Star Wars: X-Wing – Battle Over Endor Rebel Preview

Battle Over Endor adds ten new Standard Loadout ship cards to the Rebel faction. These cards can be used in the scenario included with this Scenario Pack or added to your squads for Standard play. This article will examine the new pilots and see how they can each fit into the faction’s strategies.

First, each Rebel pilot in the pack has the new talent, “It’s a Trap!” This talent encourages you to fly close to your friends. Unlike the Imperial talent “No Escape”, this talent works best with longer range attacks. If an enemy is attacking you at range 1, by themselves, you’ll need two other friendly ships nearby to get the reroll—so make sure to keep those formations tight!

Lando Calrissian brings a lot of interesting tricks to the table in his Millennium Falcon. Lando is a gambler, and his abilities reflect that. After performing a red action, including the red focus from overlapping, he has a 50% chance of removing the stress. This often will come into play when he performs his red coordinate linking into a red focus. If the High Stakes roll for the coordinate comes up as a hit or crit result, Lando is unstressed and able to push his luck with a red focus action. If it doesn’t, then he’s stuck and cannot focus. Fortunately for Lando, his banks are blue thanks to Nien Nunb as a copilot, and his modified title will give him rerolls on attack and defense while he is stressed. Not one to come under prepared, Lando still has a few more tricks: at the start of the Activation Phase, he can declare when he wants to move. If you need to move early to make sure to complete a move before your opponent can block, choose 1. If you need to wait to react to an opposing ace, choose 6. You’ll know who first player is in time to use the ability. At the start of the Engagement Phase, Lando can perform a barrel roll at the cost of a jam token. If he doesn’t have anything to jam off, this will power his title! Finally, if he’s hit by an attack, he can make a depleted attack back at his attacker. Unlike some other bonus attacks, he gets the deplete token first, then makes the attack, so the attack is weaker, but this also means that you won’t be punished on future attacks for using this ability.

The Rebel faction is known for its T-65 X-Wings, and three new ones are added in this pack. S-foils have been added as a chassis ability to the ship. If you boost, either as the white boost or the red boost linked to the focus action, you’ll gain a deplete token. As for the pilots, Wedge is a high initiative ace with a good balance of offense (Predator and Advanced Proton Torpedoes) and defense (an extra Shield and a pilot ability to gain a focus token for defense). He’s not specialized in one thing, so effective use will depend on knowing what role he needs to take on any given turn. Yendor is more offensively focused: you’ll usually have a focus and target lock on your first turn of combat, thanks to your astromech, and might be strained using your pilot ability during your Plasma Torpedo shot, so that you can hold onto your lock for the next turn’s attacks. Be careful not to overextend Yendor, as a strained X Wing can be destroyed quickly! Finally, Kendy Idele has an assortment of support tools. Ion Missiles will help control enemy movement, her droid lets her turn around once per game without stress, chaff particles can find a use for otherwise unused focus results, and her ability lets her help a friendly ship in trouble. Remember to roll defense dice even for attacks that roll no hits, as she might be able to use the Chaff to remove a deplete from boosting, or an enemy target lock!

Rebel RZ-1 A-Wings made a big splash at the Battle Over Endor. The three featured in this scenario pack have Vectored Cannons as their chassis ability and have bullseye-focused secondary weapons. Arvel Crynyd is especially exciting if your opponent brought a large ship to the table. When Arvel performs a SLAM action, he will be destroyed at the end of it. There’s no avoiding it. Hopefully, his SLAM maneuver overlaps the enemy large ship. If he’s damaged and about to be destroyed, this is a good way to make sure his loss is not in vain. Otherwise, he has an extra shield and a good defensive ability, plus proton rockets, so he’s still useful, even if there are no opposing large ships. Tycho Celchu also brings proton rockets to the party, and he can reload them! With his ability, you can reload and fire in the same turn, but the rocket attack will be weakened – a small price to pay for the ability to fire them off so often. Finally, Gemmer Sojan is in it for the long-haul, and will never get all blanks on defense when it matters! In addition to effectively ignoring one attack per turn, Gemmer can also use Chaff Particles to avoid locks and stress. On the offensive, Gemmer wants to line up a bullseye whenever possible, where Precision-Tuned Cannons and the Target-Assist Algorithm, if necessary, will hit much harder than a typical A-Wing does.

The final ship in this expansion is the A/SF-01 B-Wing. All the B-Wings in this pack want to be stressed in the Engagement Phase, so plan to use your barrel rolls a lot! Typically, in the first round of combat, you’ll use Gyro-Cockpit to gain an evade token. On future turns, you can drop bombs from your side, but be prepared to move fast to avoid being in the blast radius! Of the pilots, Adon Fox has a very low initiative, but will always roll a bonus defense die if you can stress him. This should encourage attacks to look for easier foes. Gina and Braylen should always be flown as a pair, due to their abilities. You can use the customizable version of one of them to power the other. Both hit very hard with double modified attacks and have an extra shield for defense.

Battle Over Endor brings exciting new tools for Rebels to add to their squads and fight for freedom. Enjoy trying them out in your local game store!