A Farewell to S-Foils

I worked on the X-Wing Miniatures Game for several years, from the Shadow Caster in First Edition through most of Second Edition’s lifespan. Working with the miniatures team at FFG did a lot for me – professionally and personally, I look back on the time I had with that team and with the wider X-Wing community very fondly.

So in light of the news of the conclusion of the current era of X-Wing, I wanted to reflect back on this game and its impact. Not on miniatures games, but on me. Today, I’ll provide a bit about my personal history with the game. In a subsequent post, I’ll dive into three lessons I took from my time on X-Wing that extend beyond the game’s wide wingspan.

Parallel Flight

Photograph of Sam Gregor-Stewart, Andrew Fischer, and myself playing some Commander at GenCon 2015

Oddly (or perhaps fittingly), X-Wing and I had tenures at Fantasy Flight Games that lasted roughly the same amount of time. When I joined the RPG team in 2011, X-Wing was in its early days of development, and I participated in some of the Wave 1 playtests. I remember the buzz around the office as we awaited news of the sales on the first print run. Would this big bet in a new gaming space pay off? In retrospect, the answer would end up being a resounding “Yes,” but at the time, it felt far from assured. But once the first print run sold out immediately, the writing was on the wall: X-Wing was going to be big. And beyond its sales, it was one of the products of that era that helped launch the studio to new heights. As Andrew Navaro discussed on the Earthborne Rangers Podcast, X-Wing was a huge part of FFG’s development as a studio, bringing about advancements in design, distribution, production, organized play, and more.

My path also diverged from FFG’s around the same time X-Wing’s did, in late 2020. Going freelance was a big life step for me, and it was apparently well-timed. I met Brendan at OOMM Games (now Open Owl Studios), and, of course, we all know how that went (but if you don’t for some reason, hey, check out Stonesaga!) This new course also gave me the opportunity to pursue other exciting opportunities like Star Trek: Into the Unknown with WizKids and design consulting on the forthcoming Stormlight Roleplaying Game from Brotherwise Games. I’m excited to write more about these games in the coming days, but right now, we’re here for X-Wing.

Jumping into the Cockpit

Star Wars Celebration 2017

At FFG, I came to X-Wing largely by chance. As I mentioned, I’d playtested it early on in my time at the studio. However, at the time, I tended to play hobby-oriented wargames like Warhammer Fantasy (now The Old World), Dust Warfare, and, of course, my longtime frenemy Warhammer 40,000. I bought ships for my friends as gifts, but beyond a few teaching games, I didn’t really touch the game for years.

But then, years later, a chance to work on X-Wing came up. Frank Brooks and Alex Davy had carried the game line for years, and wanted opportunities to explore other projects (which eventually gave us things like the Fury of Dracula reboot and Star Wars: Legion). I knew Star Wars well from my time producing RPGs, and I knew miniatures games, so I was asked if I would want to take on X-Wing. It felt like a risk. I knew I liked making RPGs, and I was working toward being lead designer on a game of my own. But I was also curious to see what this new opportunity might bring. I decided to take a risk.

This turned out to be a fantastic decision. The growing miniatures team at FFG was a fantastic creative group, from fellow designers to producers to sculptors to marketing to organized play to the massive and deeply passionate playtesters. I’ve written about design lessons from X-Wing and other games before, but I want to emphasize that these games happened because of the hard work of a ton of people well beyond the design team. It was a group effort extraordinaire, and I’m honored to have been a part of it.

Beyond everything we did in the studio, I was always amazed by the level of passion and creativity I saw players of the game bringing to the table (often literally). In RPGs, I rarely got to see the effect of my work so directly or dramatically. For RPGs, we’d get emails and letters periodically and we ran games at GenCon, but RPGs are predominantly played in the home, privately. Nothing compared to the thrill (and trepidation) of walking into a tournament hall packed with hundreds of people. The scale of interaction with the players was just totally different.

And at these events, people would dress up as their favorite pilots, modify and paint their ships, create their own game formats for events, produce absurdly well-made tokens and alt-arts for their opponents, and hone the competitive art of the game to a razor edge. It was a little intimidating to be responsible for an important part of a game that so many people cared about, especially when my decisions were under scrutiny. I didn’t get it right every time on design, and I learned a ton from the mistakes I made. I learned more about running a fake economy than I ever thought possible. But every time I went to an event, I was reminded exactly what made my job really special: the community of people who cared enough to come out and play it.

The Twisting Trails We Leave

The latest batch of forces painted and ready to scrap with some Cylons or Rebels. Now to print up that Rygel card…

Since leaving FFG, I have continued to watch the X-Wing community, mostly from afar but with the occasional podcast appearance or catch-up with longtime players. And through the ups and downs, I’ve been pleased to see a consistent trend over the years: people want to play X-Wing and they find a way to make that experience awesome for themselves and others. This isn’t true of all games. Sometimes even big hits vanish quickly for a variety of reasons: player fatigue, lack of availability, or dissolution of the community.

But other games endure, living on at the table long after their days as products are over. One of my favorite games, Mordheim, maintains a highly engaged core community of players despite minimal support for the last two decades and a hard-to-acquire rulebook. I didn’t even discover Mordheim until long after its days on store shelves had passed. But passionate players have kept the fires burning, taught me how to play, and helped me set up a warband. So while this might be a “Farewell to S-foils” in a certain sense, I don’t think it’s an ending. I just see too much excitement in this community for the game to go quietly into the night. I’ll certainly keep putting X-Wing on the table (extremely casually, mostly with homebrewed ships from whatever sci-fi show I watched most recently - bonus points if you recognize the ships above). If you love the game, I hope you do, too!

Late Update: My good friend Gavin Duffy, an X-Wing producer for much of my time on the line, has sent me some wonderful pictures of the team I previously didn’t have! Check us out eating hot wings and playing mini-golf!

Hot-Wings, TMG, photo courtesy Gavin Duffy

Arc-Dodging Hazards on the Green, courtesy Gavin Duffy