The intro…
Well hello! Welcome to this week’s blog!
It’s been a little while since my last post but there’s quite a lot going on so I thought I’d just get a little post out!* Because of that there’s not really an intro to make so let’s get straight in! Well, almost straight in.
*it turns out, not so little and a whole week later than planned! Oops!
First up – our events!
We have a Squad Championship coming up on the 6th of June at The Arena in Newport. Tickets are £15 and we will be applying for an XWA Squad Champ kit once they are released! You can get your name down by going to the Facebook event page and commenting on the ticket post. If you don’t do facebook just message me directly and I’ll sort it out for you. We’d love to see you there!
Secondly, we have the fourth(!!) annual Welsh Open! This will also be held at The Arena and will be a 2 day premier level event with full XWA prize support (and some of our own as well!). We’ve got Sith Taker Tim coming to stream it for us and there will of course be a side event on day 2 for those who didn’t make the cut! Tickets are limited so if you’re name’s not down yet – get on it! Head over to the Facebook event page and comment so, like above, just get in touch with me!
I will give a big shout out here to Steve Boulton for his assistance with promoting the events – you’re a star Steve!
Patreon Update…
Yes, it’s Patreon month again! Already!!!
Thankfully I’ve been planning ahead and (despite running out of time to make posts!) I’m already set for this quarter’s haul!
First up, let’s take a look at the templates!
Over the past 2 years supporters have been receiving a full template set a piece at a time. That’s now complete, except for – range rulers! So this quarter we have the range 1 ruler ready to go!
So if you’d like to support the blog AND get hold of some lovely shiny Exile swag then get yourself over to Patreon and get signed up!
Right, let’s get to it…
The XWA World Championship…
Yes! The very first XWA Worlds has taken place!
Almost 120 descended on Milwaukee to visit Adepticon across 4 days of play and compete to be the world champion!
There were 2 qualifying heats on the Thursday and Friday and if you made it though with a 4-1 or better record (and 59 people did!) you made it to Saturday’s round. The top 16 made it from there into Sunday’s knockout finals and eventually, after 14 games of X-Wing in 3 days, the winner was Anthony Marchand! CONGRATULATIONS!!!
I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from the event as a whole and the photos that people have posted make it looks like it was an absolute blast (and gave me MASSIVE FOMO!).
A huge well done to Dwight and the judge team (including my buddy Levi!) for running the event without a hitch, to Nick Sperry of 312 Squadron for streaming the whole thing and to everyone in the XWA who made it possible to run.
And of corse the players who attended to make it the success that it was!
If you want to check out placing and lists and the like then you can see those here:
https://rollbetter.gg/tournaments/2638/pools/2639
The main bit(s)…
*Disclaimer* Just to warn you, while this post is about X-Wing, it’s only loosely and less of the ‘batrep‘ (JARGON ALERT!!) style and more around ‘life, hobbies and reflection’ sort of thing. Just in case you want to save yourself a few minutes.
So, yeah, life is busy. That’s no a huge shock, of course, life is always busy but this past few months has felt especially so.
Work has been pretty constantly busy and while that’s not surprising, since October until maybe a few weeks ago it’s been around 20-30% more busy (verifiable by stats!) than the past 3-ish years. That in itself has an effect on the blog directly (because yes, I do write some parts of it at my laptop at work during lunch and between tasks) but also indirectly by being more tired when I get home.
It’s been around 3 years now since my job changed and I went being being 100% car based (driving from site to site fixing things) to being 100% account based (commute to one of 3 sites and be there for the day). Overall it’s a change that I’ve been ok with but the blog is definitely something that’s been affected. I guess that my X-Wing casual nights have also been affected but I’ll get to that a bit later.
Then there’s family.
I love my family. My kids are older now so in theory ‘things are easier’. I have a theory about parenting – it doesn’t necessarily get easier as they get older, the challenges just change and you find out how well suited you are to those challenges.
Sure we don’t need babysitters to go out or have a bedtime routine to stick to but we do have to make sure they’re keeping up with school/uni work, contributing to household tasks and generally growing into decent humans. Time with them now is far more rare and far more precious when it happens.
I’m also a Christian so Sundays are busy and sometimes other days through the week or at times like Christmas and Easter. I’m a musician so that often involves learning new music and words and practicing that at home and attending rehearsals with other people to bring it together too.
On top of this my wife and I are involved in some charity work. She works for a charity which we support and do some volunteering with and there is also another charity we volunteer for (https://www.sayinggoodbye.org/) which I’ve talked a bit about before.
All of these things are important to me and have a place in my life. I give of my time to each of them because, for various reasons, I feel they’re worth it.
And then there’s X-Wing.
X-Wing is kind of an accidental hobby. I shared in my very first blog how I got into it but let’s face it, this cartoon is funny because it’s true:
As time went on what was a small, casual hobby gained more of my ‘available time’ pie chart. It was fun, games didn’t take too long, I love Star Wars, I was spending time with my son, it wasn’t too expensive (when I got maybe 1 new ship a month or so).
Somehow, over time, X-Wing started taking abigger and bigger slice of the pie.
I went to a tournament (whole day out), went to a bigger one (2 nights away) and then started the blog because I felt that newbies and average players needed a little representation in the X-Wing content creation sphere.
Our local scene shifted and I, along with Mark Hall, became involved in running our local tournaments. My part in that became ordering and organising prizes and promotion (since I had the public platform of a blog!) and that ticked over for a while.
