Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-33863009-20180302134124/@comment-454133-20180303074431

Competitive games are generally 100 point standard play.

I'm probably so used to it that I'm forgetting some things, but a few do change. You cannot measure distance or arcs unless using an effect that instructs you do do so. It's all "theater of the mind" stuff -- you have to imagine in your head.

In casual play people are often forgiving of mild mistakes, e.g. oops forgot to put my shield tokens on, or forgot to take my action or drop my bomb. Competitive play often is less forgiving, and particularly in tournaments they'll just say no (missed opportunity -- it's too late).

Make sure you're careful about not bumping ships when you're moving around. I like to use my fingernail instead of my finger when holding a component down, since the tip of my fingernail won't stick to the surface and lift it up when I try to extract my hand. ;)

In a competitive environment people will expect you to do your maneuvers and bumping well instead of just eyeballing them. They can show you how to resolve overlapping ships with precision, and how to measure range without smacking ships. If you're flying through a ship and placing your templatge is awkward, quite often you'll want to use a placeholder (usually the 1 straight maneuver template, or 2 for a large ship), either placing it in the ship's guides or along its side. Then lift the ship away, set it aside, complete your maneuver, and return the other ship to its position using the guide to get it right where it belongs. People at the game store can show you many great tricks like this.

Tournaments are timed, usually either 60 or 75 minutes per match. They're often shorter than that because one side eliminates the other, but if a game is still going on when time is called, those players have to finish their round and then count up points. Points are based on ships you've killed (or for large ships, even half-killed). The cost of the ship and all its upgrades when it was fielded is its point value, and killing it gives you that many points. So a Black Squadron Pilot with Crack Shot is worth 15 points (even if it spent its crack shot). Large Ships grant half points (rounded up) if you brought them to half their combined shield + hull or lower. If you destroy all the ships in your opponent's fleet you get the full 100 points (even if they only spent 97 on their fleet). If you kill 67 points worth of ships and your opponent gets 52, your score is written as 67-52 (67 to 52, not minus).

This will often change how you play in a tournament, and how you build your fleet. An expensive ship that's easy to kill is a tempting target because it is worth so many points. But inexpensive ships might be shot at anyway simply because of opportunity, or because they're easier to take down for small point awards. In a tournament you need to be efficient with your ship's design -- make sure it's served its purpose and paid for itself before it dies. Often you won't fill all your upgrade slots, simply to spread points across your ships more carefully. Adding an upgrade is less about "because I have the slot" and more about "what does this get me in return for the points?".

Tournaments use these points to determine a Margin Of Victory (MOV), which is the difference between your and your opponent's points (plus some other math, I'm not quite sure... I think a 100-0 victory is 200 MOV; let the TO handle it, he knows what he's doing). This is used for choosing who fights who in the next round, and for determining the victor between players with the same number of wins at the end of the tournament. Sometimes improving your MOV means targeting ships you know you can take down (e.g. maybe leaving that shield-regenning Poe Dameron alone and killing his buddy instead). It also means you have to be careful about what points you give away -- large ships are an asset and a liability in that respect. They can be powerful and devastating, but they can also leak points when they take half damage. Maybe you'll graze the opponent's Falcon just enough to grab half points before it flies out of range, then return your focus to his buddy.

In tournaments you usually cannot proxy cards or just work off of a printed out fleet -- you need to have each card out on the table (which is a pain if the table has very little room -- hah).

But if we're talking about really competitive play, then the largest difference isn't getting used to a few more strictly-enforced rules. Those are reasonably easy and it just comes with time, experience, and asking questions. The largest change from casual games to highly competitive is the types of fleets you'll face, and the expertise of the players. The more competitive the atmosphere, the more you'll feel the difference between the top-meta fleets assembled with all the right cards, vs a casual fleet assembled with what you own when you're first getting started. I recommend you resist the urge to try to keep up with them! More competitive means you'd need more expansions to provide the ships and cards needed to compete at that top level (e.g. the main reason people still buy the U-Wing, despite its weakness at launch, is it comes with Expertise). It's easy to end up spending too much chasing that top meta. And just assembling a fleet that looks fun won't compete against someone who's spent months practicing the best fleet being talked about on the internet... and sometimes those fleets are not much fun to fly. :(  Unless you really want to be the very best, like no one every was (Pokemon!), then the race to the top will just be expensive and demoralizing.

Thankfully, game stores are not all about competitive play; casual matches are common, and even some competitions are casual and light-hearted. IMO these are the most fun! Competitions don't have to be win-at-all-costs, and there's a wide range between casual and top competitive with lots of events and individual games in-between. Regionals and straight-rules tournaments for valuable prizes might be very competitive, but even there you might lose your first or second battle, and drop down into the rankings where you're more at home among more relaxed or green players (it's the way tournament pairings are designed -- the top players fight each other after a round or two).

