Star Wars: X-Wing 2nd Edition Core Set – Tabletop Dogfighting Done Right

Program your maneuvers, reveal them in secret, and watch the dogfight unfold — a tactical miniatures game that turns your tabletop into the trench run, minus the Death Star.

Star Wars: X-Wing Second Edition puts you in the cockpit of the galaxy's most iconic starfighters, commanding a small squadron of pre-painted miniatures across a tabletop battlefield. Designed by Frank Brooks, Max Brooke, and Alex Davy and published by Atomic Mass Games (formerly Fantasy Flight Games), the Core Set drops two players straight into a classic Rebels-versus-Empire skirmish: one T-65 X-wing against two nimble TIE/ln fighters, everything needed for two players included in the box.

What makes X-Wing distinct from most miniatures games is its simultaneous hidden-movement system. Instead of taking turns moving pieces, every pilot secretly selects a maneuver dial — a barrel roll, a hard turn, a straight boost — and locks it in before any ship moves. When maneuvers are revealed and executed together, the result feels less like a board game and more like choreographing an actual dogfight, full of near-misses, blind guesses, and satisfying reversals.

Reviewers across the hobby consistently single out the maneuver dial system as the game's defining strength — predicting where an opponent will fly next, then baiting them into a bad position, is frequently cited as one of the most tense and rewarding mind-games in tabletop miniatures gaming. The beautifully pre-painted, ready-to-play ships are also a recurring highlight, since there's no assembly or painting required to get a game to the table.

What's in the Core Set?

What Makes It Stand Out

How Does It Play?

Each round unfolds in a fixed sequence. In the Planning Phase, both players simultaneously dial in a maneuver for every ship on their side of the table, hidden from their opponent. During the Activation Phase, ships reveal and execute their chosen maneuvers in initiative order, gaining or losing target locks and jostling for position. Finally, in the Combat Phase, ships with an enemy in their firing arc roll attack dice, and the defender rolls to evade — special dice symbols like Focus and Evade tokens let skilled pilots stack the odds in their favor before the dice ever hit the table.

The Core Set's asymmetric matchup — one sturdy X-wing against two faster, more fragile TIE fighters — is a genuinely well-designed introduction to the game's core tension: do you commit to an aggressive maneuver that could win the exchange, or play safe and bait your opponent into overextending? Reading your opponent's likely move, and picking a maneuver that punishes it, is the entire skill of the game — new players typically pick up the fundamentals within their first two or three games.

Beyond the Core Set, X-Wing supports a full competitive squad-building metagame with points costs, pilot abilities, and upgrade cards, alongside "Epic" rules for larger, scenario-based battles with more than two players. While active development on new ships ended in 2024, the existing catalog spans hundreds of ships across every major Star Wars faction, and the game retains a dedicated community running organized play and casual meetups.

Rating Breakdown

Pros & Cons

Who Is This Game For?