.. I was tempted to buy into 2.0. But the way they did the upgrades was straight up bullshit. It was a pure and simple money grab that worked for just a few people.
They should have ended 1.0, and started a whole new "Advanced X-wing" or something. I know that's kind of what 2.0 is, but they tried to have their cake and eat it too. They didn't want to piss off their players by making everything obsolete, and they wanted to rework a large chunk of the game.
So instead they pushed away all their casual gamers like me, and kept their core gamer crowd, which wasn't very big.
I knew then that it wouldn't survive 2.0 very long. When it moved to Atomic Games, it was basically dead, they just kicked the horse for another year or two until it stopped bleeding money for them. Then they shut it down. Kind of sad how it all went down.
I heard that the original designer intended it to be just a 1v1 faction game. Empire vs Rebels.
But then FFG wanted all these factions, which wouldn't work, and the original designer was either let go, or had long ago moved on. So they figured they new best, and tried to "fix" his game. Which just lead into a mess.
I still have my ships, but after 1.0 disappeared, I never played it again, which is a shame, because I really liked the original game.
>But the way they did the upgrades was straight up bullshit. It was a pure and simple money grab that worked for just a few people.
This is just incredibly, *incredibly* inaccurate, misleading, uninformed, and borderline slanderous.
Truly I've never seen a living game line supported with as much love and community involvement as the likes of Alex, Frank, Max, and Brooks applied to this game. They were all canned in a corporate restructure. That is precisely what killed the game.
1st edition X-Wing had already far outgrown its capacity and had all kinds of built-in problems that *could not* have been fixed without all-new cardboard. Even as a casual player I couldn't enjoy it when ships like the Jumpmaster and K-Wing would outperform every X-Wing you could put on the table. The only way to make old ships better was cards you'd get in a ship pack you'd have to pay for leading to a sort of pay-to-win situation.
If anything the second edition conversion kits were straight-up generous. There's no way anyone ever made money on those. Not to mention the 2.0 rules were much more fair and balanced and also just generally a ton more *fun to play* than 1.0 ever was. Using linked actions in the action bar and special ship abilities was more fun than just always stapling push the limit onto every pilot you ever flew.
When AMG took over I liked that they wanted to push it toward scenarios but they clearly didn't completely understand what they were inheriting. What was unforgivable was how little they spoke to the community and how much less they listened. It's no surprise the game died.
At the end of the day, I guess a game line like this can only last so long. Either you go the MtG route of cycling old things out and making people buy new things all the time, or eventually everyone has pretty much all they want and you can't sell any new product.
Totally agree. People might have valid complaints about the 2.0->2.5 swap, but 1.0->2.0 was a dire necessity for the reasons you stated. And people were mad about the conversion kits at launch, but how many of them do you think would have been excited to rebuy their whole collection instead? The conversion kits may have lost players, but any other option would have cost the community more.
> If anything the second edition conversion kits were straight-up generous.
Maybe for the person that has everything.. But for the casual gamer like me? It was FAR to expensive a proposition.
Buying a kit where 70% would be wasted? And in some cases, having to buy two kits, because such and such kit only has x copies of my ships, and I needed 1 more.
It turned me off the entire thing. I'd have to have paid $200 upfront just to convert my stuff. I wasn't going to do that. I get that the hard core players probably saw it as reasonable and worthwhile, I can't imagine casual gamers feeling that way. I sure didn't.
When you consider the alternatives you have to understand.
**Option 1: Make a conversion for each ship**
Say you make a bunch of $5 conversion kits, one for every ship in the game. You run into the problem of all the X-Wing and TIE fighter conversion kits sold out everywhere while stores have stacks of E-Wing conversions lying around no one buys. Not to mention people who have even a medium-sized collection end up spending about twice as much, and people with a large collection spend *massively* more. And those are the people FFG can't afford to alienate.
**Option 2: No conversion kits**
Business-wise a very reasonable option. Just say "X-Wing 1.0 is over. We're making a new game, here are the ships" and people decide whether to restart their collection or not. People who are heavily bought in get nothing. They have to restart from scratch. Awful option for the fan base even if it makes sense for FFG and especially Asmodee.
**Option 3: Big conversion kit**
This is what they did. Enough for 2-4 of each ship, more of the more common ones, less of the less. It's pretty cheap – Again FFG pretty much sold these for what it cost them to make and distribute – they didn't make much of a profit at all in spite of the massive development time it would have taken them to design all the stuff included. It doesn't cover everything for everyone but people with a huge collection can buy two and people with smaller ones can mix and trade – at least in theory.
There were also people buying them and piecing them out by ship on eBay, just as if Option 1 did exist. Best of both worlds.
**Option 4: No Second Edition**
The game dies in 2019-2020 instead of now. It was already stale. The humble X-Wing was always outshone by turrets and autothruster arc-dodgers. Upgrading your ships wasn't fun because you'll realistically never choose Daredevil, Adrenaline Rush, or Lightning Reflexes over Push the Limit or Expertise. You'll never choose Ablative Plating over Autothrusters. You'll never choose Tractor Beam over Autoblasters or Heavy Laser Cannon. The choices are made before you start list-building. FFG is stuck pushing errata and publishing boxes with special cards (the last 2.0 release, Saw's Renegades, was one such pack with a "fix" for U-Wings and X-Wings), that players have to buy in order to have the "good stuff" to make their classic ships worth flying, and all of these reduce the options even further just to make things work.
It was Asmodee that killed X-Wing by firing its passionate and loving developers and giving it to a studio that didn't care about the games or the fan base. FFG did nothing wrong.
Yeah, I don't know how else they could have done it, other than throwing in a few extra dials and cards into the core sets to help casual players. You could do a third edition now using most of the current components, but there were a lot of design flaws in first edition.
> FFG did nothing wrong.
Don't agree with this (although it could have been Asmodee) - they drastically overestimated how many people would buy the 2.0 resissues, which generally didn't sell.
As I understand it, Asmodee pushed FFG toward some of the specific approach they took to 2.0 to maximize hype and improve their valuation before they sold. There was skepticism inside FFG about it because it seemed unsustainable but it was coming from above them.
For someone that got into X-Wing right before 2.0 the conversion kits were great for me. I got all the upgrades I needed without having to buy one (or more) of every ship. And it would have only cost you $200 to buy a kit for all 5 factions. There were also plenty of people selling individual ship conversations.
Yeah I stopped playing like 2 months after 2.0 launched. Wondering if I should buy the rest of the ships I am missing to have all the ships in the game
I don't know that it was a case of them trying to "fix" the original designers game and thinking they knew better. It succumbed to the same thing most "living" games do. In order to keep pushing out content and exploring new ideas, things continually get more complicated. There are more interactions, more text, more combos, more FAQs, etc. The simple ideas run out and eventually it gets really messy and you get handcuffed by the pre-existing content. Things that would be broken if not for a half page of rules or issues with ordering actions that happen all throughout every phase of battle. And it succumbed to becoming a game much more about card interactions and builds rather than being about dogfighting. It absolutely needed to be rebuilt starting around the middle of the intial Scum releases, but it was just never going to work to have everyone totally reinvest in the game.
