The intro…
Hello and welcome to this week’s blog!
Just a heads up, it’s going to get a little weird this week but please bear with me!
Before I get to the main bit though, there’s some things I should mention!
First up, well done to Tom Candlin, winner of the UK’s first GT Event of 2024!
Tom fought his way through the 46 player event and after 5 rounds of swiss and a top 8 cut came out on top! IF you’re interested in the lists and positions then you can check out the Roll Better page for the even here.
Speaking of GT events…..
OH YEAH! Firestorm have jumped on board the hype train and put together a graphic for the GT announcement!
The X-Wing event is on the 6th and 7th of July and tickets are available here: https://www.thebattlefields.co.uk/events-at-the-battlefields/star-wars-x-wing-welsh-gt-2024-cardiff
Remember, you’ll get hot lunch on the Saturday and there’s a Sunday side event which promises to be a LOT of fun (cross faction & extended, bring your broken nonsense!). We now also know what the official prizes will be and to be honest, they’re pretty generous!
That’s dice and cards for participation, templates for top 4, trays for top 2 and a trophy for the winner! And remember, all this is ON TOP OF the amazing community made stuff that we’ve already planned for the event which will include custom alt arts by Dan Eicher, 3D printed tokens, acrylic tokens from Cog O Two AND of course, this lovely thing (which is still a work in progress…) for the winner…
*** DISCLAIMER ***
The helmet and other prizes yet to be revealed are specific to the Welsh Open and community produced. They are NOT official AMG prizes!
Just have to be clear about that!
Of course I’m going to big up our event BUT this promises to be an awesome weekend of X-Wing!
Alright, that’s about enough of that for now, on to…
The main bit…
While I do have a game that I could talk about from last week, I feel like maybe it’s a reasonable time to talk about the state of the game.
There’s been some interesting news/non-news/speculation over the past few months which has seemed to encourage people to create posts on social media which, truth be told, just seem to be repeating the same themes over and over. With so many different people looking at and talking about things it often feels like shouting into an echo chamber. I realise that my writing is just adding to that. As I’ve said before, though, one of the reasons I blog is to help me articulate and process my own thoughts. So, sorry not sorry I guess?
Before I get ahead of myself though, let’s start with some facts
Worlds 2024 happened. Not only did it happen but between the last chance qualifier and main Worlds event over 400 people took part. That’s a lot of people.
I don’t know the numbers of other games systems (like 40k and whatever else was going on) but of the AMG games that’s by far the highest.
Then, after worlds, AMG announced the OP track for 2024 – Grand Tournaments.
There was a very reasoned article to announce this change and I certainly agree with the principle of spreading the OP budget around so that more people can take part.
What went unsaid in the article (but was somewhat implied) is that this meant the end of Worlds as the culmination of an OP season. Questions were asked (and ignored) and over the course of a week or so people on the whole seemed to grudgingly accept this new reality.
And then Asmodee announced Worlds 2025 at the newly located Adepticon in Milwaukee.
Wild*
*there is actually a reason for this, which was covered in an interview video I’m about to mention below (negotiations/agreements were still ongoing with Adepticon but the GT announcement HAD to be made for time reasons) but obviously that is pretty recent information. At the time, and until just this last week, it made no sense.
In a slight change (or reversion to older FFG times I guess?), there would be no invite system, just turn up and play in Worlds.
Cool. Fastest finger first when it comes to tickets I guess!
Then the opportunity to apply for GT’s was announced and, slightly behind schedule (but only by a day I guess), event organisers (me included) started to get news of applications being accepted.
With a couple of exceptions though…
In the UK, a series of tabletop wargaming events (confusingly also knows as GTs) had announced in January that there would be X-Wing tournaments with official support over the next year.
The UK Games Expo (UKGE) would likely also be one but this wasn’t confirmed until much later and simply by a small update from AMG (around 3 weeks before the event was due to happen).
As mentioned in the intro, the UKGE has actually just happened this past weekend and, in a slightly bizarre and confusing turn of events, the prize support wasn’t allowed to be made public until the day before it happened. Slightly embarrassingly for AMG, it was publicised by the TO on the prescribed date and, in what I can only assume to be a time zone screw up, an article from AMG was released a few hours later with details of confirmed events.
Ok, got all that?
Now, on top of all this, there’s been a video. Well, ok, two or three I suppose.
Crabbok (a tabletop gaming YouTuber) got an interview with Will Shick who is, umm, a person (I don’t know his actual title!) at AMG. It’s a pretty long video (about 1h45 long) and, for complete transparency, I’ve not managed to watch the whole thing yet.
Crabbok then went on to do some speculating which itself triggered more social media posts about the state of the game.
THEN (and this is the last one), somebody noticed that on Asmodee’s North America website, ALL X-Wing and Armada items are marked as sold out. This of course led to further speculation of the game being discontinued and the like
Oh, and one more thing (so the website thing wasn’t the last one. Sorry), at some point in all this AMG confirmed that there wasn’t going to be a points update before the GT season started. This is important because a) it’s been over a year since points last changed significantly and b) it was widely expected that points would get nudged up/down because we’re starting to see a LOT of the same stuff doing well.
So yeah, it’s been a wild 3 months really.
