X-Wing: Huge Ships – Movement and Whatnot

Huge Ships in X-Wing have a whole set of cards up their sleeves.  They can leave your foe in ruins without firing a shot!

Moving the Huge ships is relatively similar to moving the rest of the ships in X-Wing Miniatures; that is, you still choose a maneuver on the ship’s maneuver dial and you still use templates. It does get a little different using the Huge ship templates though, so let’s take a look at that first. 

What wasn’t exactly apparent, at least to me, in the promo pics of the Huge ships is that their base consists of one long cardboard insert (with some wings towards the center) that sits on two separate plastic bases (which I think are Big ship sized, but I didn’t think to actually check when I had all this stuff out earlier). The tall flight stands actually anchor all of that stuff together into what functionally ends up being one long base. 

For whatever reason, I was kind of under the impression it was one long base which is probably where I started getting confused about how to use the new Huge ship movement template. In any case, hopefully you can see from the above pic what I’m talking about here.

Also evident in the above pic is that blue equator line that separates the Fore from the Aft for the purposes of targeting and Actions and whatnot, but also comes into play in regard to movement as well. 

Speaking of which, let’s get on with this show and talk about how these things move. 

As previously mentioned, Huge ships Activate after all of the other smaller stuff has moved on the table, (kinda) regardless of Pilot Skill. Once again, this is one of those things more easily explained with an example, so- 

You don’t completely throw Pilot Skill out the window, but you do ignore it for a bit when it comes to moving and activating your Huge ship(s).

Right, so you’ve moved all of your little ships and now it’s time to reveal your Huge ship maneuver. Let’s say for simplicity’s sake, you’ve chosen a Straight 2. How does this play out? Lucky for me, FFG made a pretty useful graphic that illustrates this saving me a tremendous amount of time and effort. 

So that’s not too bad, huh? Admittedly, I think when you start playing these Epic games and there’s ships all over the table it’s going to be hard to fit that template in tight places, but for the purposes of just understanding what’s going on here, it’s pretty straightforward (pun intended). 

If you reveal a Straight maneuver, you take the Huge ship template and align the horizontal line just above the notch and that business so that it’s rear edge lines up with the rear edge of the Huge ship’s front base and the long edge is right up against the side edge of the front base. Again- don’t let the image confuse you- the front base ends well before the blue equator- the cardboard base insert has some wings that don’t actually sit on top of the base, but effectively extend beyond it. 

Then you hold the template so that it stays in place and move the ship forward until the Huge ship’s front base rear edge lines up with the horizontal line just above the number of your chosen maneuver. 

I kind of thought about trying to take some pictures and stuff of just the template and the base, as for me at least, the cardboard insert kinda throws everything off when you’re looking at 2d images rather than the 3d model sitting in front of you, but the whole thing gets pretty goofy without the cardboard, so I just decided to use the graphic from the Huge ship rules. If y’all want though, I can pull my stuff out tomorrow and take some pics if this is still confusing. Let me know in the comments. 

All right. So Straights aren’t too bad, what about Banks? 

Well, banks are a little trickier, but again- I think the key to getting how this works is remembering that you’ve actually got two separate bases under this thing connected to each other via the cardboard base insert. 

Ok, so once you reveal your Bank maneuver, you take that Huge ship template and set it down on the side you’re going to be banking (again- how this is going to work out in Epic games kinda worries me, but oh well). Then align it so that the notch cut-out in the template hooks onto the Huge ship’s front base’s rear edge corner. Hold the template in place on the table. This is going to establish where your ship is going to end up- it’ll kinda being hanging at a 30 degree(-ish) angle off to the side. 

Next, move your Huge ship so that the front base’s front edge corner in the direction you’re banking aligns to the template’s right angle just below the Bank number. 

Thank GOD these things don’t have a K-Turn or I’d probably have a stroke just trying to understand it, let alone trying to turn around and explain it. Holy mackerel. 

So all that said, I threw an “and Whatnot” in the title of this article- what’s the “and Whatnot”?

Well, first, what happens if your Huge ship, behemoth that it is, overlaps something? 

If your Huge ship overlaps somebody else’s Huge ship, the Huge ship rules refer you to the standard X-Wing Core Rules for overlapping ships with one exception- rather than losing your Action, both Huge ships get a faceup Damage card for their trouble from the deck of the affected Section in both cases. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until I run one of these dudes into another Huge ship and have to try and move back along the template. Lols, sarcasmfont, etc. 

If your Huge ship overlaps a Large or Small ship, regardless if they’re friend or foe, they’re immediately destroyed. The Huge ship does not lose it’s Perform Action step, but as a penalty, the Huge ship owner rolls an Attack die for each small ship he obliterated and two Attack dice for each Large ship he ran over and suffers any hits (filled explosion symbols) and crits (unfilled explosion symbols) on his Fore section. 

So yeah. May not be a great idea to get too close to the nose of a Huge ship. Good news is you ought to have room for that maneuver template though. 

If your Huge ship overlaps an Obstacle (asteroids, etc.), it works pretty differently than when Large or small ships overlap an obstacle. First, unlike the smaller ships, if a Huge ship’s template touches an obstacle, nothing happens. The following penalties only come into play if one of the Huge ship’s Sections actually overlap the obstacle (and a Section is defined as being the base and cardboard insert, I guess). If you end up overlapping an Obstacle with a Section of your Huge ship, you draw a faceup Damage card from the appropriate Damage Deck for that Section. If both Sections are overlapping, your opponent gets to choose which Section takes the hit. Note that even if both Sections are overlapping Obstacles, you don’t take two cards. I didn’t measure to see if that’s possible with the rules for deploying Obstacles to even know if that could happen, but if it can, that’s the story. Additionally, the rules go on to say that the Huge ship still doesn’t lose it’s Perform Action step, and they don’t say anything about Attacking, so I guess you can so long as you’ve got a target in arc, have the Energy, etc., etc. 

Last thing about Obstacles- if you do end up overlapping one with a Huge ship Section, the Obstacle gets removed. So yeah, you can use these things like icebreaker ships if you’re so inclined. 

The last possible situation that could arise with overlaps is going the opposite way- what if a smaller ship overlaps a Huge ship? 

The Huge ship rules define an overlap in this situation as the smaller ship’s base overlapping the Huge ship in one of it’s Sections, as opposed to it’s template, so it’s the same in that regard so far. In fact, they go on to say you’re supposed to just use the existing overlap rules from the Core Rules with one additional penalty- the owner of the smaller ship doing the overlapping rolls an Attack die and suffers the consequences of any hits or crits he rolls. 

The very last thing I think I have left to cover in regard to Huge ships is a little tidbit they threw in towards the end that states in a regular game of X-Wing, a player can drop a Huge ship on the table to be used as an obstacle instead of three asteroid tokens. You can only do it in friendlies or Casual play, and the Huge ship can’t be destroyed or damaged, and it’s obviously not controlled by anyone so therefore it doesn’t move, shoot, or do anything but sit there.