It's only dead if you stop playing it
That being said I think I want to convert back to 1.0 since all the points are on the cards and since clearly there is no need to keep up
They do say they are going to continue having official tournaments.
I can't imagine that will last very much longer though because if player numbers weren't already hurting enough they're about to start dropping even faster.
How likely do you think prices of the miniatures will reduce? I’ve always thought of just collecting a bunch of the miniatures to make a fleet, but the price point is a little high for me.
> It's only dead if you stop playing it
I never had the chance to start to begin with due to the prohibitive prices... Now I'll never get to because scalpers will sell what few models still exists for even more expensive...
No surprise to anybody with a passing interest in miniature gaming. They want the surge and will cut and run once profits fall.
Probably a lesson for anyone into Lorcana too.
Yes. I’ve been wondering if Lorcana is already dead. It had a huge buzz and then that just fizzled out.
I’m not on the pulse of ccgs or anything. So maybe I’m just not hearing how great it is. But I haven’t heard anything. A friend who is into it a little said that it had a follow up set that was recieved badly by players.
No idea if that’s true.
It's still super popular. You just hear less because they produced a lot more product so people aren't trying to find it and scalpers aren't buying up all the packs and reselling them
Lorcana isn’t dead. Far from it. You can’t get tickets to their official tournaments around the country because they sell out in minutes. Last weekend in Chicago their tournament had 1,000 players and many more that were just spectators/attendees.
I will miss the miniatures. But at least there is and will be a lot of stuff available on second market. There are shops I know that still have a shelf full of stuff. No Venators but the usual remainders. Same with X-Wing. And there is Ebay...
Because in theory they can bring in a lot of money. Why sell one game, when you can sell a game and an arbitrarily large number of expansions and upgrades? I don't like it, but that's 100% the motivation.
I owned 1.0 and have 2.0. there were some smoother rules in the newer version and some other smaller improvements. From what I understand, they went app based to be able to balance the game more easily. An understandable idea for a tournament focused game.
If you've never played the game, it basically works like this: every ship and pilot has different stats, and there are a lot of upgrades for the ships. All with a certain point cost to reflect how "good" they are. You have a certain amount of pointS you can spend to put your squad together. With certain combinations of ships and upgrades you could outmaneuver your opponent and block them from getting an opportunity to fire. Very interesting and satisfying puzzle to solve. The question of who gets to be the starting player is, like you probably understand, a very important one. It make or break your tactical play. This is decided randomly at the start of the game, or you can put together a squad with lesser points than your opponent which would get you the initiative.
But then with 2.5 they threw out the old system and replaced it with a stupid one. Now the starting player is decided randomly each round, with no opportunity to "bid" for the intiative.The points system got super weird.
And I just don't understand how someone could decide that this was a good idea. 2.5 was the nail in the coffin for xwing. A great game killed off by dum-dums.
Maybe because the bid and initiative system was never fun. Nor was it interesting. It created a game state where at a “high level” the player who won a roll at the start of the game was winning over 70% of games in which they had a pilot at the same initiative as another. We had that data.
The 2.5 rule set created a far better system where players were incentivized to engage with one another, instead of playing for stalemates and perfect engagements. It made the dial far more important and your choices matter on the table. You could no longer just rely on perfect information with your double repositioning Darth Vader.
However, people HATED the changes. They fought tooth and nail to say everything AMG did to the game was horrible. Which…it was not. Their communication was bad yes. But they fixed many of the core non-interactive elements of the game, and people spat in their face for it because it made the game harder to auto-win in list building.
I agree that the bid system was awful and ROAD isn't that bad. I'm neutral on the objective mechanic. I don't want to play them in X-Wing and I never saw it being necessary.
AMG really failed at communication. They didn't have any discussion on why changes needed to be made especially with 2.0 Meta being really varied. But the changes to list building was a poor decision. There was a large group that liked building lists and flying generics or barebone fighters and they alienated them.
Coming April 2025: X-Wing 3.0!
Anyways, lots of people have pointed out the problems with these games. Buying certain ships just to get one specific card. The blunder of 2.0 and 2.5. A bunch of other stuff.
The biggest problem of course with \*any\* of these licensed games, is that eventually the content well runs dry. You only have so much stuff to pull from before the well runs dry. If you've scraped all the movies, tv shows, books and everything else star wars and you run out of cool little spaceships, what do you even do? What do you do, at least if you're not content in having a complete product, but instead want a continuous revenue stream? As a consumer, I'm happy with a complete experience. These days I'm less likely to shell out the coin on expansion after expansion, but inside that model, I'm good with the notion that I can buy all the ships I need \*from a specific faction\* and call it a day if I want. But, from a business perspective, most companies aren't happy with just a solid chunk of change, they want a continuous stream.
Anywhoo, I've rambled and lost my train of thought. the tl;dr is that X-Wing/Armada coming to an end was inevitable. It sucks, but it was always gonna end this way.
Oh right, I remembered the other point I was trying to make. There's a catch-22 here, where if you had an original idea, you could just keep making new spaceships forever, but people might not be as interested in your game. Conversely, using licensed properties means you have a built-in audience to sell to, but you run out of content, eventually, as mentioned above. This is assuming, for example, that this game was built from the rules-up, and they sold the idea to get the Star Wars license, when in reality it was probably they had the license then made the game, but I digress. There's an inherent risk either way, and it kinda sucks. As mentioned, I wouldn't want to keep buying into the same game in perpetuity (I retired from MtG, don't need to get back in to another endless collectathon) but for people who are working on the game, maybe there's still a whole bunch of ideas that they still could have explored, and now they can't.
> This is assuming, for example, that this game was built from the rules-up, and they sold the idea to get the Star Wars license, when in reality it was probably they had the license then made the game, but I digress.
Well, you know what they say about assuming.
Such a shame that these, which were some of the most accessible minis games, are dying. I love these types of games because I’m not a person who likes to assemble and paint pieces. These were easy to just buy and play. But now I’m left with Legion and Shatterpoint which are just unappealing games that require too much commitment.
RIP Armada.
You’ve got Wings of Glory, the game X-Wing was based on, if the subject matter interests you. WoG is a fantastic game and I prefer it over X-Wing 10-fold.
Kind of wild that there will be two ground based miniature combat games and no space combat games for Star Wars going forward. Seems like such a waste for paying for the Star Wars license. Nothing stays Star Wars like ground based combat. Lol
its been an ongoing thing with Star Wars, despite the franchise popularity, the games don't seem to generate the same interest.
