Sunday, January 26, 2020

Musings on Epic: Listbuilding the CR90

After covering the Rebel Transport last time, we're going into their main combat ship this week. The Corvette has two distinct features: it's main weapon is going until Range 4 and is put on side-arcs, and it can Target Lock beyond range 4. This is important, because effects that allow you to lock usually are restricted to range 1-3. I find it harder to maneuver the firing arcs into position with a CR90 than with a Raider; however, the CR90 has an easier time to keep firing once the enemy is past you. Just some things to consider.

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Musings on Epic: Listbuilding the GR75

After we established some basics on the mechanics of Epic gaming, I want to finally turn to list building. At first, we'll take a look at a ships available for the Rebel faction (and, by proxy, the Resistance): the GR75 Transport. Be advised that the Resistance has much reduced options in some cases; I will mention this for the categories. For each ship, we shall look at the available upgrades in turn. I will steal a page from the Space Cats Peace Turtles podcast for rating the upgrades and establish tiers, without any specific order within the tiers. We go in descending order from S-Tier to A-Tier over to B-Tier, C-Tier and F-Tier. With all that preliminary stuff out of the way, let's evacuate some bases with the GR75!

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

A contorted view on "The Rise of Skywalker"

This post comes out of a series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to the audio version. For 5$, you get access to the mini-podcasts I'm doing with illustrious co-hosts answering questions by listeners of the podcast. At 10$, you get exclusive access to the Boiled Leather Audio Conversation bonus podcasts. Give the Patreon a look!
I'm in a bit of a conundrum, to be honest. It's well documented that I really, really like "The Last Jedi". Therefore, a movie that sets out to ignore the largest possible amount of storytelling from that movie gives me bad aches. I feel that right now, I'm not able to give "The Rise of Skywalker" a really fair shake and that I need to watch it again with perfect knowledge of what happens in the plot and without any hopes and preconceptions attached to it. For now, the phantom pains are contorting the picture.

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Musings about Epic: Action stations!

After we covered the basics of how Wings and Huge Ships actually work, it's time to get down to some more detailed stuff. So, what comes after executing a maneuver? Say it with me: taking an action! Unless you're stressed, overlapping an obstacle etc. of course. Duh, you might say, what about it? Nothing in the rules changes what actions I can take. Wait a bit, I reply. As everything Epic, action selection has to cope with the format.

Monday, January 13, 2020

Musings about Epic: Flying huge ships

Back in X-Wing 1.0, Huge Ships were by generally consensus "not good". One of the reasons for their lackluster performance, aside from the clunkyness of the Epic rules in 1.0 in general, was that they were simply to weak, unable to deal enough damage or generally to do what they were designed to do. In 2.0, this problem has been remedied. Huge Ships perform well enough to be used in battle, and in this article, we'll go into the basics of how this works.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Musing about Epic: Flying in wings

This is the first post in an intended series about the Epic game format of Fantasy Flight Games' "X-Wing Miniatures Game". Your feedback will determine what will become of it, so please, chime in and talk about it!

When you try out the new Epic game format for the first time, the biggest change - apart from the new 500 points limit in standard games - is the mechanic of wings. Wings allow you to move several ships while assigning only one dial, therefore cutting down the time needed to play considerably. Apart from making Epic much more playable than in 1.0, however, wings have several repercussions that one needs to be aware of when you're building your lists and flying them.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Locke&Key: A primer

This post comes out of a series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to the audio version. For 5$, you get access to the mini-podcasts I'm doing with illustrious co-hosts answering questions by listeners of the podcast. At 10$, you get exclusive access to the Boiled Leather Audio Conversation bonus podcasts. Give the Patreon a look!
Netflix has announced that they will show a first season for the adaption of the graphic novel "Locke&Key" starting in February. For those unfamiliar with it, "Locke&Key" is a series of six graphic novels (at least in the edition I own) that tell a full story from beginning to end. It's a mild horror-fantasy story.