I’ve been playing the X-Wing Miniatures game off and on since the summer of 2013. I got to try the game out at a local anime convention and fell for it head over heels. I’ve been a big Star Wars nerd ever since I was a kid growing up with the prequels. The game had that cool miniature wargaming feel to it while being easy to learn and fast to play. The miniatures were also pre-painted so you didn’t have to pick up another hobby just to have good looking ships.

I bought a fair number of expansions starting with wave 1 all the way through to wave 6, missing out on the awesome looking K-wing that would arrive just one wave later… Maybe a blessing in disguise seeing the strife the Twin Laser Turret introduced that wave would go on to cause within the playerbase.

I didn’t have much spending money back then, but I managed to amass a pretty decent collection of 26 ships, one of them being the huge CR90 Corvette, known to lesser Star Wars nerds as the Tantive IV. 😃

All this time I’ve been playing what has come to be known as first edition, since the second edition of the game was launched back in 2018. I’ve tried 2nd edition before but didn’t really see the need to upgrade as it was early on and expensive to convert, but I recently felt the urge to pull the trigger and see what I had been missing out on. I went on Tradera, (a Scandinavian auction site) and snatched up a lot of two complete 2nd edition core sets and four loose expansions for a little less than 90 euros. I was also lucky enough to find a new sealed conversion kit for my 1st edition scum ships along with an A-Wing expansion, setting me back a decent 42 euro.

While getting caught back up I found out that AMG (the company that took over development of X-Wing) cancelled development of the game about a year ago, making expansions really inconvenient to find in a small market like Sweden. No wonder the game store seemed so out of stock…

Let the DIY begin!

I own 37 ships now, nine of which are tie fighters. (I guess this is what I get for buying four core sets of the game…) and I’m planning on 3D printing more ships in the future.

I put a few hours into chasing down scans of 2nd edition pilots scaling them up in photoshop and having a local photo place print them out for me to make physical cards. Now I’ve got every pilot ever released for the ships I own, without having to hunt down 100’s of euros worth of used expansions. 😄

Magnets

I wanted an immersion upgrade, so I did some searching around for magnet kits for X-Wing. These kits make it so that you can bank and tilt your ships to better sell the illusion that they’re manoeuvring in space. One “Magnetising Miniatures” YouTube rabbit hole later and my video recommendations are irreparably Warhammer 40K modelling tutorials… Brilliant! I put in an order from an online hobby store ”GreenStuffWorld” (cool name 😐👍) who put together and sell magnet kits specifically for X-Wing TMG.

I can’t complain about this kit, the price was fair and I really like the way it makes the ships look. It provides you with 15 steel ball bearings and 15 countersunk magnets. They instruct you to simply remove the stock plastic peg and glue the magnet in its place, but I opted to try and hide the magnets by drilling a 3,5mm hole into the body of the ship. This greatly varies in difficulty depending on the ship you’re converting and if you manage to get the entire plastic peg out without breaking it off.

The X-Wing below has an internal mechanism for the S-Foils (nerd for “wings”) that greatly limits the available space to sink a magnet into.

A substantially easier ship is the A-Wing, all three of mine had a sizeable air pocket inside the cockpit that made it so I only had to drill about 3mm deep. The ship is also really easy to hold when drilling. I would suggest using one of those handheld ”pin vices” that modelmakers use instead of a full sized power drill like I did. It should make for a less eventful session. 🫨

The B-Wing was a tad too heavy for the magnet so I added some clear coat to the ball bearing to get a little extra grip.

All in all I probably tanked the value of these miniatures by cutting off the stems, but I don’t see myself ever selling this game so that point is pretty moot. 🙂

Thanks for reading!