X-Wing Miniatures Game (2015) – Accessibility Teardown

Version Reviewed

Starter Kit: English First Edition

Millennium Falcon: English First Edition

Introduction

We love the X-Wing miniatures game, and that probably came across in our review. Actually, scrap that. It did come across in our review. You think that we’re very witty and handsome. You want to make sure everything that we write gets posted to reddit and stumbleupon to boost our signal. You want to hit all the social share buttons along the top of this post. We can go about our business. Move along.

So now we move on to the accessibility teardown. Many Bothans died to bring you this information. I hope so, anyway. I did send an order to the sluicing mines for them to kill Bothans until the works gummed up. I’ll need to check up to make sure that happened as intended.

Colour Blindness

Colour blindness isn’t a particularly serious issue, but there are a few problematic areas. The striking reds and greens of the attack and defense dice are going to lose something for those with Protanopia and Deuteranopia. They’re still visually distinct, and have different symbols they can roll, but red and green are very easily differentiated by those without colour blindness. The differential between the colour palette for those afflicted by these categories of colour blindness is much reduced:

This somehow seems less epic

There’s a fair amount of colour-coded information on the base indicators, but it’s mirrored by the pilot cards which show the number break-down with iconographic accompaniment. The ease of telling rebel and empire ships is reduced for those with Protanopia and Deuteranopia since the firing arcs for both become impossible to differentiate. Each ship base also has a ship icon on it so the information isn’t lost, just made a little more obscure and trickier to pick out easily in a massed ship battle. And of course, each ship is visually distinct in and of itself – if you can’t tell the side the TIE fighters are on versus the X-Wings you might have broader thematic problems with the game.

Which of these yellows is the dark side?

The rest of the tokens have other encoding information, such as either iconography (focus and evade tokens), form factor (almost everything else) or distinct letters (numerical codes or target locks). The target locks use alphanumeric combinations, but appear in pairs – red for the target, blue for the originator. With all categories of colour blindness (save for monochromacy) you can still make out which is which.

I find your lack of green disturbing

The range markers come in green and red varieties, but this is entirely thematic – the Empire fires green lasers, the rebels fire red, so you can use whichever side appeals based on your faction. You don’t need to worry about it all though.

The movement dials use red and green to indicate easy and stressful maneuvers. While you can usually tell which is which from context (the farther you go along the dial, the more likely it is to be a stressful maneuver) it isn’t always going to be easy to tell. It’s not really something you can ask another player since you’ll reveal your intentions in the process. You can find maneuver lookup tables for each ship easily enough, and they even come with the documentation for the game. A little bit of preparation before playing will be useful in this – print them out or mark them with dots or icons on the manual so you can be sure which is which.

‘As best I can tell, none of these stress me’

We’re going to recommend the X-Wing Miniatures game here – it has a few minor lapses, but nothing that will seriously impact on the flow of play if you’re prepared to do a little bit of homework.

Visual Impairment

Other categories of visual impairment are more of a problem. Some cards have very small iconographic information presented along the bottom, and while the icons are visually distinct and well contrasted they’re small enough to be difficult to make out:

Sir, the odds of successfully identifying the available upgrades are…

These are the ship upgrade slots available, and they’re an important part of setting up a budget-based game – the actual upgrade cards themselves though are clearly indicated on their obverse, although not especially easy to categorise when they’re face up:

I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home. They’re not much bigger than these icons.

The special ability text that goes with particular pilots and upgrades has a readability problem on occasion when it is mixed with symbolic language . most of the icons are distinct and relatively easy to make out, but some are very similar – in particular hits (filled in explosions) and critical hits (outline explosions). You can though almost always work out what’s sensible from context. You’re probably not going to be turning blank dice into critical hits, for example. You’re unlikely to be using a ship-damage action to turn a hit into a critical hit, and so on. There will though be some occasions where it’ll be necessary to ask.