Campaign Against Cancer is like that -- the unofficial rule is to bring fun stuff, and the few who bring top fleets end up playing against each other for the rest of the day while the rest of us have fun! So don't let those top fleets get ya down. Right now it's Miranda-Nym and Harpoons that annoy everyone, before that it was everything Dengar. The game goes in phases. Even with all that top-meta nonsense, in fact especially because of it, people love the more casual stuff.

In my experience the X-Wing community is extremely friendly. So the next step is to head to a game store in your area on a night when they host X-Wing, ideally not on a tournament night (at least at first) so you can learn a bit first. Ask someone to show you to ropes, and usually someone will be happy to do so. They can walk you through any rules or steps you don't know about, give you suggestions for how to build your fleet with the ships & cards you have, etc.

And at least in my area, a fantastic thing about playing in tournaments is often you'll get cards or other rewards for doing so. Promo alt-art cards are often given to all players, ships might be raffled off, you can get neat components like acryllic focus tokens, and sometimes a player will give out some of his extra Unique cards to new players (I do this from time to time to encourage new players and say "thank you for joining us tonight!"). And even when you lose or don't get anything, a tournament can be such a fun experience.

I personally have a habit attending tournaments with fleets that are not top meta. I don't really like to fly what's most powerful or most popular, so I'll fly something quirky instead. Sometimes I'll win with it too. ^_^  This is relevant to new players too: you can win tournaments without flying the top meta; practicing and developing your skill can make you very strong. In fact, its a great way to challenge yourself to do your best with a fleet you love. When Dengar and TIE Defenders were all the rage (before their nerfs), I was flying a B-Wing, X-Wing, and HWK and rocking with them, despite all three suffering in the meta even back then. ^_^

A couple more recommendations: For longer tournaments, maybe have a water bottle and even a simple snack on hand (make sure it's easy to work with -- nothing awkward or sloppy). This is most important for myself -- I'm hypoglycemic and my body hates me on a personal level, so I make sure to have stuff to stay hydrated and keep my blood sugar level up, since these are both methods my body tries to use to assassinate me. ;)  Everybody's different, but if you find yourself needing a snack, pack a water bottle and some Belvita crackers or a protein bar or something like that with your x-wing ships so it's available for you.

In a tournament you probably want to play your fleet at least once or twice beforehand. Knowing your fleet accounts for a lot -- you forget cards less often, you know how your ships move, and you know your strengths and weaknesses.

Have fun.

Draw up a checklist of components to pull out. I had one for a while and it helped me a lot, speeding up the process of getting ready.

Talk with the people at the store and make friends. Seriously, the community is awesome.

Help new players once you've gotten the hang of things. Paying it forward does a lot of good!

IMO learn how you want to organize your components during games. The table doesn't always have lots of space, and you want to be able to find everything easily, and fit all your cards and components in the area available. I like to assemble my maneuver templates a certain way; I see other people just pile them together and then they spend half the match searching for the 2 straight inside the pile, and I don't know how they can stand it. ;)

There's lots of acryllic stuff like maneuver templates, rulers, tokens etc that you'll see people sporting. There's some utility to the rulers and maneuver templates (especially as your cardboard ones start to wear down), but most of this stuff is unnecessary bling, just for fun and/or looks. Don't worry about it for now; the stuff FFG provides with each expansion is usually all you need. That's money you might enjoy more if it's spent on an expansion that excites you... Mind you I'm saying this as a boring 34-year-old, so maybe this just makes me lame, but it is my pragmatic recommendation. (a fair response is a sarcastic "Thanks Dad", hahaha)

Look around at how people store their x-wing ships, cards, and other components. There's lots of ways to do it and I've been meaning to go through the options, take pictures, etc and post lots of ideas to the wiki to help people out. But in general, once you feel like you have enough stuff that an organization method is needed to simplify transport (and protect from damage), the simple and affordable option is tackle or hardware boxes. Your local Walmart, Lowes or Home Depot etc should have tool boxes or tackle boxes with lots of individual sections for fishing hooks or nails etc, and these tend to work perfectly for x-wing ships. ^_^  And for $5 or $10 or so a piece, they're a good way to get started. I differ a lot from other people on how to store cards... but there's multiple good ways to do that too. Just like the acryllic stuff, don't worry too much about the elaborate/expensive methods. There's crazy stuff like expensive 3D-Printed containers for each ship, or foam mats that hold each ship like you would for delicate warhammer models. All unnecessary -- unlike a lot of tabletop models, most X-Wing ships are quite durable, and as long as their small guns aren't taking a hard knock they're going to be fine. Simple works great, and people at the stores will be able to recommend some very pragmatic methods.

Sorry for the wall of text. I hope something in there helps?