Star Wars X-Wing may be out of production, but its legacy lives on, with fan communities continuing to support the game, and exciting new projects from former designers. I spoke to Max Brooke, a former Fantasy Flight Games designer who worked on both editions of X-Wing, to learn about his upcoming new game Precipice – a mech piloting wargame designed to make you feel like you’re really in the cockpit.
Brooke joined FFG as an RPG producer in 2011, doing everything from project management to game design for the Warhammer 40k RPG and Star Wars RPG. “Because we were all mini gamers, the RPG team members often served as playtesting pitch-hitters for the growing miniatures department”. That began with Dust, FFG’s first miniature wargame, before the team “participated in some of the Wave 1 playtests” for X-Wing and “the early testing of Star Wars: Armada”.
An opening appeared for Brooke in the Miniatures design team “around five years into my time at FFG”, and he “stepped into a design role on X-Wing for Wave 9 of 1st edition”, including the Shadow Caster, Fang Fighter, TIE/sf, and ARC-170. “The first wave was sort of an apprenticeship under Alex Davy and Frank Brooks”.
If you played first edition, you might recognize some of Brooke’s work. “One of the first upgrades I designed was Seismic Torpedoes” – single-use weapons that turn asteroids into clouds of deadly debris. “Destructible terrain has always been something I’ve enjoyed”, Brooke says – it shows up substantially in Precipice. In subsequent waves he worked “on ships like the Quadjumper and Skurrg Heavy Bomber, which had interesting movement and position considerations of their own”.
As he recalls it, “One of the challenges of X-Wing 1st Edition was that the design space was incredibly tight. There were barely any levers to pull, and you had to really think outside the box to create interesting new content”.
Brooke worked on the X-Wing 2nd Edition refresh, which he calls “an amazing opportunity to revisit everything we’d all learned about the game and bring together an edition with the design space to last as long as we needed it to”. That included carving out faction identities with specific design ideas, and “assessing which fundamentals we wanted to elevate (flying the ships, rewarding positioning) and what game design elements of 1st Edition had impeded those things”.
Brooke’s involvement with Armada was much lighter. “I never had much formal involvement beyond helping playtest and sitting in on brainstorming sessions as a member of the Miniatures team”, he says. “But I did get to work closely with Michael Gernes and Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, both of whom are friends to this day and close collaborators on Precipice!”
Precipice
Brooke is in the early stages of playtesting Precipice, an original wargame inspired by mecha anime. Some of its X-Wing DNA is immediately apparent. A lot like X-Wing, players build and load out their mechs with rules cards, starting with a core body, then attaching cards for limbs and a head, and equipping those sections with weapons. The game uses a similar action programming sequence, with each player locking in a sequence of commands that their pilot is feeding to their mech before revealing their plans to one another.
But there’s an even more fundamental, and unusual, feature of the game that owes its origins to X-Wing – “the spotlight is always on one unit”. Precipice is a game of duelling mech pilots, with players typically controlling just one model (or two, for those scenarios when mechs can exit their vehicles, Titanfall style). Brooke says the “the biggest influence in this regard” were his “experiences watching people play X-Wing”.
“Consistently, from the most casual tables to the top table at Worlds, players just love flying the ships”, Brooke says. “Ace lists, in which players would focus on a pair of ships, or even a single ship with a disposable wingmate, made up an incredibly popular playstyle”. “Strategic and tactical level games are fun, but I could tell X-Wing was scratching a different itch for a lot of people”, Brooke says, “People want to feel like they’re in the cockpit”.
Despite the popularity of ace lists, X-Wing’s design still assumed that players would control multiple units. But seeing the appeal of this playstyle – and recognizing it as something he wanted to get involved with – set Brooke wondering: “could a game be fun with just one primary piece on the table?”
Brooke thinks that it can, “but it pays to start thinking expansively about what a game piece is in a miniatures game”. Precipice doesn’t just have rules for destructible terrain, they’re a key factor of the design. “This is partly because it’s fun to have your mech smash buildings”, Brooke says, “but it’s also because it’s good for the gameplay loop to have numerous things to interact with on the table – the game gets more interesting if your actions might have larger consequences than you originally intend”.
“Thinking of the battlefield as a set of resources and threats (rather than as a set of modifiers) was critical to designing a game with a single primary miniature”, he adds.
I’ve not yet playtested Precipice, but the rules suggest that you’re going to really feel the weight of the machine under your command. As mechs start lumbering in a direction they build up momentum which will keep them moving the same way at the end of the turn. Even if your piloting is good, your opponent’s unpredictable actions could result in that momentum sending you into the side of a building or through a fuel silo as they knock you off your original course. Taking a particularly hectic turn will see you commit multiple action cards to your mech, but if you pull back more than three cards you’ll apply damaging strain to your mech’s chassis.
“I want both the fun and the challenge of Precipice to be the control of the mech”, Brooke says. “Most mecha miniatures games put the player into a “command and control” role, and abstract a lot of the piloting”, he continues. “For an army-based game, that’s a totally reasonable design decision. But I wanted to do something different with Precipice – I don’t just want to make a game about mechs, I want to make a game about piloting mechs.”
This is the other half of Precipice’s heritage – Brooke is a huge fan of mecha. “One of my biggest inspirations was my early experience playing MechWarrior 3”, he says, “It was hard to get the mech to do what I wanted, but it was incredibly rewarding when it worked!” In other sim games, “from later MechWarrior entries to Strike Suit Zero to Gundam: Battle Operation 2, I noticed that there was often intentional friction inserted into the way the game played, forcing you to consider your moves in advance of trying to execute them”.
That friction between your intentions and the tools you have to execute on them “resonated with what a lot of people reported liking about both X-Wing and Armada”. Brookes says he hopes Precipice will have “somewhat less friction than I had with MechWarrior, but I want people to feel like they’re improving, mastering the system, and becoming more adept as pilots as they play”.
Along with the rules, Brooke is working with collaborators to develop miniatures for the game, “first as STLs for home 3d printing, and hopefully in other forms in the future”, he says. “Getting to see the original designs for the game realized is utterly magical, and the artists and sculptors I’ve had the pleasure of working with are an amazing bunch!”, he adds, but “as excited as I am about our original designs, the game is very much meant to be playable as a “Bring Your Own Mech” experience, too”. “Part of the reason I wanted to make this game was that I have a lot of amazing kits I’d love to put on the table, if only I had a game where they really fit in.”
If you’re intrigued by Precipice, you can get all the playtest documents for the open alpha at the Precipice website. Signing up for the mailing list also gets you access to the Playtest Discord to meet likeminded players. If you give it a shot, hop on over to the Wargamer Discord community and let us know what you think!
Source: Wargamer
