The HWK-290: Preparing for war, gaming way into the night, and the start of revolutions
I have a running fantasy that someday the government will show up on my doorstep with tyrannical intentions and shred off the pretext of decency for open warfare. At that time I will be free to do what I do best and have loved since my feet could carry me upward, and that is to fight—fight for independence, fight for respect, fight for the human race—fight for anything—but fight. Now when I say fight, I don’t mean “serving” for some greater cause made up by a statist government. I mean fighting where my strategy and effort destroy an opponent no matter how great the numbers or odds of victory, the worse, the more attractive. So the fantasy of a large statist government having the audacity to believe that they will win my submission with force is an attractive one to me.
I do not make a good soldier material, or a sports player who simply does what somebody else dictates. That is not the kind of fighting that I’m good at. In sports I never wanted to be a player, only the coach or the owner of a franchise, never some meat head player who was simply a field soldier. In the military, I never wanted to be a soldier, only a commander. But the way the human race is set up, they expect people to run through some kind of social initiation period where they start on the bottom and work their way up. However, by the time that such people find themselves in charge, they have been beaten down into submission and lose the ability to “think” uniquely. So I avoid all structured war games like the plague, and always have. When I play at war whether it is politics, business, or physical submission of one group over another, I require being in charge otherwise I’m just not interested. If people shut up and listen, they find that they benefit greatly by doing what I tell them. I don’t get out of such arrangements anything from the participates—any level of camaraderie, any back slapping from social respect—any feeling of “fitting in” to the structure of human existence. I simply enjoy winning in games of conflict.
One of the greatest aspects of being human is that we are thinking creatures and find many ways to entertain ourselves. Of the many things invented to entertain the human race, war games for me have always been the thing that I most enjoy. When I was a kid I ran into tabletop war gaming from a military history class I took where famous Revolutionary War battles could be re-enacted. As an adult my wife introduced me to similar games such as the Star Wars: Assault on Hoth which we played nearly every night during the first couple years of our marriage. When I started having kids I played a lot of video games with them—all of which were about war, fighting, and combat. I never approached the games as an escape from reality, but as the only way I could do the types of things I enjoyed doing without destroying the fabric of the world around me. Then of course there was the Wiz Kids Pirate Constructible Strategy Game that I have discussed in great detail here before, which my family spent a good five solid years playing together.
As fate would have it, one of my son-in-laws is a serious table top gamer. He plays games I never had the patience for like Magic the Gathering relentlessly and will play any board game that has ever been invented. He simply loves games. He along with my nephews over the past summer introduced me to the Dungeons and Dragons like game, Hero Quest which I enjoyed greatly. But I have since discovered something much, much cooler—Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures by Fantasy Flight Games. This game has all the things I enjoy and have only found possible since LucasArts produced the old video game X-Wing, which was a combat flight simulator that I often spent entire nights playing. As video games became better and moved online, Star Wars: Galaxies had Jump to Hyperspace, which was the latest evolution of the old X-Wing game, but it has since left the scene since Star Wars: The Old Republic arrived. There was a void in my heart that was there in the years between the exit of Jump to Hyperspace and the creation of Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures that wasn’t filled by anything else. Now that I have discovered X-Wing Miniatures, it has been like revisiting my favorite games of the past with new updated spins which should be expected with evolution, and I have been soaking up. I have enjoyed myself more since the discovery of X-Wing Miniatures than I can remember consistently in decades. I have been buying up ships for the game like crazy and getting very serious about it.
Both of my son-in-laws have also been getting into the game, so over the weekend we went to Yattaquest in Mt. Healthy to purchase a mat for our X-Wing Miniatures game as the playing surface is supposed to be a 3’X3’ area and we wanted something nice. So we went to Yattaquest and saw that the place was absolutely rocking with activity as they had a game night where the back room was filled with players. I was stunned how many other people were playing these games for the same reasons that I do, and I was shocked by how many different games were on the shelf at Yattaquest. There was an entire section for Warhammer—it was simply amazing. I picked up my game mat and the last two ships they had for X-Wing Miniatures, a couple of A-Wings.
