How to win Worlds in 5 Easy Steps

Three years ago I wrote the critically acclaimed¹ piece “How to Win Worlds in 4 Easy Steps”. It was a revelatory article that propelled Oli Pocknell to his World Championship win². Three years, one pandemic and no further World Championships later, I present the follow-up article, in preparation for the 2023 X-Wing World Championships.

Naturally, the sequel to #4 is #5, and in such cases the sequel even turns out better than the original. Therefore, this time around there are 5 Easy Steps to winning Worlds. This is where the fun begins.

¹my wife said it was ‘not bad’ ²other factors may have contributed

1. Unlearn everything you thought you knew. 2.5 is not an iteration, it’s a revolution. The game plays completely differently now. Break out of the habits and thought processes you established over the years, and create new pathways and perspectives. Practise the new world like it’s a new game, and take in what is fresh and different.

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2. Know your win conditions. More important than ever is knowing how you win your game. Squad matchups are now multi-dimensional and scenarios add a layer of complexity that means the future is ever in motion. You can win and lose in a single decision if you’re not aware of what you need to do to reel in the victory. Get smart and get aware.

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3. Memorise the numbers. Han was wrong — knowing the odds matters. Focus or lock? Spend the lock? Go for the kill or save the focus for defense? Learn the probabilities of certain outcomes ahead of time so you streamline your decision making and reduce mental fatigue. It’s a long three days (or more if you’re going through LCQ), and the more you can save your brain cycles for the decisions that really matter, the better you’ll do.

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4. Have your heart broken. And not just broken; shattered. Into itsy bitsy tiny little pieces. Watch as covid sweeps the world and puts an end to game nights, store champs, and those big regional tournaments you used to get so excited about. Watch powerlessly as your beloved game gets burned to the ground by tactless, if well meaning, stewards upon whom the game is thrusted out of the blue. Watch as the community tears itself apart pointing fingers, shouting blame, hurling insults and descending into a madness of hate and bullying. Witness the end of X-Wing.

Sign up to an online league that is keeping interest in the game going while we’re stuck in lockdown. Start to meet players from all over the world, swapping stories of quarantine restrictions, work adjustments, and the transition to online X-Wing. Sign up to another league, and then another tournament. Learn what UTC stands for and find yourself learning the time differences between Sydney, Singapore, Warsaw, London, Toronto, Chicago and Los Angeles. Find camaraderie in your games against players in Peru, South Africa, Malta. Laugh at how much fun this is and how nice it will be to be back in stores next month.

Stay at home some more. And then some more. Sign up to more tournaments. Team tournaments. Represent your country as one of 38 nations in a glorious celebration of international online X-Wing. Make new friends, swap new stories, learn more timezones.

Start sending your little metal cards and other trinkets to people you play across the world. You made them to give away at the tournaments you’d have gone to, so this is the next best thing, right? Get a message from one of those people asking if they can have more, to use as prize support for an upcoming online tournament. Of course you agree.

Make more trinkets and design more cards. They’re popular now, and tournament organisers the world over want to use them as prizes for their tournaments. Start making cheaper versions and give them away for free, as your own way of supporting what these people are doing. Together, keep the game going - thriving, even - in the vacuum of the internet. Lockdown stretches and stretches; your plastic ships gather dust while their digital counterparts rack up kills. Madrid, Perth, Pittsburgh, Bogota become cities you know the timezones to.

One day the game changes completely, virtually overnight. The familiarity of the old game you knew and loved is gone, and in its place, something new, strange, unfamiliar, and scary. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. It is the greatest version of X-Wing yet, and simultaneously the wreckage of what a once-great game has now become. It is the pivot point for a thousand spars between the believers and the haters, it is the flashpoint for a community already stretched to its limit.

Pick yourself up from the despair and extract yourself from the echoing chambers. Pointless arguments against entrenched positions don’t help anyone. Covid is receding and stores are opening up. This is a time to be excited for the game. This is a time to get those plastic spaceships out, to remind your fingers of what templates feel like, to hear the rattle of dice and feel the solid g̶r̶i̶p̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶a̶ ̶h̶a̶n̶d̶s̶h̶a̶k̶̶e connection of a fistbump from across the table.

Expand your repertoire from metal cards to metal coins. Start by striking a commemorative coin for your country’s team, and go from there. Hear the call of tournament organisers the world over crying out for prize support yet getting nothing from those they call to. Step in to answer that call, using everything you’ve learned to make prize kits that will spread to every continent and be used on tabletops in stores thousands of miles away. Do what you can in the recovery of the community and work for the survival of the game.

Play in more leagues, meet more people, ship out more swag. Sign up for the first major in-person tournament in your country since pandemic hit and remember what it was like to play this game for real — to fall in love with what is nothing more than toys and strategy played out with like-minded friends.

See the green shoots of recovery everywhere you look. Things aren’t all rosy and perfect and beautiful, not by a long shot, not yet. The game is wonky; it is still finding its feet. The community is divided; it is still trying to heal. Keep doing what you can to promote the game, to bring people back, to bring people in. There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. We know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the challenge. Remember this: even the smallest act of kindness pushes our lines forward.³

Finally, after what has felt like an eternity, Worlds is announced. This is it: the sunrise we longed to see and the culmination of everything that has swirled for 40 long, unprecedented months. For those of us still standing, this is what we waited for.

They’ll be there, the people you’ve met online over the past three years. They’ll be there too, the people whose idiotic opinions you’ve had to rebut since the game was revamped. They’ll all be there. The people you can’t wait to see, the people you can’t stand to know, they’ll all be there — the people who still play the game.

Because at the end of the day, that’s what is important. Whether you love them or loathe them, whether you walk in step or disagree with a passion. When the dials are down and the dice are rolled, they are the ones in the same room playing the game. And that puts us all on the same side. We all want the same thing — more people playing X-Wing, a healthy thriving community, and a bright future we can all look forward to.

There is space - a need, even - in this movement for them and for us. For Saw Gerrera and for Mon Mothma. For Luke Skywalker and for Luthen Rael. For mercenary scoundrels, retired Jedi Knights, defector pilots and humble droids. So let us go to Worlds and celebrate what brings us all together. We don’t win by destroying what we hate; we win by playing what we love.

Let Worlds be the springboard for the great X-Wing renaissance. Let us bring the joy of X-Wing from Chicago to every local community and every game shop table in every corner of the world and let us remind ourselves, and everyone we know, how fantastic this game and this community is.

This is how we win our friends back. This is how we win over the world. This is how we win Worlds. Remember this. Try.

³go watch Andor

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5. Don’t joust Vader Bad idea!!

The author would again like to credit Aaron Bleyaert, whose amazing piece How to Lose Weight in 4 Easy Steps was the inspiration for this article. He (the author, not Aaron) will be attending the 2023 X-Wing World Championships, and if you mention this article to him, he will give you a metal trinket of some kind.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you do also read the prequel to this article, How to Win Worlds in 4 Easy Steps. Together, these 9 Steps really will help you win Worlds. I promise.