The readability problem extends to the dice, which are non-standard d8s. Gamers with serious visual impairments may have invested in a set of braille dice, and perhaps even have them in the usual range of standard ‘heavy game’ varieties – braille d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s, d12s and d20s are easy enough to procure. If you don’t want the braille varieties you can usually pick up over-sized dice for enhanced readability. Below are a couple of mine, with standard-sized dice alongside them for reference:

Me and my dad

However, if you’ve made the effort to buy accessible dice it won’t help here because the dice have their own face values and these are different for the attack and defence types. You’re going to need a suitable d8, and you’ll need to construct a lookup table for results, such as:

You’re rolling a lot of dice at a time, and rolling them often, and until you memorise this lookup chart you’re going to lose a lot of flow in play. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but something to bear in mind as you assess whether this is a game for you.

A larger problem is in the movement dials, which present only a tiny slice of the possible set of movement options at a time and are often showing similar looking icons for entirely different moves. For example the bank maneuver versus the Segnor’s loop, or the Koiogran turn.

Did you ever have one of those days when you don’t know whether you’re looping or banking?

It’s going to be tricky for players with even relatively minor visual impairments to easily see these without making use of an assistive aid, and the act of doing so may reveal intention.

X-Wing will take up a large amount of space. The standard play mat you can buy is thirty-six inches square, and you’ll often be using all of it. Ships tend to congregate together briefly for battles and then fly wildly around as they maneuver back into the fray. You need a certain degree of ability to tell when and where you’re going to be flying into range of your opponents, and how best to maneuver your ships for tactical advantage. The range finder tool is really just for edge cases and working out the specifics of distance. That’s only viable though if you can reasonably reliably ‘eyeball’ the firing arcs of your ships and locate your enemies inside and out. It’s also difficult to tell in what direction some ships, mostly the base TIE fighters, are facing without being able to easily see the firing arc on their base.

In squadron battles using multiple expansions, it’ll often be necessary to indicate ships with the numerical base tokens. If you’re going to keep track of four separate TIE fighters each will need their own numeric indicator, and it can be difficult enough for sighted players to keep the mental link of what ship is where and what maneuver best suits them. It’ll be difficult too to make out the numbers on the ship base, so a degree of cross-referencing between card and ship and number will be needed.

However, it’s not all bad – the cards uniformly adopt high contrast and readable fonts, and while there are a few problems with sizing of icons it’s mostly fine. The different tactility for most tokens (save for evade and focus) is a welcome design choice and helps in differentiating by touch. The models themselves are reasonably generously proportioned and all but those with the most serious visual impairments should be able to get a reasonable overview of broadly where ships exist even if they may not necessarily know which are which.

We’re going to offer a *very* tentative recommendation here. We think those with minor to the lower-end of moderate visual impairments will *probably* be able to play. We strongly advise though you consider the discussion above before deciding whether or not to part with your cash.

Cognitive Accessibility

You can probably guess from our review that X-Wing is a game that requires deep strategic thinking, tactical awareness and an ability to deal with flexible emergent situations as they occur. These are features that tend to mean it’s inaccessible for those with cognitive impairments.

A considerable degree of reading fluency is required, Many pilots, upgrades, critical hit damage effects and more require the ability to parse reasonably complex conditional logic. This logic then gets passed through an interpretation of symbols and iconography based on the context of the action. Game state can become extremely complex, as can your options available with any given ship. Some pilots have passive abilities that trigger at the beginning or end of game stages. Some upgrades have conditional impact that let you change something of X into something of Y. Ongoing ship damage may require dice-rolls as particular stages begin, or require that from the next turn a particular trait of the ship is altered. Some upgrades may provide actions to a ship that it wouldn’t normally have. Each ship has its own particular style of movement, and its own menu of ‘actions’ it can (usually but not always) perform at the end of the movement phase. Those actions may be extended through upgrades, pilot abilities, and ongoing damage. Some actions may be temporary based on the current availability of a particular discardable upgrade. You may be acting under the effects of focus, or evade. You may be the instigator or victim of a target lock. The dice you roll in an attack is dependent on your range, except for in the cases where it isn’t. You can only fire at an enemy in your front targeting arc, except with weapons where that’s not true, or in ships that have different firing solutions.

There is a lot to keep track of, and a huge amount of compound conditionality in the rule-set. None of the rules are complex in and of themselves, but the net cognitive burden of the combinations is massive.