Then I became an XTC captain for Wales and not long after that Mark and I decided to start running the Welsh Open as a large scale event in our area. More prizes, more promotion.
Then AMG announce the end of development and the X-Wing Alliance is born. Initially I didn’t get involved, I was busy enough and didn’t really know what I could contribute. A few months in and Mark and I have a chat as the Prize lead position is available and a week later that’s me. In charge of prizes for the whole XWA. X-Wing globally. Me.
What followed was a whirlwind of Discord chats with decisions, debates, ideas and plans. We worked out the wave 0 kits quickly followed by Squad Championship and System Open kits for the 2025.2026 season.
All of these were mostly small additions here and there but all were additions. Responsibilities that I put my hand up for, knowing that I’ve got something to contribute.
I want to assure you here that I’m not moaning. Ok, well maybe I am a little bit and I’m very aware that it’s likely coming off that way – and for that I apologise. It’s not my intention. I’m just trying to paint a picure of where I am and how I got here.
My intention is more to highlight that each of needs to find our balance. It’s so easy to get involved in something and commit to it in a way that you enjoy and get satisfaction from and then over time it shifts from being a pleasure to being a burden. This is something I know I’m prone to and have fallen foul of many times over the years. I also have a strong sense of loyalty and so once I start doing something or getting involved I usually feel like I’m tied to it forever and if I drop it then I’m a bad person I’m letting people down and they will think poorly of me because of it.
Even writing it down here I know that none of that is true when I approach it with my logical brain. I know that.
But in my heart?
So bearing ALL of this in mind, it’s time for me to share with you that I have now stepped down as OP Prize Lead for the XWA.
This has been coming for a little while. I started conversations with people back in December, wanting to give as much time as possible to the new person coming in to be ready for the next OP season once Worlds was planned and ordered.
Out of everything that I’ve been holding and balancing, the XWA work was the one which was causing me the most, for the lack of a better word, discomfort.
That’s not because of any pressure or stress applied by anyone, neither inside or outside of XWA, but actually more because, after just over 18 months of doing it, I have a much better understanding what the role is, what it needs and what the demands are. While ordering prizes and deciding on shiny things for your own event for around 50-ish people is one thing, working with a team of 8+ people across multiple countries and time zones to work on prizes for hundreds of events and thousands of players is far more about effective project management and processes than it is about picking a card to get printed.
As I’ve gotten older I have tried hard to understand myself better, to know and accept what I’m good at, what I’m not good at and can change and what I’m not good at and find it hard to change. I know FOR CERTAIN that project management is not a strength of mine (just ask my wife about the decorating snag list!). I know that I can identify steps towards a solution but. most importantly for where things were, I can do ‘troubleshooting’ (or maybe ‘stepping in and guiding to an outcome’ is more accurate) and get a solution out of the door. But ongoing management of something? History has shown (blog aside) that’s not so much where my strengths are.
I know I managed to achieve this at the point that I stepped in. Between us we got the Wave 0 kits finalised and out of the door to make sure that store level kits were available for TO’s to run events while AMG slowly wound down their support. We then moved on to the 2025/2026 OP season where we pulled together Squad Championship and System Open kits, over 150 events combined. I’m really proud of the work that we put in and the kits we put out for the community.
So, what now? Well, someone with ACTUAL project management skills and experience! Recently the amazing Stephen Weiland has stepped in to the role and is tasked with sorting out the 2026/2027 OP season and beyond. We’ve had some good handover meetings about plans and processes and he’s excited and ready to get started! While I’m no longer prize lead I am staying involved in the team and will be contributing where I can. Another thing that’s become clear over the last year or so is that it can’t all rest on just a small number of volunteers. Since nobody at the XWA is getting paid we need to spread the load to make sure our volunteered time isn’t monopolised by the tasks we plan. Bur out is very real and something we need to avoid. I don’t think I managed to avoid it in all honesty but I want to make sure that nobody else falls into that.
I feel honoured to have been involved in XWA in the way that I have. It’s been great to being contact with people from all over the world who are excited to host X-Wing events and my hope is that the trend of more events year on year continues. This game is great and the people who play it are even better.
The conclusion…
So why have I gone in to all this detail? Well, the crux of it is this – I have a hobby that I enjoy and what’s most important is that I keep enjoying it.
The purpose of a hobby isn’t to get better at it (although usually you do, to a point) nor to monetise it to turn into a side-hustle. It’s something to enjoy and have with with.
I felt that I was able to make a decent contribution to the global X-Wing community by being part of the XWA and providing TOs with prizes for events. I now feel that not only can this now be improved and built upon by others but I can get my focus back to more local things. My own scene, our local events. And the blog.
Now this is by no means to say that I regret it or that getting involved in XWA work was a mistake, that they’re utter tyrants or expect slave labour. That’s simply not true. When you drill down to the core of it, each and every person in the XWA wants the same thing – for X-Wing to thrive and succeed. Each person has their own responsibility and works on that in their own way and at their own pace. Hopefully everyone else is better at time management and boundaries than I am! And better at asking for help!
So yes, my conclusion here is that finding the right balance for you is important. That saying yes to something doesn’t have to mean it’s forever. That putting something down (even something you enjoy) is sometimes what’s best, for you and for it.
Now then, time to start planning some prizes for our Welsh events!
The outro…
Thank you so much for visiting my blog, I hope you’ve enjoyed it! If you’d like to support me in continuing my X-Wing blogging adventure there are a few ways you can do that.
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