My view…
Honestly, it’s taken me a while to truly get my head around it all.
First off, and remember, I am mostly a ‘glass half full’ type of person, I don’t think AMG are winding the game down. Not yet, at least.
The Asmodee website thing is weird, I’ll grant you that. For Armada and X-Wing specifically to be totally out of stock (while other AMG game lines do have stock) is unusual. Personally I don’t think it’s anything sinister. It could be a warehousing or stock software issue or, well, anything really.
I just don’t see why AMG who so famously aren’t the biggest fans of organised play would go to the trouble of creating a calendar of events for the next year if they’re trying to bin the game off.
It just doesn’t make sense. Then again, there’s a lot that’s happened that doesn’t make sense over the last few years of X-Wing…
Now if they had cancelled worlds, not announced GTs and then the website thing happened then sure, I see it. But I just can’t really see why you’d go to the effort (or more to the point, the cost) of arranging a global organised play schedule when you’re just going to kill the game off.
Look, I know that, much as I would love it to, this game won’t last forever. When AMG took it on from FFG they came out and said they love to see 10 more years of the game. The longer time has gone on, the less likely that has seemed but you’d like to think that maybe the intent is still there.
Is there a debate to be had about how AMG have handled the game? Well, probably not actually, it’s pretty clear that it’s been fumbled (and I’m being generous there…) almost from the start. From drip feeding info open to interpretation (lie the introduction of what became ROAD (JARGON ALERT!!)) to making half announcements on paint streams for other game systems by responding to comments, communication with the players has been (and continues to be) a very significant stumbling block (again, very generous). Still, that’s not really what I’m here to talk about today.
My overall impression is that they’re vastly under resourced for what they’ve been given to manage and, with everything going on with parent of the parent company (tldr; putting Asmodee out of the parent group to run on their own while saddling them with huge debts), AMG are likely being asked to prioritise their focus on the games which give the most revenue and with the best will in the world, that’s not X-Wing right now.
The cost of producing unpainted plastic models on sprues versus completed, painted models, well, I don’t know what it is but I can imagine it hits that profit margin pretty hard.
I was a guest on the Sith Takers podcast last week and the Crabbok video came up in conversation. I hadn’t seen/heard it at that point but the following point of view is one that came out on that cast. As I said there (though not as eloquently as I’d have liked!), I’m very torn between how I’d like to see AMG approach the future of X-Wing.
My gamer/consumer side wants new releases and re-releases and core sets for more factions to match the Rebel and Imperial ones from last year. I’ll take card packs and Ahsoka’s ship and the Bad Batch ship and whatever else can be concocted. I’d even understand if it takes a long time. I can wait, as long as I know it’s coming.
But my sensible side understands that after you wade past all the nerds and lore and nostalgia, this is about a business making money. The question is, does X-Wing make enough of it? The answer, sadly, is probably not.
Do I want 3rd edition? No, not really. I don’t think it’s needed at this point from a game design point of view and the last edition updates (1.0 to 2.0 and 2.0 to 2.5) caused a lot of division in the player base. Another version would lose yet more players and jade veteran players even more.
On the other hand it’s VERY much the best way for them to make money on it. A slight tweak in rules, change the scale just enough to make people need to re-buy everything and go big on promotion to launch as basically a new game. Stores would give back shelf real estate and there would be an influx of new players to the game.
Would I buy in? Hard to say for sure but probably, yes. I’m WAY too invested to back out now I think. Would many current players? I mean, a non zero number would, of course. But the opportunity to reel in new players would be massive.
Like I said, I don’t want it but I can see why it would make sense.
Having watch some (but not all) of the Will Shick interview and the Crabbok reaction/speculation video, I somewhat agree and do get the feeling that there’s more he would like to say but just can’t right now. I think some of Crabbok’s speculation is a bit off the wall (moving the game to another Asmodee publisher?!) but I suppose at this point there’s really no stupid ideas and anything is possible.
The conclusion…
You can’t quite help but feel like a passenger when these sort of things happen.
You can see it unfolding but you have absolutely no say or control in how it pans out.
Still, after all is said and done, what really matters is the community. Whether it’s online or at my local store, having people enthused about the game to talk to and interact with is pretty ,much the main thing that keeps me coming back to X-Wing. Yes, it’s a good game (a great game in my opinion, actually) but there’s plenty of good games out there. This is MY good game that my friends play and I get to spend time doing that with them.
I guess that’s what makes the whole subject of the future of the game so emotive. How wrapped up in my life it is now. When it comes down to it, the future of X-Wing is going to be what it’s going to be. I can’t stop it or change it, as an individual it’s out of my hands.
What is in my hands is how I deal with it then and how I behave about it now. Can we, as a community, collectively have some influence on how the game pans out? Yes, I think we can. We can continue to turn up to events, we can keep buying product (when it’s available!) and we can be positive in our interactions with AMG on social media. Is it going to easy? No, I suppose it won’t and maybe we won’t see much in the way of news or developments as quickly as we’d like but in the mean time, let’s just keep playing with our plastic spaceships and hanging out together. After all, that’s why we’re still here, right?
That’s about it from me for today. Thanks for reading, I’ll be back next week!
The outro…
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