There’s not a lot of inherent rule synergy. As soon as you start getting into upgrade and pilot combinations though you’ll find that the right pairings will yield powerfully exploitable interrelationships. Some combinations even result in anti-synergies that will cause ongoing problems. For example, the Push The Limit medal permits you to perform a free second action once per round – you can’t do the same action twice, but you can do one of the others you have available. If you also have BB-8 on board, you can also perform a free barrel roll each turn you make an easy maneuver. When taken together, you will have turns where you can boost, focus and barrel roll all in one single round of movement. Understanding the interaction between upgrades is an important element of effective play.

Relatively little though is needed in terms of memory management, except for an understanding of the jargon of play and the meaning of symbols. Both of these things can relatively easily be supported through the use of a bespoke crib sheet. Everything else is available for inspection, and sometimes even in multiple places – tokens exist for allowing players to distribute damage so it goes with the ship itself, or placed on the ship card. There’s a nice amount of potential redundancy if you want to reduce the memory burden lower than what the game itself would usually permit.

As I mentioned in the review, there is a deeply simplistic tutorial version of the game available in the rules – it avoids focus, the use of actions, range combat bonuses, critical hits and more. You can even further ramp down the cognitive complexity by limiting yourself to a small number of ships. This would perhaps bring the game into the level of a tentative recommendation. This fully-skimmed version of the game though has none of the fun or crackling energy of the full fat version. If you have someone that is a huge fan of the franchise and wants to fly an X-wing around shooting at TIE fighters we could offer that as a possibility.

For anyone that wants X-Wing as it actually exists, we can’t possibly recommend it to those with fluid intelligence impairments. We can though offer a recommendation for those with memory impairments only.

Emotiveness

This is a tricky one – X-Wing is a game that will allow you to feel incredibly smart and painfully stupid on a turn by turn basis. It’s a game that emphasises strategic and tactical thinking, and it permits a whole pile of interesting ‘take that’ mechanics as part of the flow of the battle. A ship with a high skill pilot for example might take advantage of the ordering of movement to drop behind a pursuing enemy before unleashing fire at close range on their exposed rear. Oh god that’s so satisfying, but it’s hard to dress it up for the one that fell for the trap as anything other than being duped. When you fail in X-Wing, you fail because you were beaten. Sure, the dice likely played a role in the outcome but fundamentally it’s a game of ensuring the odds are ever in your favour. You will have an occasional game where you just couldn’t roll the right results, but good positioning, strategic nuance and effective use of your flexible options for action will win the day in most cases.

This is, depending on the person you’re dealing with, both good and bad from an emotional perspective. You only rarely feel as if you were robbed of a victory by the inherent luck of the draw, so defeat is at least controllable. However, you also can’t really convincingly blame the dice – when you lost, it was primarily down to you as a player. The issue here comes with how emotional issues may manifest – if they’re due to a lack of control, it’s probably fine. If it’s the sting of losing or the self-recrimination of defeat then there’s going to be a more significant issue.

There isn’t any explicit bluffing or lying in the game, but like most miniature based war-games it does encourage, and even perhaps mandates, a degree of feinting and misdirection. All of this is in the expression of ship movement and not in terms of personal inter-dynamics, so the usual social issues that come along with this shouldn’t be a major factor.

It’s a game of player elimination, but if you’re doing it as a two-team game then elimination is the end state for everyone involved anyway. It’s possible to play games with larger numbers of teams (making use of the Scum and Villainy ships that appear in later expansions), but we’d advise against that when dealing with emotional or behavioural disorders. Games of X-Wing can last a long time, and there are few things as frustrating as standing on the sidelines watching everyone else have fun without you.

Due to the importance that strategy and tactics have in success or failure, X-Wing is a game that can permit for very significant score disparity. Technically, the only winning condition for skirmish battles is all of your enemies leaving the game through one means or another. However, the number of ships you have versus the number your opponent has (and the point values of each) is clear for all to see. Winning a battle with only a laser-scarred TIE fighter left over is one thing. Winning with every ship you had intact and undamaged is something entirely different. Some scenarios too have turn limits, at the end of which the remaining points in play are totted up and used to determine a winner. If you lost badly, then *you* lost badly.

