Rogue Squadron- Tri-U

Welcome to Rogue Squadron, pilot! In this series, we will be looking at different squadrons you can fly in Fantasy Flight Games X-Wing miniatures game. We give you the squad, what expansion pack all of the upgrades come from and then give you the low down on how best to fly it. Strap in and get ready to fly.

All Wings Report In

U-Wing “Blue Squadron Pathfinder” (U-wing Expansion) (34 pts) (PS 2)

None

Crew- Gunner (Slave-1/YT-2400 Expansion): After you perform an attack that does not hit, you may immediately perform a primary weapon attack. You cannot perform another attack this round.
Crew- Operations Specialist (Upsilon Shuttle Expansion): After a friendly ship at Range 1-2 performs an attack that does not hit, you may assign 1 focus token to a friendly ship at Range 1-3 of the attacker.
Modification- Tactical Jammer (Shadow Caster/Decimator Expansions): Your ship can obstruct enemy attacks.
System- Fire Control System (B-Wing/TIE Phantom Expansions): After you perform an attack, you may acquire a target lock on the defender.
Title- Pivot Wings (U-Wing Expansion):
- Side A (Attack): Increase your agility by 1. After you execute a maneuver, you may flip this card.
- Side B (Landing): When you reveal a (0 ) maneuver, you may rotate your ship 180°. After you execute a maneuver, you may flip this card.

2x U-Wing “Blue Squadron Pathfinder” (U-wing Expansion) (34 pts) (PS 2)

None

Crew- Gunner (Slave-1/YT-2400 Expansion): After you perform an attack that does not hit, you may immediately perform a primary weapon attack. You cannot perform another attack this round.
Crew- Tactician (Auzituck/TIE Phantom Expansion): After you perform an attack against a ship inside your firing arc at Range 2, that ship receives 1 stress token.
Modification- Tactical Jammer (Shadow Caster/Decimator Expansions): Your ship can obstruct enemy attacks.
System- Fire Control System (B-Wing/TIE Phantom Expansions): After you perform an attack, you may acquire a target lock on the defender.
Title- Pivot Wings (U-Wing Expansion):
- Side A (Attack): Increase your agility by 1. After you execute a maneuver, you may flip this card.
- Side B (Landing): When you reveal a (0 ) maneuver, you may rotate your ship 180°. After you execute a maneuver, you may flip this card.

Lock S-Foils in Attack Position

Why yes, I did indeed take this list to a store championship recently. No, I am not insane. Yes, I lost three out of five games. No, even I’m not crazy enough to own three U-wings. I borrowed two of them.

We’ll address the bantha in the room first. The U-Wing does have some serious problems. Unlike the YV-666 or two shuttles it can turn around. But doing so is not a simple operation. You need to telegraph the maneuver the turn before by flipping your title or by running with only a single agility. And turning around in place isn’t as useful as it appears at first glance. You can fly right up to a rock or the board edge and then turn around to avoid them. But when engaging with your opponent in a joust, you rarely want to turn directly around.

Despite having eight health and usually two defense dice, they rarely survive more than two rounds of fire. A few weeks ago I flew against a U-wing and eliminated it the first round before it even got to shoot. That was kind of what inspired me to take this list. I wanted U-wings to find a role and to not suck.

All that said, let’s talk about what this list does have going for it. Pure efficiency in firepower. When you engage, you feel no regret spending Focus tokens for defense and you actually love it when you miss your first attack. With Gunner enhanced by Fire Control System (FCS) and Operations Specialist (OpSpec) your second attack will almost always be stronger (unless you’re shooting a tokenless Soontir Fel at range 2, in which case that stress you just gave him also gives me a Focus token to use to defend himself. Which happened this tournament).

When you can fire at range 2 against targets with decent agility you can rain down stress tokens on them. This can completely shut down some ships for a few turns, even when you can’t kill them. This can either take the pressure off you for a few turns or make it easier to kill that ship in later turns.

I found the best strategy for this list is to fly along your board edge and make your opponent come to you. You can fly back and forth, stopping and turning around all day. You like to joust but you also like to control the engagement. You can’t do that if you chase them.

While I did only go 2 out of 5 with this, only one of those games did I feel like I had no chance of winning. Both other lost games had a combination of a bad maneuver and suboptimal dice results that contributed to the end result. Those are the kind of things that affect every game of X-wing, which takes some of the blame off the U-wings.

Overall, it was cool to fly something for the fun of it rather than because it’s statistically good.

Variations

Getting Hera on one of these things would have made a lot of difference. Being able to just stay stopped or to pivot back and forth as needed would have allowed them to avoid lots of traps. Unfortunately, Hera’s unique which means only one could ever take her. That said, switching one Tactician to Hera would allow you to switch the other to another Operations Specialist which keeps the one ship with OpSpec from being such a vulnerability.