Star Wars Miniatures Experience

Updated: Aug. 23, 2008 I got a chance to play in a small tournament of the Star Wars Miniatures this past weekend. I’ve gotten minis from various sets over the past few years for use in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (D6, not D20). I put together an army together (Imperial) and headed off to my FLGS. Eight other players were there that day and we each got to play three matches each with ones success in one game determining who they would play in the next. I lost each of my matches, but still had some fun. The interesting thing was the players that came out on top were all using smaller armies of more expensive and rare (or very rare) army units. This isn’t really surprising to me as that seems to be the case with almost every collectible game (card, minis, etc…). Granted, the more minis one has collected the more options a player has in creating an army, but this game is too complicated in that it has nearly 10 factions with only 1 of them being allowed to be mixed in with figures from any of the other armies. To make this more interesting, these factions are scattered throughout the various expansions. All of these different figures offer advantages or weaknesses based on the map available for the tournament. In case of the recent tournament, the map had few large open areas and only one end of the map had a starting area with an exit large enough for larger units that are “Rigid” to be able to move out from. This meant that in several of the games I was unable to bring my biggest unit out since I drew the short straw and got the wrong end of the map for my large, rigid droid. This map was a great advantage for characters with stealth, but not so good for armies like mine to get minis to assist each other to increase my likelihoods of hitting high defense figures like the ones that were preferentially selected by most of my opponents. So, lesson learned. Guess if I plan on trying to participate in another tournament I’ll try to build more armies to help cover other possibilities of the problems maps pose. Second tournament: This was a sidekick event where each player built an army with just two figures of no more than 100 points total. Of the figures I have, only 6 could really be combined together to get near that. I ended up using the X-1 and the Vulture Droid in Walking Mode for a total of 94 points. I lost all 3 matches, but came very close to at least killing one figure in the first match. After that I barely scratched the others. Interestingly, one of the guys played me in a match with me playing a different army that he wanted to test out. He handed me two droids, specifically the Sith Heavy Assault Droid. These two droids were only a few points more than what I was playing with (49 for the assault droids vs 48 and 46 for my X-1 and Vulture respectively), but they had more health, better defenses and better hit ratings than what I was playing with. I guess they really aren't trying to point balance any of the figures from any set with any other set (or if they are, they are only balancing against the last few sets).