This is the way (is it?)

My squadron of X-Wings about to (unsuccessfully)
take on the Mandalorian and his dodgy friends

Last week I finally returned to our local Star Wars: X-Wing club after a break of 2 years! That's a long time to be away from the game and I was more than a little rusty. Moreover, the game is currently going through a period of turmoil since Asmodee transferred it from from Fantasy Flight Games to little known Atomic Mass Games, who have seriously rattled many of the fans with some pretty extensive changes coupled with some clumsy PR. One of the biggest changes is to list-building, which now strongly favours named pilots kitted out with lots of upgrades. So my swarm of 5 generic X-Wings that I proudly took along was swimming clean against the tide, and was punished accordingly.

Back in 2017 I wrote a post wishing that FFG would introduce scenarios into X-Wing to relieve the monotony of endless death-matches. Well AMG have listened to my advice (haha!) and made scenarios central to their vision of the game's future, not as an option for casual play, but as the core structure of tournament play. Well my experience of the new scenarios amounts to a grand total of one play, but I have to say I'm not impressed so far. The idea of the scenario was to collect crates of "supplies" which had been carelessly left floating around in space. As someone quipped, it's not so much Star Wars as Star Garbage Collection. I admit I played badly – got so carried away with the idea of shooting up the other side's ships that I forgot to use my X-Wings as zero-G pickup trucks, but... isn't the pew pew shooting the whole point of the game? I'm no longer anywhere near being a hardcore fan of this game, so my opinion does not carry much weight, but the scenarios we have seen so far just seem a bit lame. I hope AMG will quickly develop some  scenarios with a bit more bite.