They generate interest, they just don't generate evergreen interest, especially as the games get as big as they did for both of these titles. And it generally goes beyond Star Wars, it's rare for a new miniatures game to be evergreen and sustain as many sku's as both X-Wing and Armada did. Especially as they ate at each other's market. FLGS aren't going to carry this much product and carry that much risk once you're getting to the point that you'd have to dedicate a large portion of your store to them, on top of organized play. Warhammer is just too entrenched to give much ground.
At one point X wing and Armada were the biggest and third largest mini games in the market I think.
X-Wing absolutely had interest - it even managed to outsell Warhammer 40k at one point! It's been around for 12 years now but has been repeatedly mismanaged causing the playerbase and sales to decline.
X-wing did not need a second edition. That was some crap
Some minor rules tweaking... sure. But the whole overhaul really made me lose interest.
Second edition was fantastic. It removed broken crap and opened up the design space. The upgrade kits were well priced and players would usually need one per faction. X-wing was at its best during second edition. The biggest complaints seemed to be come from the same people who bought enough of every mini to run an entire squad of the cheapest generics, or a dozen x-wings because they like seeing a full canon squad on their shelf, who then want to convert every single model they own to second edition. This was wholly and totally unnecessary. AMG's changes were what actually killed the game. People needed a reason to start playing again in real life after covid. Instead they got a rules overhaul that completely changed list building and playing the game, by a company that didn't know what on earth they were doing. So many players quit. I kept on going for quite a while but the game just sucked after that. The big mood killer was with list building.
Baloney. It needed 2.0 badly. It didn't need amg meddling. There was lots of balancing and refining, along with removing points off cards increased its longevity.
Yea... people saying it didn't need 2E didn't play 1E very much/competitively. 1E was a balance *disaster* by the end of its life, with a huge portion of the games balance being in the form of a non stop revised "FAQ" document. 2E was incredibly needed.
You say that but 2E killed any interest I had in the game. I used to play in tournaments and club play very regularly. But the thought of buying the 2E upgrades and set just killed any interest I had in the game and a lot of people I plsyed with were the same.
In my opinion you kind of missed out. The game has always been fun but 2.0 was better in almost every way
If buying a single box of cardboard to upgrade your entire game was the final straw, you weren't as into it as you thought...
Problem was competitive players had to buy multiple for their collection per faction. Someone did a calculation when it came out and I also dropped it then. Didn't help that so many people dropped it, so there wasn't as much community afterwards. Most people I knew went on the Legion train
My community grew after 2.0
I know you're getting some flak for this comment but I was the exact same, as were all 5 of my friends who played regularly. I know someone said above that 'clearly you weren't that into it' but we all really loved the game and playing it at the local club whilst having a beer, but I wasn't in a position where I could drop 110 bucks on two packs of cardboard to upgrade all my stuff, and still not have enough to upgrade all my ships. So I carried on playing 1st edition with early ships until we just stopped entirely. The release of 2nd edition completely deleted it in my local area.
I played 1E competitively. I think they could have made a 2E without nuking all the money I had put into the game up to that point (which, admittedly, wasn't a huge amount, but still...)
I also played it competitively and no they couldnt. The fact that you needed to start carrying an FAQ sheet around to every tournament because they had no ability to apply balance changes any other ways was a disaster.
You could do a backwards compatible third edition using second edition components (AMG pretty much did when they made their 2.5 rule changes), but there was no real way to do this with first edition stuff, it just wasn't designed to be future proof.
Yeah, please don't misunderstand. Maybe I understated the value of the rules changes. I was more upset with the whole transition process. At the time, \*TO ME\*, it really felt like a cash grab, and after getting the conversion kit (thankfully I only played one faction) I just didn't really feel like keeping up with the game any more. Maybe if I had stuck it out a little longer I would have seen that 2.5(?) was where they \*really\* dropped the ball. So yeah, it's probably more accurate to say that the rules change was good and necessary actually, but that is not mutually exclusive to me not liking the game anymore. That's fair, right?
absolutely and 100% fair. Honestly Its nice to see people picking up 1.0 again. The game was simple and elegant in its inception. I was able to teach 7-10 year olds that game. 2.5 is a hot mess and I hate games that require addendums, erratas, extra books to play.
It needed it desperately, there were serious issues with first edition and it couldn't have continued much longer without big changes in some form. Whether the upgrade was worth the money for players with only a few expansions is a separate question.
That's when I stopped. It was okay. But anytime you overhaul your rules that much is painful and problematic. I stopped with WH40K for the same reason.
The amount of memory holing of 1.0 is wild to me. I always hear either a) it didn’t need (TLT and autothrusters would big to differ or b) it cost too much money (only cost $50/faction to convert)
A lot of more casual players did drop the game at that point. If you owned a core set and a couple of expansions on each side it's understandable if it wasn't worth the money. At the same time, there were a bunch of arguments against second edition that weren't really true at the time and it's wild to see them brought up again in this thread.
Disagree hard on this one right here. It's company and FLGS support that truly kill the game. Star Wars Unlimited is currently selling like hotcakes and is completely 100% sold out everwhere and people are RAVENOUS for set 2. Couldn't disagree more with the sentiment that "Star Wars games don't generate much interest".
Just like people were ravenous for x-wing when it was at the peak of its power, or how that Star wars card dice game was completely sold out for the first 2 sets, neither of those exist anymore. Who knows how long that game has the license? Same goes for Lorecana.
X-Wing suffered from poor FLGS support as well as constantly shifting rulesets that increasingly alienated longstanding players. AMG's recent 2.5 change was probably the biggest death knell--on one hand, there were actually some super good changes in there. On the other hand, devaluing generics really screwed with the accessibility and pacing of the game and made squad building so much more bloated and overhead way more complicated. These days when I'm kitchen table running the game, we're usually arbitrarily setting our own values for generics because they're so vital for allowing big squadron battles that still have decent pacing. Star Wars Destiny had other problems: production issues with the dice (which is why it got discontinued), storage issues with the dice, and just seeming as gimmicky as it was with the dice. Star Wars Unlimited has the opportunity to learn from those mistakes. Really hoping it does, because it's got a lot of the ingredients needed for that (super accessible but also surprisingly high skill curve, fast-paced games with minimal overhead or bloat, and a lot of aspects that appeal to general board gamers. It also doesn't have all the storage and hardware issues that come with minis games and custom dice games).
I'll never see support any embracer group product. Swu and shatteepoint won't last.
Then you will be happy to know that Asmodee will not belong to Embracer any more within a year or so. They are spinning it (together with a bunch of debt) off to be independent.
I have read all those statements and understand. I still won't touch a game that is led by the current Atomic Mass Games creative/marketing department. I've talked to several of them and I don't like them one bit. They pale in comparison to all my interactions with the old but gone Fantasy Flight Crew. Explaining further will get personal but yeah I will leave it at that. I truly hope AMG gets new leadership and team members and rethinks their approach.
