played a couple games of X-wing today. my younger brother spent his Xmas money on a bunch of X-wing sets (IIRC, a core set, the rebel and imperial aces sets, singles for a TIE and Interceptor, the Falcon, and the Slave I)
he'd played it with friends before but we were both fairly new to it. first game was the 'tutorial' scenario with Luke's X-wing vs the two TIE's. he flew the TIE's, i had the X-wing. i won that one handily due to a mix of bad tactics on his part (early on he split his forces trying to get fancy, and didn't anticipate that i'd turn.. which put me in a great place to shoot up the weaker of the two TIE's.) in the end the X-wing didn't even have a scratch.
the 2nd game was a larger affair, 100pts each. i had the basic versions of the A-wing, X-wing, B-wing, and YT-1300, with about 11 points of the upgrades.
he had 3 Interceptors and 1 TIE, all special pilots (Fel, 2 royal guard, and howlrunner, IIRC) and tricked out with as many upgrades as he could fit.
that game was a bit of a mess (we added asteroids to the play area, and trying to avoid those just led to several multiple ship pileups), and we wound up attriting each other fairly heavily.. eventually it was down to Fell and howlrunner vs my B-wing and an A-wing.. the B-wing killed itself taking a risk for a better shot (it had a crit that meant the maneuver inflicted damage.. then it flew through an asteroid.. :-[ ) and then Howlrunner finished off the A-wing.
it was very close up till the last couple turns though.. a bit like a battletech game, once ships started being lost, a bunch went in a short time.
while i'd already spent my Xmas money (on some movies and things that had been on my list but i didn't get), i'm going to try and sell back some of my used books and DVD's to the local Hastings, see if i can get in-store credit enough to get some ships of my own.