X-Wing Imperial Aces Review

Hi, Thanks for stopping by at my blog. This post is my review of the new X-Wing Imperial aces boxed set from Fantasy flight games.

The box contains two TIE Interceptor ships with alternative paint jobs, an A5 booklet with a new mission included, Pilot and modification cards (detailed below), a TIE Interceptor movement dial for each ship, bases and base inserts for each ship. There are also a collection of other counters included which include: x6 Asteroid damage counters, x6 protoype mission counters (for the asteroids), x2 shield markers, x2 stress tokens, x2 evade tokens, x2 focus tokens, squad markings for squad 32 and 33 and a set of target lock markers.
I purchased this set from one of my local hobbies stores Games Without Borders, a new shop in Carlisle, anyone local to Cumbria should check him out, he’s a good guy and his range is expanding all the time (And he’s just expanded to a new bigger shop too!)

X-Wing Imperial Aces

The RRP of this set is about £25, which for two small ships isn’t too bad. normally, a ship on it’s own has an RRP of £11.99, so it’s just over double. You get a few extra cards to a normal set too, so it works out to be about the same price per ship.
Currently, at least in the UK, this is the only way to pick up the TIE interceptors anyway, so even just looking at it like that it’s worth picking a set up!

The cards included in this set are as follows:

Pilot Cards

• Carnor Jax (Pilot skill:8)
• Tetran Cowall (Pilot skill:7)
• Kir Kanos (Pilot skill:6)
• Lieutenant Lorrir (Pilot skill:5)
• Royal Guard Pilot (x2) (Pilot skill:6)
• Saber Squadron Pilot (x2) (Pilot skill:4)

Elite Talent Cards

• Opportunist (x2)
• Push The Limit (x2)

Modification Cards

• Hull Upgrade (x2)
• Shield Upgrade (x2)
• Targeting Computer (x2)

Title Cards

• Royal Guard TIE (x2)

Info Cards

• Boost
• Modifications & titles

X-Wing Imperial Aces – Box Contents

The TIE Interceptor ship in the game is a really good ship, with a pretty solid “3, 3, 3, 0” stat line. Giving it very good firepower, very good agility and a not too shabby amount of hit points. The place where the Interceptor really shines though is in it’s actions. even the basic Interceptor can focus, barrel roll, boost and evade. The Boost action is a particular favourite of mine. While it might only let you move “1” forward, when you add on the size of the base, with a fast move on your dial you can easily get across the table in only a couple of moves.
Coupled with the “Push the limit” upgrade card you can perform two actions in one turn. This does give you a stress token, but with plenty of green manouvers on the dial you won’t keep it long (or, if you’re smart & have taken the Lambda shuttle you could always off load the stress token onto that straight away!)

The named characters in the set come with some pretty cool special rules, with Kir Kanos giving an additional free hit at long ranges, Carnor Jax stops close up ships spending focus or evade tokens and Lt. Lorrir can gain a stress token to use the angled 1 token when barrel rolling instead of the straight 1.
These ships are pretty cheap in terms of points too, a red guard interceptor, with pilot skill 6 clocks in at 22 points, and can be given one upgrade, where a basic x wing with rookie pilot is 21 points with only pilot skill 2.

So far overall, I do think that the Imperial ships are a little too cheap. Having normally ended up playing on the rebel side in most of our games I find it hard to make a usable fleet under 150 points. The temptation is always there to use the best pilots, and to add all the upgrade cards you can, but that piles the points on too, usually I find myself outnumbered 2:1 when playing as the rebels and when getting up close that can really hurt.
Hopefully when the new ships come out in wave 4 with any luck they might be a bit cheaper, giving me the option to field a couple of cheaper ships along side my expensive ones.

contents 2

You might have noticed the damage tokens on the card layouts above, these, and the 6 small square tokens are for use with the new mission that comes with the set. The mission seems like a pretty good one, although I haven’t tried it yet. One of the ships is assigned the “prototype” token, and becomes the objective of the game, when it flies near an asteroid with a marker on it it gains an ability. These asteroids can be shot at by the rebel player and the damage tokens are used instead of damage cards to mark their hit points.

Cards

As usual the cards all match up with the rest of the set. With the Actual ship cards having the imperial logo on the back and the information cards having artwork. Would have been nice if these art cards had some alternate designs as they all look the same, but hey, you can’t have everything!

The packaging the ships comes in looks pretty cool. FFG have stuck to a pretty standard layout for the basic ship packaging and the “large” sets, the box for this set is the same size and design as the Falcon , Lambda and Salve 1 packs. The ships in the plastic case look good, however, unlike the other sets they waste quite a bit of space. This isn’t really an issue from a selling point of view, but afterwards, if like me you keep your ships in the plastic case they came in and put those into a larger box, it wastes a lot space. Eventually, I’ll have too many ships to store them like this anyway, and I’ll have to buy something like a KR multicase with custom cut foam, but for now, I have them in the plastic boxes for protection, and this one is taking up more room than it should!

X-Wing Imperial Aces Ships

The paint jobs on these ships are pretty basic. That’s not a complaint either, but don’t rush out to buy it thinking that because it’s an alternative paint job it’s going to be a “better” paint job than the others, because it isn’t. I’ve been impressed by the level of consistency the x-wing ships have had across the range, but that doesn’t mean to say that the level of detail is anything other than just basic. One day, when I’ve ran out of other figures to paint (ha!) I might revisit these and give them a custom job, but for now, they are absolutely fine and will serve me well just as they are.

X-Wing Imperial Aces

The red ship is the weaker paint job of the two ships, but still more than acceptable.

X-Wing Imperial Aces

I think it’s just that the bluey grey of the TIE fighters compliments the design quite well, but the more basic ship actually looks a lot better in my opinion.

All the cards laid out

Here’s all the cards laid out, with the overlapping cards being the ones you get two of. I’ve purchased some clear card protectors for all my cards, the large cards are exactly the same size as Magic the gathering cards, so I just purchased a set of clear protectors for these and they fit perfectly.
The smaller cards can be a bit trickier to get protectors to fit, so I just bought the cheap card protectors that fit the standard size cards, and cut them down. They’re about 99p per 100 so I don’t really mind cutting them up. When the proper protector decks become available I’ll buy those, but these are doing a good enough job in the mean time.

Thanks for reading my post.

Chris