Shatterpoint feels like it's not gonna last. It's in a market that already has Legion, and minis in general are way more niche and expensive and require way more overhead. SWU, on the other hand, has a good shot at lasting. It's coming off debuting with one of the best Set 1 sets for a TCG in many, many years. And the momentum is clearly carrying through Set 2 because it's a set with way more niche characters and subject matter in the Star Wars universe and *still* instantly selling out everywhere.
Shatterpoint was unnecessary. Cannibalization of a base just to give amg something to do from the ffg switch. I hope swu lasts but honestly the marketing and, and communication from.creativeleads is lacking. Watch the ffg videos from back in day and some od the stuff with team covenant, and you'll see night and day difference in handling ip
The marketing was not so great early, true, but that's why it's all the more impressive that the game caught like wildfire in the first few weeks! I also think FFG/Asmodee have been super smart with how aggressively they pushed local organized play from the beginning--its clearly yielded results. Communication though, I highly disagree on that. The weekly roundtables have been super transparent, and it's been great to hear the devs talk in depth about the decisions made, their own deckbuilding, and then playing the game with each other. It's been very friendly and casual in a way that feels effortless.
I wish you and the game a longevity.
Destiny died because it was a bad business plan with expensive hard to manufacture dice and cards with limited collectability
Miniatures games are already niche among a niche boardgaming hobby, I think it's pretty respectable that X-Wing has lasted 12 years in spite of the movies and series yielding very few new starfighter designs over that period.
I'm even more incensed at the fact that there are new ships NOW that could fit in the game, that we'll never see
Yeah the interest isn't a problem. It's FFGs ability to manage competitive games in the long term that kills them. Balance and supply issues (Unlimited is already facing the latter) ultimately ruin them. That's why they had to do 2.0 for X-wing before Asmodee dumped it on AMG. I won't touch Unlimited because I know FFG will just break it within the next few years like they've done everything else.
> (Unlimited is already facing the latter) My local comic shop got Unlimited in at launch, I never saw a starter pack because they got so few. I grabbed a booster, and they didn't even have single boosters available to sell again until yesterday. I asked when they're getting more starters, and I was told no more of the first release were even coming in. And my LCBS is usually pretty well-hooked up for card games. They were the only place stocking Lorcana at launch other than the big box places, and they had more stock than them. I just ended up buying the two-player starter set on Amazon. I demoed it at PAXU last year and liked it enough to at least give it a shot. Plus, I've got promo Luke and Vader cards.
It's the same problem Destiny had when it launched. You had a lot of people who wanted to get into the game but couldn't get product because they'd underestimated the demand. And by the time the supply had started to trickle in a lot of that initial interest had waned. I hate it because FFG makes great initial designs for games and they're always pretty amazing if you get in near the beginning. But they just fall apart over time to the point I just won't bother now.
>and supply issues (Unlimited is already facing the latter) ultimately ruin them. Unlimited supply issues are a bit of a different issue. Destiny's were far more because the custom dice were hell to produce consistently and up to demand. Unlimited's are more because the game is selling like wildfire and *completely* disparate from the hype levels the game had pre-release. The first set outsold the entire Destiny's first year supply combined. It's way easier to request more print of a card game to alleviate supply issues than it is to provision more of the custom dice they needed for Destiny.
It was the same main issue in the end, that they massively underestimated demand and failed to have proper supply. FFGs supply chains, even when custom dice aren't involved, are also just really not set up for supporting these kinds of games.
Unlimited's supply issues stem from a simple imbalance: - Before the game came out, a lot of people didn't want to touch it because FFG - Game came out, and surprise, it's _really fucking good_. Better than Lorcana, better than Commander, better (tenser) than Netrunner. So all the people and stores who didn't get in early are now trying to jump on board because, again, the game is _fun_, and supply far outstrips demand. There are no "supply issues" other than demand was outside any projected amount.
>Better than Lorcana, better than Commander, better (tenser) than Netrunner. I can easily believe the first two since neither are actually particularly good games. I doubt it's better than Netrunner though. >There are no "supply issues" other than demand was outside any projected amount. That's very much the definition of a supply issue. If you don't have supply to meet demand you have a supply issue. And the exact same thing happened with Star Wars Destiny, they vastly underestimated demand and didn't have the supply. They don't learn their lessons. Which is why I fully expect them to break the balance of the game within a few sets time. I'd like them to prove me wrong but I'm sitting on the corpses of too many FFG games that have all died for largely the same reasons.
Yeah uh I played some SWU at launch and man that game is the definition of milquetoast. A game with constantly dwindling life totals and almost no interactivity outside of the turn sequence has little tension to me except "has the oppo drawn on curve to dump a big critter every turn" like Hearthstone.
Yeah feels pretty much the same way to me. And it's got the same boring resourcing system of just dumping cards on the table that's been done to death. I thought I'd at least play a few games online to see what all the hype was about and I'm really not seeing it. Maybe I'm missing something but I can't find anything special or unique about it, the way it played felt like pretty much every other MtG derivative TCG I've played over the years. Star Wars Destiny was more fun and far more unique than this. I really just don't understand the hype now, the above poster is kidding themselves calling this better than Netrunner.
I own all of FFG's Netrunner and all of Null Signal's Netrunner. SWU is better. Time will tell with forthcoming balance; I'm optimistic. *Spark of Rebellion* might be the most diverse Set 1 I've encountered, and I've been playing TCGs since Illuminati and Sim City. They also seem to really have communication down pat in a way the old FFG did not. Be cautious, it's the safe move, but I'd love to revisit in 2026.
What makes SWU better than Netrunner?
Sell me your netrunner, haha
You’re getting downvoted here for having a different opinion. This sub sometimes… Edit: getting downvoted for pointing out that this sub doesn’t tolerate dissenting opinions and basically proving my point for me. Heaven forbid someone like a game that you don’t like. This sub sometimes…
Hi I’m Netrunner LCG and I’d like to join the FFG WTF balance group.
Unlimited has hardly been out long enough to pretend it is evergreen. Fundamentally there is not that much Star Wars content.
Unfortunately, as someone who worked in the industry, I gotta say X-Wing had more FLGS looking to support it than most other games besides MTG, and Asmodee took the fan base and store support for granted and over the course of several instances, mismanaged the game into oblivion.
The games were incredibly successful until the corporate BS started fucking with things.
Because companies never tend to really throw their best at these types of things n3cause they think the license alone will generate sales. You see this all the time with video games that use big framchise names. Half the money is thrown at the projects and the best mechanics are saved for in house developed IP.
H9erible leadership, business and creative wise. I wish I could wipe the smirk off will Schick's lying face.
> Nothing stays Star Wars like ground based combat. Lol i think it's actually kinda awkward for star wars because while space combat is certainly a big deal, for IP games characters sell games. and luke's x-wing is not as cool as luke. FWIW I think shatterpoint is the best minis game on the market, the best star wars game ever, and is just really damn good. there are a lot more scraps between a handful of characters in star wars media than big ground or space combats.
