Star Wars X-Wing 2nd edition miniatures game

I finally got around to playing some games of Fantasy Flight's second edition of the X-Wing Miniatures Game. I had bought the 2.0 core set and the 1.0 conversion kits back in October of last year. I was on the fence about purchasing 2nd edition. The only change that I was really excited about was the new turret rules, which I figured I could easily house-rule into 1st edition. However, I used my girlfriend's teacher discount at Barnes & Noble along with a coupon to get a hefty discount on the 2.0 core set and conversion kits, in the hopes that the game's other changes would also make it worthwhile.

Older ships have new abilities,
and tokens flip to a "spent" backside.

Fantasy Flight took the opportunity to streamline many components and add some ease-of-use features. For example, the maneuver dials are redesigned such that you can see every maneuver that the ship has available without having to rotate the dial. Upgrade cards have large, empty spaces that allow you to slot them underneath their respective pilot's card without covering up important information. Ship bases and maneuver templates have handy guidelines that can be helpful when executing partial maneuvers (due to collisions). And so forth.

Tokens have been broken up into different colors, each of which has a different effect. All green tokens (such as "focus" and "evade") are now buff tokens which are removed at the end of the round (unless a card says otherwise). Orange tokens are de-buffs (such as "disarm") that go away at the end of the round. And red penalty tokens (such as "ion" and "stress") remain in play until a certain condition removes them. Shield tokens now have a back side, which is colored red. This way, you can flip a shield token over when it's spent, but keep it on your ship card in case it ever gets recharged. The new energy and force tokens work the same way.

Better still, many features, concepts, and abilities from later expansions to 1st edition have been back-ported to all ships in 2nd edition. This has certainly increased the value of simple X-Wings, Y-Wings, and many other early 1st edition ships. The titular X-Wings, for example, now have a barrel roll ability on its card and a Talon Roll on its maneuver dial. The Lambda shuttle is one of the most improved ships in second edition, as it now has both a fore and aft-facing firing arc, as well as new "coordinate" and "jam" actions.

I appreciate that expansion ships are sold in smaller, more efficient packaging.

Heck, even the packaging is more streamlined. The massive boxes for 1st edition's large ships (which were full of empty space) have been replaced with smaller plastic bubble-packaging.

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The Dark Souls remaster was recently released, but it doesn't make enough [single player] improvements for me to really care to buy it. I might pick it up for the Switch when that gets released, because portable Dark Souls could be fun and interesting and fresh enough to warrant another purchase. However, the Switch version is being developed by another company, and it doesn't even support 60 fps, so I may not bother getting it anyway.

In the meantime, I decided to try out another "remaster" of sorts, and I got some friends together for some jolly cooperation in Steamforged Games' Kickstarted Dark Souls: the Board Game. This is a co-operative dungeon-crawler. I think the closest comparison that I can make is that it's a Dark Souls-themed variation on Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Unfortunately, Dark Souls: the Board Game doesn't seem to hold a candle to Descent.

Opening the box sets the tone of the game right away.

YOU DIED

The big mechanic that is imported from the video game is the inclusion of the video game's bonfire and respawn mechanics. Like in the video game, resting at the bonfire (or dying and being returned to the bonfire) resets everything. This includes all enemy encounters, as well as all the players' resources (such as the Estus Flask, Lucky Coin, or Pendant -- which actually has a function in the board game). However, a bit of the sense of attrition is also lost in translation, as your HP (and stamina) fully resets after each encounter. I think I would have preferred if the Estus Flask had a certain number of uses, but only restored a subset of your damage. That way, you'd retain some of your damage from encounter to encounter.

All the party's souls are dropped
on the spot where a character died.

Nevertheless, the Bonfire mechanic is probably the one mechanic that is most successfully translated from the video game source material. Despite the lack of health attrition, the desire to conserve as much resources as possible for the upcoming boss fight pressures the players into riskier play. Trying to conserve resources can lead to a lot of deaths.

Just like in the video game, if you die, all your souls are dropped on the floor where you died. If any one player dies, the whole party "dies" and is transported back to the Bonfire. The deeper into the dungeon you died, the more you have to fight through [again] in order to reclaim your souls. If you die again before reclaiming your dropped souls, all those souls are lost.

As I understand the rules, you can't leave an encounter once it's started, so you won't be making any "soul runs" to pick up your souls and then run back to the bonfire. You also can't open treasure chests until the encounter is won, which means you can't make suicidal "loot runs" either, which are a trademark strategy of the Souls video games. If you need to level up or buy new equipment in order to beat the encounter that killed you, you'll have to risk losing your dropped souls by farming against other encounters...

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