Rogue Squadron- X-Wing 2.0 First Impressions

X-Wing 2.0 launched this week to much fanfare. I’ll be attending a tournament this weekend which will use it but before then, I thought I’ve give my quick first impressions so far. These are in no particular order, except that I’ll keep my big rant for the end.

Yay’s!
- Eat dice ship’s trying to get behind my Lambda! The guns now work back there and it’s awesome.
- Medium bases make flying old ships feel like completely new ships.
- The center line on the maneuver templates really does help when bumping.
- The new dials are great. Hard 1 Firespray!
- There’s a rock in my way, but wait, now my Y-wing can barrel roll out of the way!
- Turrets are not easy mode!
- X-wing feels new and fresh again. So many new things to try out and explore.
Umm’s
- There are a lot of new tokens. I had to find a new tournament tray because there were just too many different tokens to keep track of.
- Composure is only available in the new Falcon box. How do Rebels and Imperials get it in 1.0? I thought that was the new standard, never need to buy things from the other factions. This is very concerning.
Upgrade cards
- I like the design space with the upgrades being printed on the bigger cards.
- I don’t like how much more table space they take up now. It’s really cluttered now. Not sure how I’m going to arrange these for tournaments.
- Especially since many upgrades have their own Charge tokens so you can’t just bunch them up real tight. They need to be exposed so the Charges don’t get mixed up.
The Squadbuilder App
- It looks very pretty.
- I like being able to pick from different tournament formats.
- There are far too many load screens and windows.
- No visible dials 🙁
- You can’t print your list so it shows the card text for each card. Doing this saves the headache of getting upgrade cards out for casual nights. Or printing a list to give to you opponent at tournaments.
- YASB 2.0 is so much more elegant. Drop down menus are so convenient.

Big Rant- Ship Cardboard

The biggest missed opportunity with X-Wing 2.o was not divorcing the pilot from the ship cardboard template. They changed Locks to be a number tied to the ship markers. Why not go one step further and make the ship’s cardboard template not list the pilot on there?

For example, as it stands right now, the conversion kit comes with three TIE Interceptor dials and three TIE Interceptor cardboard templates. It also comes with four different TIE Interceptor pilots; two unique and two generics. Because of the way things are printed, you can’t run three of the generics despite having three dials because there are only two cardboards for each generic instead of three. You also can’t run Turr Phenir with two Alpha’s because one of the Alpha’s cardboard is on the back of Turr.

This is so infuriating for me. And yes, its kind of a stupid thing to get frustrated about. If I have three ships models and three dials, why can’t I fly any combination of pilots? Sure, in casual play, just use whatever template. But you can’t do that in tournaments. And I really wanted to do an A-Wing or TIE Interceptor mini-swarm.