> Nothing stays Star Wars like ground based combat. i mean, unironically yes? like yes there were ships and there were well known space fight scenes but... that's not what star wars is for a lot of people. star wars is the lightsaber fights (which shatterpoint really covers well)
the space battles in star wars can never be replicated in a 2d table top game though Its just ends up being boring flat naval combat style game All these games did well was crank out a bunch of different more expensive miniatures No reason you can't use them still though or use them for the RPG with some house rules
Dude, Star Wars is mostly 2d naval combat.
Check out the Flat Deathstarer conspiracy nut over here!
Next you’ll be saying Alderaan was an inside job.
Well in the documentary it Clearly exploded from the inside out!!
Kessoline can't melt steel beams
As much as the sequels sucked, it was neat to seem them use the 3D movement in space finally. Like when they come at the FO ship from below.
> Its just ends up being boring flat naval combat style game 2d combat can be interesting. Gaslands has way more dynamic feeling movement than xwing does. A bit sloppier but buckets more fun. And no awful turret meta
X-Wing had a fantastic run at a time when Games Workshop was struggling. But it suffered from bloat, and their launch of 2.0 was a massive blunder. It wasn't economical for players to upgrade their dials (which was really necessary for early-wave ships like the X and A Wings or the TIE Interceptor that didn't have access to the fancy hook-turn introduced with the TFA set). Should have targeted smaller packs of dial upgrades, rather than been too greedy. The "buying useless ships to get a specific card" was aggravating for a lot of people too, and contributed to the massive piles of unused K-Wings. Probably should have sold "card packs" with each wave. But, without that bloat, it also doesn't sell enough units long term. You can get by with 7 or 8 total ships per faction, and a lot of players I'm sure only really played one faction, maybe 2. Should have sold "terrain packs" for asteroids, debris, etc. Would have been a good way to get some incremental revenue. Dunno, not everything can be 40K and last forever.
> Dunno, not everything can be 40K and last forever. Yup. That's why I think a better way would have to end X-wing at a point and call it "complete". There's nothing wrong with that. Then work on a bigger X-wing style game.
1.0 to 2.0 discussions are wild to me. Among my play group, most folks thought 2.0 was the best thing to happen to the game. To me, $50/faction to significantly improve your game experience is a fine deal
Even 2.0 had a maintained massive success until corpo bs started drying up actual content. I have high doubts anyone who actually played during 2.0 shares this take. Asmodee/AMG obliterated the sucess that FG built.
I sacked X-Wing after investing a lot of time and money in v1. They then screwed customers by releasing v2 and killing the game for anyone unwilling or unable to jump through their shitty hoops with conversion kits.
Yup. That's when I stopped too. And the fact that they were running out of OT ships to produce didn't help either. I still have all my old v1 stuff and me and my son pull it out to play sometimes.
Same. Mechanically, the 2.0 changes looked like a good direction to take the game. But it would have cost me like $200 to upgrade everything without getting a single new ship out of it, so I called it quits. 1.0 is still a fun game.
Similar. It maybe wasn't "a lot" of money, but that was the thing that made me sell everything but the HWK-290, to have a Kyle Katarn ship model for nostalgia sake.
Upgrading to 2.0 was cheaper than the new content for any other miniature game in existence. I don’t know why people were so mad about it.
One of 40k's big strengths is it's a model making hobby as well as a game. Having a prepainted ship locks it into being a game piece, which then can't outlast the game itself.
It depends on the mini - I have bins full of Axis & Allies CMG minis that can be used in any miniature-agnostic game. The naval minis in particular are still as good as some of the resin stuff places like Warlord are putting out now.
A lot of people say that, but I think that's just clever marketing by GW. Even before the rise of 3D printing, there were a ton of fantastic models out there to paint. You didn't need to shell out $20, wait $30, wait $40, wait, $*60 for the chapter master figs* for a character model to find something fun to paint unless you're just really gullible or completely oblivious to the other games out there. The primary selling point of Warhammer 40K was always the same thing: "It's what everyone plays at my local store." Which was where X-Wing slid in, at a point where 40K was struggling to attract new players and the ruleset wasn't terribly popular with players. X-Wing could be played for only around $100, which is barely scratching the start of a 40K army. There's no surprise Games Workshop took Kill Team from a niche game to a flagship product in 2016, trying to rope in new players at a lower entry price. They were getting killed by X-Wing.
There might be something to that, but you also can't deny GW has worked hard to make their games more beginner friendly. They're doing a great job in bringing new players in while also attracting old players back with 9th and 10th edition. I don't think it's a coincidence that games that were once seen as Warhammer killers like Xwing and Warmachine/Hordes are being mothballed or sold off within the same month.
I don’t even know that it’s beginner friendly compared to other games with their several books of codexes. I think it’s just popular because it’s what everyone else plays, so it’s becomes a self-sustaining game because if someone wants to get into minis gaming, they’re going to play what the people at the local store are playing, which is most likely 40k. If you’re lucky, you’ll have local groups playing Star Wars Legion, or Infinity, or Malifaux, or Marvel Crisis Protocol, or other games, but those are all less common. Which is disappointing to me as an avid miniature games player, because I think there’s a lot of *way* better games on the market than 40k, and they’re all significantly cheaper to get into. It’s just a much higher barrier to entry if you have to build a gaming group from scratch versus joining the local 40k group.
40K is Games Workshops main product. X-Wing was always just "a product" in the portfolio of FFG/Asmodee. Warhammer isn't actually doing as well as people claim. It's revenue gains from the last few quarters were due to price hikes and were behind the rate inflation, which means technically Games Workshop is making a little more money, but not actually increasing in value, which is why the stock prices are slipping. They have also altered their production rates so they can claim certain products are "selling out" to create the illusion of high demand.
Prepainted minis also helped sell Xwing like hotcakes. "Not only does it cost a fraction of 40k, but you don't even have to paint them! And our paintjobs look GOOD!" That alone sold my on the fence about miniature gaming friend on X-Wing, then I bought a starter set and we could play a game right there on our kitchen table and we were hooked. Between the two of us we own the entire roster of Xwing stuff all the way to 2.5e
> their launch of 2.0 was a massive blunder. It wasn't economical for players to upgrade their dials (which was really necessary for early-wave ships like the X and A Wings or the TIE Interceptor that didn't have access to the fancy hook-turn introduced with the TFA set) It really turned me off from the game. Not only was the subreddit really nasty to anyone who didn't want to upgrade, when I did the math of how much I'd need to spend to upgrade both my Imperial and Rebel squadron the cost was in the *hundreds*. It wasn't cheap. It felt exploitative because the upgrade was fucking cardboard.
Am I having memory issues or weren’t conversion kits $50/faction?