However, it’s a game with an inherently controllable setup – even the randomness of the dice can be modified by upgrades and wise positioning. There’s no need for anyone to begin the game thinking that they are going to lose because of the hand fate dealt them. Likewise, there’s no reason to assume defeat even when things have gone badly for a while.

We offer a tentative recommendation for X-Wing here, As usual we advise you to consider the precise natural of the emotional impact and assess based on your own unique situation.

Physical Accessibility

Physicality is uniformly problematic here. Tokens are small and fiddly for the most part, although the models themselves are reasonably large. However, even the models have detachable bases and these can easily come apart in movement. When moving ships in close quarters and through other ships you can’t just lay down the movement track and follow it. Instead you need to pick up the ship, hold the movement guide over the ship you’re moving through, and move your own through the obstacle before working out where its movement probably would have ended. Fitting the maneuver tools into the guide tracks can be tricky, and they need to be used at both the start and end of maneuvers. It’s very easy, especially in a tight battle, to knock ships out of position and this can have significant gameplay impact – the difference of a centimeter may be enough to move a ship from being out of range, and the difference of a degree of orientation may entirely alter the dynamics of the game state.

Some cards are half-size and will need to be flipped over at certain points of play, and there is a constant traffic of stress, evade, shield and focus tokens.

The largest issue though is going to be in the maneuver dials. Everything else you can have handled for you, but the dials are secret and must be manipulated privately to indicate intention. However, they are rotating cardboard circles attached by a strut, and they tend to stick easily. They don’t offer any easy way to know which direction is optimal for turning, and in a large battle you might be dealing with half a dozen or more of them every single turn. If you’re going to use these, you’ll need to have some assistance. You can buy upgraded plastic dials, but while these will improve the rotational freedom of motion they won’t significantly alter the interaction difficulties.

But there is again an alternative – the maneuver templates for each ship are reasonably freely available. The dials are only used to enforce compliance with the ship profiles and to allow for everyone to make plans without reference to other players. It’s possible in consultation with printed charts to adopt a more accessible regime – written instructions on a face-down pad, typed instructions on a computer, or selecting from a pre-built deck of options. As long as you can make clear, correct decisions without your opponent knowing what’s going to happen, such compensations would permit for the game to be played without significant impact.

Everything else is reasonably easy to verbalise – actions all have consistent names, and the maneuvers too have particular names and numbers that uniquely identify them. ‘Segnor Loop 4 on TIE #15’ is an unambiguous instruction that anyone can transparently enact on your behalf. There are no judgement calls in whether the movement is correct or ships are in range (save for when you’re moving through another ship). The rules are very specific about positioning, and the movement templates ensure that nobody needs to guess at what’s right.

We’re offering our usual tentative recommendation here – if agency of play is important, we don’t recommend this at all. However, if you’re willing to let someone else make moves for you, and if you can make a few compensations to deal with the difficulties associated with the maneuver dial we think you’ll probably be okay.

Socioeconomic Accessibility

Let’s talk about the problem Star Wars has with women. In this, we’ll also an acknowledge an issue that comes along with fairly reviewing the X-Wing game in this area.

I own the X-Wing Force Awakens core set (two of them) and a pile of expansions. I have the Imperial Aces set, the Rebel Aces set, the Millennium Falcon, and Slave I. More will follow, but that’s an investment of around £140 to date.

Do you know how many women pilots I have available?

Spot the Smurfette

One rebel pilot (Nera Dantels) and one imperial pilot (Kath Scarlet).

There’s only one female space Tory. She’s kind of like a sci-fi Louise Mensch, I guess.

If I want to pretend I’m a woman flying a ship otherwise, I need to just assume the generic no-names are appropriate. The Millennium Falcon pack lets me fly the ship as Han (yay!), Lando (Boo!), Chewbacca (Yay!) and as a generic outer ring smuggler (Uh, okay).

