Fire the Ion CannonPreview the Upcoming Y-Wing (TM) Expansion Pack
“This is Gold Leader. We’re starting our attack run.”
–Star Wars: A New Hope
In recent X-Wing™ previews, we’ve revealed ship cards and upgrades from the X-Wing™ Expansion Pack and the TIE Fighter™ Expansion Pack. Together with the expansion’s detailed starfighters, these additions allow you to build whole squads and customize your play experience.
In a later preview, we’ll look more closely at some of the options and strategies available to those players who choose to take advantage of advanced squad building, but first we’ll continue to review the first wave of single fighter expansions.
Today, we look at another mainstay of the Rebel fleet, the versatile and durable Y-wing!
The Y-Wing™ Expansion Pack
The versatile and reliable BTL-A4 Y-wing was the Rebellion’s primary starfighter until the arrival of the T-65 X-wing, and long after it was scheduled to be phased out, its speed, durability, and weapon options helped it remain a staple of the Rebel fleet.
The Y-Wing Expansion Pack contains one detailed Y-wing miniature, its maneuver dial, four ship cards, five upgrade cards, and all requisite tokens. These give you everything you need to bring the Y-wing into your games of X-Wing, as well as a wide range of options for balancing your piloting skill and the tactical advantages and potency of your upgrades.
In the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game, Y-wings start play with three shield tokens and a hull value of five, making them easily the most rugged of the starfighters available upon the game’s initial launch. However, the Y-wing’s primary advantage may be its ability to equip an ion cannon, which it can use to temporarily shut down an enemy starfighter’s systems. While the ion cannon doesn’t do much damage on its own, it can leave a TIE vulnerable to coordinated X-wing fire.
This tactical weapon is definitely one of the highlights among the new upgrade cards the Y-Wing Expansion Pack introduces, and the expansion includes a reference card and token that allow you to bring this technology immediately into battle.
The Ion Cannon Turret upgrade card and reference card.
For five squad points, an ion cannon is a fantastic tool to help disable your opponent’s starfighters. It can only target enemy ships within range one to two, but it can target any enemy ship within that range, even one outside of its firing arc. Yes, the ion cannon turret can target anything within a 360-degree arc. This adds greatly to the weapon’s “effective” range and helps turn the tables on your foes. Normally, your opponent will want to surround your fighters and get in behind them at close range, but a Y-wing with an ion cannon is never a helpless target.
Then, once you hit an enemy starfighter with your ion cannon, you cripple that ship for one round, and it drifts slowly through space until its systems come back online. In game terms, this means that a starfighter struck by an ion cannon cannot assign a maneuver during its next planning phase. Instead, it must drift across the table as though it had been assigned a white "
1" maneuver. So after you hit a starfighter with your ion cannon, you’ll know precisely where it’s going to end up after its next activation phase, and you can coordinate your attacks against it in the subsequent combat phase.
Often, players will likely swoop in for the kill with their X-wings, since those starfighters pack more firepower, but some players may opt to build their squads solely around Y-wings, taking advantage of the starfighter’s ability to fire proton torpedoes. In fact, players can outfit the Y-wing with as many as two proton torpedoes, and a crack shot like Horton Salm can make certain that every shot counts.
Keep your eyes open for more information about the Y-wing and other starfighters from Star Wars: X-Wing as we get close to the game’s release at Gen Con Indy. Next up? A look at the TIE Advanced™ Expansion Pack!
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Fire the Ion Cannon