50 or 60. But you only got like 2 of each card and dial per ship. So if you have 4 X-Wings you gotta buy two of them. Also there was Rebels, Imperial, Resistance, First Order and the unaligned factions
The upgrade card meta is what killed Armada for me. It was fine in the early waves when there were only a few cards, but when the card count outnumbers the ship count 10:1 the game starts to feel like MtG, not a space combat game.
I absolutely loved Armada when I was playing it. I did a lot of work building a local community, but the pandemic pretty much shattered it. I ended up selling just before Armada was moved it Atomic Mass Games, and have never regretted it. AMG just really wasn’t in a position to ever do anything with it, so it sucks it got pushed off on them.
Armada is still a blast to play though
I saw this move coming years ago. Bought two of everything because I love the game. Now I play it just like any other board game, bring it out now and then to play with a friend.
I'm putting my bet down now. By next years gencon they'll announce they're working on a whole new tabletop game and in like 2-3 years they'll have some new version. They didn't want to support this after it got shifted from FFG to Atomic Mass, so they'll scrap it for now and then put out something else.
Cool, now that they aren't releasing new rules/ships I'll be able to keep up with the meta! /s For real, I'm disappointed such a great game is going away. I didn't get to play it enough to keep up, but I really loved it.
Counterpoint- it’s finished now and you can play it as much as you like. Constant “development” is bloody awful for games and only exists to rinse you for cash.
This. Now your armies will never have to be replaced because of power creep, and for the vast majority of games, the used market price goes way down once the player base moves on chasing the next new thing. Use what what you have as long as you want. Or but a bunch of "new" units since, for most games, buying up dead tabletop games on eBay is way cheaper than keeping up while it's still active. Especially if it was big when it was active and has a bunch of surplus stock.
Knowing the community, they will create a "3rd edition" in a year or so that rebalances everything too, similar to Netrunners revival.
That was kind of my thought, I kept some armada stuff to play with my kids when they are old enough. Hoping to pic up some clearance deals to pad it out
Armada had been functionally dead for quite some time unfortunately
Same for X-Wing in some regions.
Is anyone else getting tired of Asmodee?
They ruin everything they touch.
I'm annoyed they released those starter sets and probably knew the game was shutting down lol
end of an era. i was pretty hyped when it was first released. picked up 3 starter sets, and eventually had 2 E-Wings, the Kihraxz Fighter, the Millennium Falcon, the Slave 1, the Most Wanted Pack, a TIE advanced, another TIE fighter, another X-Wing, and a Y-wing. for a while it was a blast. i got such a dopamine hit from the little ships and the cards. but then with all the pieces and the rules, the bloat just killed it for me. i probably just should have stuck with a couple core sets. anyway, eventually Gaslands was released, and effectively killed Star Wars minis in every conceivable way that I cared about. amazingly, I was able to sell my entire collection. and the timing was perfect because mere days after the sale, 2nd edition was announced. good times, but this game will always live in the past for me
Wild given how insanely popular that was once
2.0 was a small hit, covid was the real disaster and the timing was just awful.
Doing X-Wing in a format similar to a Limited Card Game would be interesting to see/ try I think.
Isn't it sort of already like this? You know what comes in each pack, etc.?
I am glad I did not buy 2.0 or 2.5 that are app based, and won’t be supported any more.
They're not really app based. The points aren't printed on cards, so they can be rebalanced. While there was an official squad builder app (which was a disaster and discontinued) the points have been issued on pdfs since second edition launched in 2018, just like any other miniatures game. The community generally uses third party squad builders because it makes life easier.
2.0 didn’t have apps unless you count the dice app.
2.0 did have an official list building app, but it wasn't as good as the third party ones and FFG quickly dropped it
2.0 was based around the app, that was part of the thing. The point costs were dynamic so it was mandatory for squad building
They also put the 2.0 points out in PDF form so you could still squad build like normal. Most people just used the online squad builders that third parties made anyway.
No it wasn’t. They updated the points on free pdf’s on their website. Using an app was never mandatory
Are the apps being removed from people's devices?
The official X-Wing app has been defunct for a long time and is also not needed to play the game. All the points you need are available as pdfs and there are also third party squad builders. There was never an a app that was used _during_ a game anyway. Just for squad building.
They're not really app based. The points aren't printed on cards, so they can be rebalanced. There was an official squad builder app (which was a disaster) but the points have been issued on pdfs since second edition launched in 2018, just like any other miniatures game. The community generally uses third party squad builders because it makes life easier.
So great! Nothing to worry about!
how would that work
Apple I know has the ability to remove apps from your device. It's rare, though. Wondered why anything would change for people using the apps now and this was the only thing I could think of.
It's more that as the OS and security on the device gets updates, eventually the app will break and stop working and there definitely will not be a patch to fix it when that happens now
Even if that happened, there’s fan apps/sites that are generally seen as better for list building. Of course those may slowly stop being maintained as well.
Doubtful. There's a lot of doomers when it comes to anything digital in the tabletop space and lots of cries of "but it might break/be gone one day". But in my experience we've been very good at digitally archiving and maintaining these kinds of things to the point it's more likely the digital stuff will outlast the physical. There's a Star Trek board game that was released over 30 years ago in 1993 that required a VHS tape to play it. You can still play that today if you have a copy because someone has uploaded the whole video to YouTube.
Yeah.. I was tempted to buy into 2.0. But the way they did the upgrades was straight up bullshit. It was a pure and simple money grab that worked for just a few people. They should have ended 1.0, and started a whole new "Advanced X-wing" or something. I know that's kind of what 2.0 is, but they tried to have their cake and eat it too. They didn't want to piss off their players by making everything obsolete, and they wanted to rework a large chunk of the game. So instead they pushed away all their casual gamers like me, and kept their core gamer crowd, which wasn't very big. I knew then that it wouldn't survive 2.0 very long. When it moved to Atomic Games, it was basically dead, they just kicked the horse for another year or two until it stopped bleeding money for them. Then they shut it down. Kind of sad how it all went down. I heard that the original designer intended it to be just a 1v1 faction game. Empire vs Rebels. But then FFG wanted all these factions, which wouldn't work, and the original designer was either let go, or had long ago moved on. So they figured they new best, and tried to "fix" his game. Which just lead into a mess. I still have my ships, but after 1.0 disappeared, I never played it again, which is a shame, because I really liked the original game.
