Here we are, 43ish days from the release of X-Wing Second Edition. Excited doesn’t begin to describe what’s going on in my head. My son and I have been playing X-Wing for about 18 months now at Huzzah Hobbies. Even though we routinely lose, we do have a lot of fun along the way. My son has a lot of fun building lists, and we both have fun playing games at the store and at home.

But, to put it simply, we just don’t play enough games to be very good. Really, we play maybe two games a month. At the last store tournament, I asked someone “so how much would you say you play in a month?” His response was “not much, I play here (Huzzah), at Island, at (some store in Maryland), maybe another pickup game at (some other store). I watch a lot of streams and I play Fly Casual against the AI when I’m watching TV.” That’s an awful lot for “not much.”

I have a dumb little goal to “get better at X-Wing”. To make that SMART Goal, that may be a little more like “I’d like to win a Store Championship by September 2019.” To make that happen, I am going to have to log a lot more games. And most of that will have to be on Vassal or Fly Casual. I’ll be setting a weekly goal of hours played in the next few weeks.

Second Edition feels like a decent place to start fresh in the game. A lot of the mechanics and meta have been cleaned up, and it should be much more a game of positioning and strategy. I’m also excited by the Escalation Format … I hope it give people (like me) an opportunity to compete without having to dump a lot of money into the game. I mean, I’ll buy one of each ship, a few more of the swarmy ships, but I’m not going to buy three Lambdas or whatever.

I am a bit conflicted on this “goal.” It’s very frivolous. It doesn’t make the world a better place. It doesn’t make me healthier. It doesn’t increase the time I spend with my family. It doesn’t make me better at my job. Yet, it’s fun. Even though I stink, I really enjoy pushing little plastic spaceships around a table. This will be my one “splurge” goal for the time being. In the next few weeks I’ll be setting some other goals, and possibly documenting them here.