By Andrew Dodson on August 17, 2014 at 9:52am
This year, at GenCon, Fantasy Flight Games made a big announcement regarding their "X-Wing Miniatures Games:" they were introducing an entire new faction - Scum and Villainy. The faction will be based off of the worst of the worst of the Star Wars universe. The bounty hunters, smugglers and mercenaries that only fight for themselves (and their wallets) and couldn't care less what the Imperials or the Rebels were doing.
Up until this point, the "X-Wing Miniatures Games" only allowed players to play ships from either the Rebel Alliance side or the Galactic Empire side. Adding the Scum and Villainy faction opens the game up to the dozens and dozens of "independent" ships from the Star Wars universe and forces players to completely rethink some of their strategies when building their squadrons.
Scum and Villainy will be released as four ship expansions.
The "Most Wanted" expansion comes with two modified, Black Sun Z-95 Headhunters and a scum-variant Y-Wing. It also comes with a new Boba Fett card, support cards for the Firespray-class ship (which comes separately) and comes with the twenty ship cards - the most ever included with an ""X-Wing Miniatures Game" expansion.
The "IG-2000" expansion brings the IG-2000 into the mix, piloted by the feared droid bounty hunter IG-88. Since he's a droid, and doesn't have to waste power on stupid things like "life support systems," the IG-2000 promises to be a dangerous ship to have to go up against, as it'll be able to perform maneuvers that would knock out your typical meat-bag pilot. The IG-2000 introduces the "Segnor's Loop maneuver" which looks like a bank but also turns the ship around 180 degrees.
The "M3-A Interceptor" expansion introduces the M3-A “Scyk” interceptor, a light-weight starfighter but with a weapon mount that can handle just about anything you can attach to it. The expansion comes with five unique upgrade cards, including a “Heavy Scyk” Interceptor Title which provides a third cannon to the ship. The different weapon upgrades gives you a lot of options to modify the M3-A for any game scenario.
The fourth expansion, and the one I'm looking forward to the most, is the "Starviper" expansion, which brings the Starviper attack platform into the fray, along with the pilot Prince Xizor. The Starviper is a maneuverable ship (it has the barrel roll and boost abilities), with decent firepower and the ability to take more than a little bit of damage. The nine upgrade cards it comes with makes this advanced ship a swiss-army knife on the battlefield - capable of filling just about any role in a squadron.
The Scum and Villainy expansions will be available to all squad leaders soon at major game retailers.
As if I needed another reason to spend more money on this game....