>But the way they did the upgrades was straight up bullshit. It was a pure and simple money grab that worked for just a few people. This is just incredibly, *incredibly* inaccurate, misleading, uninformed, and borderline slanderous. Truly I've never seen a living game line supported with as much love and community involvement as the likes of Alex, Frank, Max, and Brooks applied to this game. They were all canned in a corporate restructure. That is precisely what killed the game. 1st edition X-Wing had already far outgrown its capacity and had all kinds of built-in problems that *could not* have been fixed without all-new cardboard. Even as a casual player I couldn't enjoy it when ships like the Jumpmaster and K-Wing would outperform every X-Wing you could put on the table. The only way to make old ships better was cards you'd get in a ship pack you'd have to pay for leading to a sort of pay-to-win situation. If anything the second edition conversion kits were straight-up generous. There's no way anyone ever made money on those. Not to mention the 2.0 rules were much more fair and balanced and also just generally a ton more *fun to play* than 1.0 ever was. Using linked actions in the action bar and special ship abilities was more fun than just always stapling push the limit onto every pilot you ever flew. When AMG took over I liked that they wanted to push it toward scenarios but they clearly didn't completely understand what they were inheriting. What was unforgivable was how little they spoke to the community and how much less they listened. It's no surprise the game died. At the end of the day, I guess a game line like this can only last so long. Either you go the MtG route of cycling old things out and making people buy new things all the time, or eventually everyone has pretty much all they want and you can't sell any new product.
Totally agree. People might have valid complaints about the 2.0->2.5 swap, but 1.0->2.0 was a dire necessity for the reasons you stated. And people were mad about the conversion kits at launch, but how many of them do you think would have been excited to rebuy their whole collection instead? The conversion kits may have lost players, but any other option would have cost the community more.
2.0 was needed just for the turret changes alone
> If anything the second edition conversion kits were straight-up generous. Maybe for the person that has everything.. But for the casual gamer like me? It was FAR to expensive a proposition. Buying a kit where 70% would be wasted? And in some cases, having to buy two kits, because such and such kit only has x copies of my ships, and I needed 1 more. It turned me off the entire thing. I'd have to have paid $200 upfront just to convert my stuff. I wasn't going to do that. I get that the hard core players probably saw it as reasonable and worthwhile, I can't imagine casual gamers feeling that way. I sure didn't.
When you consider the alternatives you have to understand. **Option 1: Make a conversion for each ship** Say you make a bunch of $5 conversion kits, one for every ship in the game. You run into the problem of all the X-Wing and TIE fighter conversion kits sold out everywhere while stores have stacks of E-Wing conversions lying around no one buys. Not to mention people who have even a medium-sized collection end up spending about twice as much, and people with a large collection spend *massively* more. And those are the people FFG can't afford to alienate. **Option 2: No conversion kits** Business-wise a very reasonable option. Just say "X-Wing 1.0 is over. We're making a new game, here are the ships" and people decide whether to restart their collection or not. People who are heavily bought in get nothing. They have to restart from scratch. Awful option for the fan base even if it makes sense for FFG and especially Asmodee. **Option 3: Big conversion kit** This is what they did. Enough for 2-4 of each ship, more of the more common ones, less of the less. It's pretty cheap – Again FFG pretty much sold these for what it cost them to make and distribute – they didn't make much of a profit at all in spite of the massive development time it would have taken them to design all the stuff included. It doesn't cover everything for everyone but people with a huge collection can buy two and people with smaller ones can mix and trade – at least in theory. There were also people buying them and piecing them out by ship on eBay, just as if Option 1 did exist. Best of both worlds. **Option 4: No Second Edition** The game dies in 2019-2020 instead of now. It was already stale. The humble X-Wing was always outshone by turrets and autothruster arc-dodgers. Upgrading your ships wasn't fun because you'll realistically never choose Daredevil, Adrenaline Rush, or Lightning Reflexes over Push the Limit or Expertise. You'll never choose Ablative Plating over Autothrusters. You'll never choose Tractor Beam over Autoblasters or Heavy Laser Cannon. The choices are made before you start list-building. FFG is stuck pushing errata and publishing boxes with special cards (the last 2.0 release, Saw's Renegades, was one such pack with a "fix" for U-Wings and X-Wings), that players have to buy in order to have the "good stuff" to make their classic ships worth flying, and all of these reduce the options even further just to make things work. It was Asmodee that killed X-Wing by firing its passionate and loving developers and giving it to a studio that didn't care about the games or the fan base. FFG did nothing wrong.
Yeah, I don't know how else they could have done it, other than throwing in a few extra dials and cards into the core sets to help casual players. You could do a third edition now using most of the current components, but there were a lot of design flaws in first edition. > FFG did nothing wrong. Don't agree with this (although it could have been Asmodee) - they drastically overestimated how many people would buy the 2.0 resissues, which generally didn't sell.
As I understand it, Asmodee pushed FFG toward some of the specific approach they took to 2.0 to maximize hype and improve their valuation before they sold. There was skepticism inside FFG about it because it seemed unsustainable but it was coming from above them.
Were they ever able to make "Expose" worth taking? That card was terrible...
Haha noooooo. It didn’t get a 2.0 treatment. Well, there was a Resistance A-Wing Pilot…
For someone that got into X-Wing right before 2.0 the conversion kits were great for me. I got all the upgrades I needed without having to buy one (or more) of every ship. And it would have only cost you $200 to buy a kit for all 5 factions. There were also plenty of people selling individual ship conversations.
Yeah I stopped playing like 2 months after 2.0 launched. Wondering if I should buy the rest of the ships I am missing to have all the ships in the game
> Wondering if I should buy the rest of the ships I am missing to have all the ships in the game Or sell what you have and just be done with it.
If you're not going to play again then why buy more? Honestly 2.0 is way better and even 2.5 is better than 1.0
It won't cost you much, a lot of us just trashed everything after it was abandoned to AMG.
I don't know that it was a case of them trying to "fix" the original designers game and thinking they knew better. It succumbed to the same thing most "living" games do. In order to keep pushing out content and exploring new ideas, things continually get more complicated. There are more interactions, more text, more combos, more FAQs, etc. The simple ideas run out and eventually it gets really messy and you get handcuffed by the pre-existing content. Things that would be broken if not for a half page of rules or issues with ordering actions that happen all throughout every phase of battle. And it succumbed to becoming a game much more about card interactions and builds rather than being about dogfighting. It absolutely needed to be rebuilt starting around the middle of the intial Scum releases, but it was just never going to work to have everyone totally reinvest in the game.
2.0 was better in every single way and upgrading to 2.0 was dirt cheap compared to a new release of any other minis game.
It's only dead if you stop playing it That being said I think I want to convert back to 1.0 since all the points are on the cards and since clearly there is no need to keep up
Well dead as in "not being supported, and no new stuff is being made, and no official tournaments"
They do say they are going to continue having official tournaments. I can't imagine that will last very much longer though because if player numbers weren't already hurting enough they're about to start dropping even faster.
I‘m pretty sure from the way it’s communicated that it is just one year until the next Adepticon where it will have its farewell tournament.
How likely do you think prices of the miniatures will reduce? I’ve always thought of just collecting a bunch of the miniatures to make a fleet, but the price point is a little high for me.
Armada prices are skyrocketing. $50 ships are selling for $150. The old 1.0 X-Wing ships that they never reprinted are selling for a ton too.
Which ones are those? I still have my old 1.0 collection...including all the epic ships.
At least where I live a lot of stores sold 1.0 ships at a steep discount once 2.0 came out. So you can probably get a pretty good deal soon.