Where the hell is Rey? She flew the Falcon in the Force Awakens, and she was great at it. Imagine being a little girl seeing this game, thinking ‘Oh wow I get to be Rey’ and finding out ‘Sorry, no – if you want Rey she’s in another expansion pack and it’s not out yet. And you’ll need to buy another YT-1300 to get her. She’s an extra Millennium Falcon pilot, not one of the real ones’. Do you want Finn? He’s going to appear later, but he’s not here now. What if you want a female crew member? You’ve got Jan Ors and that’s it.

I don’t even want her in the golden bikini, I just want Leia on the Falcon.

Do you want Leia? Haha, screw you. She’s in the Tantive IV pack. Sure, that’s a sensible and thematic location – but that’s not where we saw her most in the movies. We saw her on the Falcon. I want her on the Falcon goddamit.

The Force Awakens did wonders in adding diversity to the Star Wars canon, but the game has been very half-hearted in embracing that. To be fair, that’s not an isolated incident and some of it is explained by the history of the game. See, the Force Awakens pack is from 2015 and is an update of an earlier 2011 core set. Most of the other expansions predate the Force Awakens by a considerable degree. The Falcon and Slave I are from 2013, whereas the Imperial and Rebel aces packs are from 2014. But that’s not what stops them being updated with new characters – it’s the need to ensure consistency of the packs for tournament play. There’s no reason we couldn’t get Rey in modern printings of the Falcon, or in an associated cheap booster pack. Instead we’ve got new, modern characters being added in later waves, with the old ships being kept as they were.

The result is a confusing mishmash of expansions which work together mechanically but grate against each other canonically and thematically. So to an extent the gender imbalance is understandable – there are very few women of note in the Orig Trig, and we’re probably all comfortable with forgetting the prequels ever happened. Recent waves of expansions have included the far more interesting cast of the Star Wars Rebels TV show into the roster, and that’s got a lot of great bad-ass women in it. So, it’s getting better.

Except…

There’s a universe of extended canon out there, and there are some tremendously great female characters in it. It’s not that the X-Wing game avoids drawing from outside the movies, either. Kyle Katarn is a Jedi in some of the Star Wars video games, and he’s available as a crew member. Why wait until so late in the game’s evolution to make an effort to widen the roster?

A lot of game playing is about wish fulfillment and being able to identify with the characters involved. If that’s the male characters, you’re sorted. Otherwise, it’s a slim roster.

But then, you can buy expansion packs to bulk out the diversity, right? After all, I just said that above. Sure, assuming your budget isn’t an issue.

A core set for X-Wing has an RRP of £27, which gets you a fun but not phenomenal game. Buying an individual ship (another X-Wing, a TIE bomber, a Y-Wing or whatever) is between £10 and £15 depending on the ship. Smaller expansion packs are £20, the Millennium Falcon and Slave I are in the £30 bracket. The Ghost expansion is £43. The Tantive IV has an RRP of £60, and the Imperial Raider is £80. That’s a *lot* of money to spend to get the kind of roster you might want. While nobody holds a gun to your head and makes you spend money on any of this, the core set is not enough to meaningfully enjoy the game in any real sustainable sense. You’ll get a taste, but you’ll need more. And in the process, it’ll make your wallet weep. My set of expansions, slim as they are in the grand scheme of things, represents a spend of around £140. That’s at the point where I think that I don’t need any more, although I still want more. The starter kit is a down payment on a much larger investment – if you’re at all worried about a budget, this isn’t a game that will work well with it.

But what you get for the money is a game that supports reasonable player-counts – with very large battles, you’ll probably want to have teams working against each other, collaborating on strategy and logistics. But you don’t need that – you can have one person on each side controlling a whole fleet. You can mix-and-match – it works very well for all kinds of player counts, so it’s not as if you’re spending a fortune on a game only two people ever get to play. You can even setup free-for-alls with three, four or more small squads battling against each other. The only real limit is how many ships you can afford.

However, this is undeniably a luxury title with a price-tag to match – that would be enough for us to be wary of recommending it. Coupled to its problems in terms of diversity, and how those two issues interrelate, we can’t recommend it in this category.

Communication

There is a required reading level, but no formal need for specific communication in a two player game.