Then all my kids along with my wife went to Sci-Fi Cincinnati over in Northgate Mall and found two Y-Wing Fighters and a Tie Fighter Advanced, which are both extremely rare. I bought them up knowing that they were selling for over $50 dollars a piece on the internet because of their rarity. I felt I had just uncovered a gold nugget—a rare treasure and it made my entire weekend.
http://www.sci-fi-city.com/cincinnati.htm
We arrived home late after the mall had closed and began playing X-Wing as a family with the game ending at around 3 AM. We then played most of the next day and I can report that it is some of the most fun I have had in years. It has many of the elements that I personally enjoy more than anything, it’s about miniature detail models, strategy, technology, large concepts, and it has a creativity level that is limited only by the player—which is very attractive to me. After our very successful weekend of playing X-Wing Miniatures, I treated myself to a rare privilege; I pre-ordered a ship that I am hungry to get as a compliment to my Millennium Falcon builds, the new HWK-290. In a 100-point game, the HWK-290 will provide for me the perfect support for my aggressive style of game play and I am very happy to see it come available as it does not technically ship to the general public until September 11th. Fantasy Flight Games pre-released HWK-290s during Gen Con in Indianapolis, but until then and since nobody has put their hands on them.
The ship is a sentimental favorite for me; it’s from the video game called Dark Forces which my daughters used to play with me. So it meant more than just a game piece for X-Wing Miniatures to make the purchase, I am just ecstatic that it will be coming to me. It is a unique item that I can’t wait to put my hands on, and it feels good to have something which drums up so much happiness. Yes, there are a lot of very bad things going on in the world, and I have written about many of them here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. But the new game X-Wing Miniatures has given me new juice where few things prior provided. I simply love the game for what it does. But more than anything it is allowing me to build a squad that has the Millennium Falcon as a tactical option with the HWK-290.
I don’t socialize much, but it was nice to see so many people with similar interests at Yattaquest. The place was huge and very busy as business was good. I’m obviously not alone in my love of combat because most of those games were themed around conflict resolution. As I stood in the center of Yattaquest I had the sense that if the first American Revolution started in pubs around New England, then the second and third will be in places like Yattaquest. The game players were simply enjoying some escapist fun while not compromising their minds in the process. Those people are not compliant statists of the type who built the trouble of LBJ’s Great Society. They are rebels, commanders, and tacticians that nobody else takes serious as they have fallen through the cracks of the establishment only to become the next sleeping giants awakened during the next great crises. But never before that I can recall did so many people flock to games like Warhammer, Magic the Gathering, and X-Wing Miniatures as they do now. I attempted with all my resources to find Y-Wing fighters but could not, because they were sold out everywhere I looked, even on Ebay and other online outlets. I found them by chance at Sci-Fi Cincinnati and quickly bought them up. They weren’t sold out because the company didn’t make enough of them—quite the contrary—they were sold out because the demand is that high. I find that extremely encouraging.
I might have to wait for my fantasy of a statist government gone mad showing up on my door step to declare war against me and my family. Obama can’t even make a decision against Syria, so I’m not worried about progressives making a visible move against the American people who would cost them terribly—because such things at least require courage, which they lack. But until then, I love that there are games like X-Wing Miniatures that I can play with my family late into the night and all the next day. War gaming is a good substitute for the real thing and I love being a member of the human race because it invents such things. But one thing that is a running theme among these gamers is that submission is not an option. They enjoy war gaming because players contemplate resistance and wish to play out scenarios that bring about such results. The exchange is peaceful so long as participants have an outlet. But heaven forbid that places like Yattaquest didn’t exist. These are not the games of our grandparents, these are the direct response to large-scale statism, and the minds drawn to them are not compliant.
I’ve bought cars, homes, taken exotic vacations and raised families. I’ve been successful, won many real battles and have enjoyed my life immensely in many capacities. But let me just state that when I purchased the HWK-290 for $14.95 a chill of delight went up my spine that I can’t get from anything else in this world…………….and the reason is beyond the comprehension of the average statist politician. Only people who play such games understand.
Rich Hoffman
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