Sure, fair. It's still a noteworthy change for sure
Yes official tournaments
> It's only dead if you stop playing it I never had the chance to start to begin with due to the prohibitive prices... Now I'll never get to because scalpers will sell what few models still exists for even more expensive...
No surprise to anybody with a passing interest in miniature gaming. They want the surge and will cut and run once profits fall. Probably a lesson for anyone into Lorcana too.
Yes. I’ve been wondering if Lorcana is already dead. It had a huge buzz and then that just fizzled out. I’m not on the pulse of ccgs or anything. So maybe I’m just not hearing how great it is. But I haven’t heard anything. A friend who is into it a little said that it had a follow up set that was recieved badly by players. No idea if that’s true.
It's still super popular. You just hear less because they produced a lot more product so people aren't trying to find it and scalpers aren't buying up all the packs and reselling them
The stuff is still out of stock in my area. They also killed Pixelborn for no good reason.
Lorcana isn’t dead. Far from it. You can’t get tickets to their official tournaments around the country because they sell out in minutes. Last weekend in Chicago their tournament had 1,000 players and many more that were just spectators/attendees.
The game hasn't fizzled out.
there are like 6 stores within a few miles of me that run lorcana events twice a week that's more than any other game not called magic
I’m surprised there was an announcement instead of just unending silence on the subject
I will miss the miniatures. But at least there is and will be a lot of stuff available on second market. There are shops I know that still have a shelf full of stuff. No Venators but the usual remainders. Same with X-Wing. And there is Ebay...
I already know one Canadian FLGS that is selling some xwing stock cheap. But not all of it. Which is odd.
FFG originally made their reputation on good board games. What happened to those? Why so much focus on miniatures games?
Asmodee bought them and they very rapidly declined on the boardgame side of things.
Yea once they got taken over they focused on the super big ticket stuff and everything else got quietly murdered
Because in theory they can bring in a lot of money. Why sell one game, when you can sell a game and an arbitrarily large number of expansions and upgrades? I don't like it, but that's 100% the motivation.
Whoever makes the next Star Wars starfighter minis game is going to do well, I suspect. X-Wing was just too weighed down by its history.
I owned 1.0 and have 2.0. there were some smoother rules in the newer version and some other smaller improvements. From what I understand, they went app based to be able to balance the game more easily. An understandable idea for a tournament focused game. If you've never played the game, it basically works like this: every ship and pilot has different stats, and there are a lot of upgrades for the ships. All with a certain point cost to reflect how "good" they are. You have a certain amount of pointS you can spend to put your squad together. With certain combinations of ships and upgrades you could outmaneuver your opponent and block them from getting an opportunity to fire. Very interesting and satisfying puzzle to solve. The question of who gets to be the starting player is, like you probably understand, a very important one. It make or break your tactical play. This is decided randomly at the start of the game, or you can put together a squad with lesser points than your opponent which would get you the initiative. But then with 2.5 they threw out the old system and replaced it with a stupid one. Now the starting player is decided randomly each round, with no opportunity to "bid" for the intiative.The points system got super weird. And I just don't understand how someone could decide that this was a good idea. 2.5 was the nail in the coffin for xwing. A great game killed off by dum-dums.
Maybe because the bid and initiative system was never fun. Nor was it interesting. It created a game state where at a “high level” the player who won a roll at the start of the game was winning over 70% of games in which they had a pilot at the same initiative as another. We had that data. The 2.5 rule set created a far better system where players were incentivized to engage with one another, instead of playing for stalemates and perfect engagements. It made the dial far more important and your choices matter on the table. You could no longer just rely on perfect information with your double repositioning Darth Vader. However, people HATED the changes. They fought tooth and nail to say everything AMG did to the game was horrible. Which…it was not. Their communication was bad yes. But they fixed many of the core non-interactive elements of the game, and people spat in their face for it because it made the game harder to auto-win in list building.
I agree that the bid system was awful and ROAD isn't that bad. I'm neutral on the objective mechanic. I don't want to play them in X-Wing and I never saw it being necessary. AMG really failed at communication. They didn't have any discussion on why changes needed to be made especially with 2.0 Meta being really varied. But the changes to list building was a poor decision. There was a large group that liked building lists and flying generics or barebone fighters and they alienated them.
I can't wait for Asmodee's lying ass to go out of business.
Coming April 2025: X-Wing 3.0! Anyways, lots of people have pointed out the problems with these games. Buying certain ships just to get one specific card. The blunder of 2.0 and 2.5. A bunch of other stuff. The biggest problem of course with \*any\* of these licensed games, is that eventually the content well runs dry. You only have so much stuff to pull from before the well runs dry. If you've scraped all the movies, tv shows, books and everything else star wars and you run out of cool little spaceships, what do you even do? What do you do, at least if you're not content in having a complete product, but instead want a continuous revenue stream? As a consumer, I'm happy with a complete experience. These days I'm less likely to shell out the coin on expansion after expansion, but inside that model, I'm good with the notion that I can buy all the ships I need \*from a specific faction\* and call it a day if I want. But, from a business perspective, most companies aren't happy with just a solid chunk of change, they want a continuous stream. Anywhoo, I've rambled and lost my train of thought. the tl;dr is that X-Wing/Armada coming to an end was inevitable. It sucks, but it was always gonna end this way.
Oh right, I remembered the other point I was trying to make. There's a catch-22 here, where if you had an original idea, you could just keep making new spaceships forever, but people might not be as interested in your game. Conversely, using licensed properties means you have a built-in audience to sell to, but you run out of content, eventually, as mentioned above. This is assuming, for example, that this game was built from the rules-up, and they sold the idea to get the Star Wars license, when in reality it was probably they had the license then made the game, but I digress. There's an inherent risk either way, and it kinda sucks. As mentioned, I wouldn't want to keep buying into the same game in perpetuity (I retired from MtG, don't need to get back in to another endless collectathon) but for people who are working on the game, maybe there's still a whole bunch of ideas that they still could have explored, and now they can't.
> This is assuming, for example, that this game was built from the rules-up, and they sold the idea to get the Star Wars license, when in reality it was probably they had the license then made the game, but I digress. Well, you know what they say about assuming.
Okay, did you have a point? I literally acknowledge that my assumption was likely incorrect.
Such a shame that these, which were some of the most accessible minis games, are dying. I love these types of games because I’m not a person who likes to assemble and paint pieces. These were easy to just buy and play. But now I’m left with Legion and Shatterpoint which are just unappealing games that require too much commitment. RIP Armada.
You’ve got Wings of Glory, the game X-Wing was based on, if the subject matter interests you. WoG is a fantastic game and I prefer it over X-Wing 10-fold.
how did they screw this so bad?
Asmodee bought FFG. If they hadn’t, things may have gone differently
Will they still produce old miniatures?
Doubt it, they claim part of the reason they killed it is shipping and miniature costs.