Three Personal Lessons from X-Wing
Three Lessons from X-Wing
In my last post, I reflected back a bit on my time with X-Wing. Today, I want to share three anecdotes from this time that gave me insights beyond the game’s considerable wingspan. I’ve broken these down into different stages: a beginner lesson as I learned the game, an intermediate lesson as I gained conceptual mastery of it, and an advanced lesson as I reflected on the “why” of it all.
[Beginner] Give Yourself Room to Maneuver
Fragment (Depicting Airplanes) (Dress or Furnishing Fabric), 1920-39, Unknown
Also a pretty accurate depiction of my first game of X-Wing.
When I took the assignment to work on X-Wing, one of the first things I did was play a bunch of practice games to get up to speed. And in the first of these, I played against Alex Davy. Naturally, as most first-time players do, I ran my ships into each other immediately after setup, causing my plan to fall apart, at which point Alex’s ships swooped in to crush me. In the wake of my multi-ship pile-up, I remember Alex said “You’ll learn how to avoid doing that,” or something to that effect. And he was (mostly) right. Over time, I got a sense for the spacing of the maneuvers.
And, as I designed further waves of X-Wing, I started to discover the importance of creating that same room to maneuver in design. A lot of X-Wing’s troubles when I joined in late First Edition stemmed from the early choices that created hard bounds on the game, like permanently fixed points values or high-end, absolute effects like 360-degree firing arcs. Even the 100-point scale for list-building made it hard to carve out a place for new cards. Second Edition’s main design goal was giving the game room to maneuver in the very long term without crashing into itself. Tools like adjustable points values, systemic curtailing of effects that fed fun eutrophy, and subtitles for pilots to allow repeatability of iconic characters were all meant to give the game the space to fly free for as long as it needed.
In life, maintaining flexibility for myself has been important, too. As I discussed in the last post, it would have felt safer in some ways to stick to RPGs rather than shift into a different field of games. But by expanding my options with experience on X-Wing, I was able to give my career the room it needed to reach new spaces and give myself the confidence to take the chance on new projects. By entering a new space, I made personal and professional connections with tons of new people. I already knew many of the names and faces in the RPG space, but miniatures games were a whole new field, and both Stonesaga and Star Trek: Into the Unknown stem in part from connections I made by working on X-Wing.
[Intermediate] Consider the Costs of Jousting
Boat Joust, Jean Rigaud, 18th century
This was honestly the best public domain jousting image I could find. It both was and was not what I expected when I clicked.
For someone who has played a lot of X-Wing over the years, I don’t win all that often. Even at my best, I would say I never got past “competent enough not to crash my ships into each other while executing a plan.” Alex and Frank, my elders on the game, could go to tournaments and place reliably, as could Brooks, who joined after me. But executing visual-spacial challenges is just not one of my strengths. However, it was my job to understand the game at various levels, from basement tables to Worlds. Eventually, I became extremely versed in the tactics and strategy of X-Wing and I learned how to mentally engage with the challenges players better than myself faced. I’ve written a bit about these competitive players in the past, and how much I enjoyed working on a competitive game despite not being much of a “shark” myself.
As you start playing X-Wing, you develop a preferred setup and flight pattern for your list. At first, your losses are attributable to failures of execution (like my ill-fated ship pileup in that first game with Alex). But once you can execute your approach reliably, you start to notice something important: you don’t always win, and more importantly, there’s a specific pattern the among the games you lose. From the outset, if you and your opponent just fly straight at each other, guns blazing (often called “jousting”) somebody has a mathematical advantage. Assessing how your list fares against your opponent’s in a joust is a crucial skill in X-Wing. Essentially, this is the same concept as the famous Magic: The Gathering strategy question of “Who’s the Beatdown?”, seen in Space Owl’s X-Wing version “Who’s the Joust?”, too. When you’re outgunned, deciding to just joust is unquestionably easier than adjusting your attack vector on the fly, but shifting the terms of the engagement in your favor is more likely to give you the win in the end.
About a year before I left FFG, I had been working on X-Wing for roughly four years, and I found myself asking “Where will I be in five years if I stay on this course?” And I was uncomfortable with the answers I imagined, because while I loved my job, my team, and working on X-Wing, I also wanted to create games of my own - something I just didn’t have hours in the day to pursue. Doing something new looked like a huge risk. But what I wasn’t considering, which I can now look back and see clearly, is that there was a huge risk to not doing something new, too.
Expanded beyond zero-sum situations like 1 on 1 competitive games, I think this lesson looks like this: following a conventional path or established plan is often appealing, and certainly can be valuable as you build your skills or experience. But it can also be an unconscious constraint, enabling you to forget that that the conventional path is still one you are choosing. You aren’t locked in, and taking a moment to ask “Is this course the best one for me?” might reveal alternatives lead to more appealing places.
[Advanced] Choose to Optimize for Fun
The Flying Philosopher, Unknown, estimated 19th Century
This probably isn’t an efficient way to fly, but he does look like he’s having fun.
Designing X-Wing meant playing a lot of games of X-Wing for reasons other than fun. From testing the feel of new mechanics to trying out competitive lists in preparation for balance updates, most of our games weren’t primarily played for fun. And yet fun would sneak back in. Sometimes, this just meant the whole room cheering when Luke blasted Darth Vader off the table with a million-to-one shot in a test game. Other times, we would build elaborately crafted lists around an esoteric joke or try absurd combinations just to see what would happen. We would see an interaction at the table and then say “Hold on, what if the Vulture droids could land on asteroids?” and hop back to our computers to type up the ability. Of course, it was work - we had deadlines to meet and problems to solve, but some days the urge to introduce fun for its own sake was just irrepressible.
There’s a game design saying (often attributed to Sid Meier and/or Soren Johnson) that “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” and, as a corollary, “One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect players from themselves.” The saying sticks around for a reason: it’s solid, insightful advice. Individual players will often choose the path of expedience over fun. A player base of sufficient size and motivation will find every single crack in your system. Fun can easily get lost in the hustle and bustle of optimization.
But I think back to those office games - we were literally playing for work, and yet fun would bubble up. We’d choose to make the games more fun than we needed to. In turn, those ideas would often percolate back into new designs. And beyond the office, people were doing this for themselves without our involvement. Individual choices by players matter and people can even (un)optimize the fun back into a game that has gotten stale to them. As often as I talked to competitive players who were running something “meta,” I’d encounter other, equally competitive players fielding creative, highly personal, or just “janky” lists that threw the paradigms of the month out the window in favor of self-expression or fun. I met some players who specialized in one specific ace regardless of that character’s standing in the meta, and others who would jettison their old winning lists and take big risks just to keep things fresh because they knew they loved novel experiences. And from the fan-inspired Aces High or “Mario Kart”-style events at the side tables in the X-Wing hall, there are countless examples of ways people have tweaked the game itself to optimize fun to great results. I saw people choose fun all the time, and I loved those moments.
So when you’re approaching a new list, a new game, new hobby, or a new project, really ask yourself why you’re doing it and what you want to accomplish. If one of your goals is to enjoy yourself, think about how you can actively facilitate that goal. Don’t just make a plan that averts failure, also consider how your plan encourages enjoyment. Build having fun into your strategy at the foundation. And if your assessment reveals that fun really isn’t a priority for you, understand what else is motivating you and ask yourself how best to fulfill that.