However, in team play you’ll want to be able to confer and the strategy can be quite deep and intricate. It’ll involve long term aims, assessment of likely counteractions on the part of your opponents, and how you’re going to counteract those counteractions. Moreover, these conversations will need to be keep private, which may create issues for those making use of signing, communicative aids, or visually distinctive conversational systems. You can leave the room for strategy discussion, but much of what you do is going to be based on examining the game state and making decisions like some kind of old-timey WWI general.

We recommend it in this category. The reading level is an issue for all game modes. The strategy discussions will only be of relevance to those with visual communication forms working in a team-play scenario. There are compensatory strategies available for dealing with it.

Intersectional Accessibility

You’re dealing with a lot of cards, but you’re not holding them in hand – they’re laid out on the table for all to see, which alleviates the physical and visual impact of card management.

The dice are non-standard, and make use of symbolic language. There are only a handful of symbols that need to be dealt with, although those with cognitive and visual impairments may find some of them difficult to discriminate. This symbolic language is used throughout on the cards, and some information is presented only iconographically such as the range of actions available to particular ships. There may be a degree of referencing, close examination and cross-referencing for those with visual and cognitive impairments.

The size of the game area tends to be very large, and this creates issues for those with visual and physical impairments. Not only do you often need to check which ships are where, how they’re facing, and what their current state is you will be making plans for your own ships in relation to those of your enemies. Given that some ships may well be four feet away on the opposite corner of the play area, it can be difficult to easily scan the game state if you can’t see clearly and can’t move to take a closer look. It’s not as if you can just pick up ships either – they need to stay where they are because of the difficulty of replacing them exactly where they were. Most of the state information can be stored on cards, rather than directly on the ships, so if you and your opponent are sitting side by side these issues can be alleviated to an extent.

The precision with which ships must be moved is significant, and it’s often being done in the midst of a pile of other ships. It’s difficult to do if you can’t see very well. It’s difficult to do if you can’t make precise physical motions. It’s incredibly difficult to do if you can’t do either. You’re almost certainly going to be relying on other players to make the physical moves you plan out.

One especially good thing about the game though is the way it permits scaling of game-length. If you want a a quick skirmish, grab a couple of ships each and you’ll be done in thirty minutes. If you want a day long engagement, grab everything you’ve got and schedule replacements for destroyed ships at later stages. That means you can meaningfully structure your play around any physical or cognitive discomfort you might be likely to experience. That’s good, because unless you’re dealing with team-play there is no ability to drop-out without ending the game.

When multiple players are on each side, the impact of another player dropping out is only cognitive. It’s a redistribution of logistical and tactical planning, but it doesn’t otherwise change the game. All the state is open, so you can just assume the responsibilities of other players without anything else being impacted.

There are going to be issues for those that have the relevant kinds of colour blindness along with other visual impairments. The maneuver information is quite small and the difference between certain maneuvers may be just a square turn as opposed to a rounded one. This is going to impact on determining the stress, or otherwise, of certain maneuvers.

Finally, we have the usual issue here that if you are relying on someone to action the instructions you verbalise, you’re going to have a problem if this is compounded by a communication impairment. Our comments above relate to an either/or situation – if both physical and communication impairments intersect, the game will not at all be playable.

Conclusion

The X-Wing Miniatures game is awesome – we gave it 4.5 stars and it deserves every one of them (once you’ve spent a bit more on some expansions). In terms of accessibility though it’s a complex beast:

It’s accessible to those with colour-blindness, for those with memory impairments, and for those with communication impairments. It’s a more nuanced story for everything else. We absolutely don’t recommend it for those with fluid intelligence impairments, and we strongly suggest you avoid it if cost is an issue. As to its inclusivity, it can be expanded to deal with its inherent lack of diversity but it’s gonna cost you. Really, it should have the words ‘It’s gonna cost you’ translated into Latin and emblazoned across the front of every box.

We can tentatively recommend it in every other category, but always with caveats. You’ll almost always need someone to lend support here and there, and in some cases you’ll need people to do almost everything for you. You’ll need to be willing to make some changes in how you approach the game, such as in how you represent your programming of hidden maneuvers for each ship. It’ll be difficult to play, we’re not trying to convince you of anything else. It might though, given how good it is, be very much worth the effort. You must do what you feel is right, of course.