“Fly Casual”

This has been the unofficial motto for the X-Wing community. My local community, Houston’s Apollo Squadron, have adopted it as our official motto. It stands for what got me into the competitive X-wing community and what has kept me flying for the past few years.

But what does it mean?

That has been a point of debate in recent weeks in the community. The recent change to the X-wing tournament rules to allow for Intentional Draws (ID’s) caused quite a stir. People were up in arms opposing the change and defending the change. I don’t want to get into the ID debate here as that issue seems to have been settled for the moment. It’s a valid rule until August 2016 and then it will change. But even now that FFG has announced plans to reevaluate the rule change, things aren’t quite back to the atmosphere they were before.

ID’s themselves aside, the debate brought the whole question of what “Fly Casual” means to the forefront. Until this debate I wouldn’t have thought this would be something anyone was unclear on. But perhaps this assumption is the reason the ID debate became so heated. There were competing definitions of what it meant to “Fly Casual.”

For myself, what I assumed flying casual meanst and what made the Xwing community so appealing to me, was the idea that no one took anything to seriously. Everyone came to a tournament to have a good time. You wanted to win, sure, but that was secondary to getting to play.

To me, flying casual meant when your opponent made a minor mistake, such as forgetting to take their Focus action after moving, you’d shrug and not raise a stink when they did it later. No one wants to win by being an asshole. Everyone makes mistakes.

Likewise, flying casual also means when you make a mistake, you hold yourself accountable to the rules. You forget to cloak Whisper and your opponent says it’s a missed opportunity, then you shrug and accept it. Those are the rules for a reason.

Flying casual isn’t about how lax you are with the rules or whether or not you play to win. It’s about how you comport yourself while you play. It’s the attitude you have.

Someone who flies casual is someone you enjoy playing against no matter who wins or loses. When they make a mistake they shrug it off. They don’t just ignore the rules when you make a mistake but they aren’t a hardass about them. More time than not they’ll warn you before you do make a mistake, even to their own detriment.

Some may disagree with my interpretation of “Fly Casual.” You might think it’s to lax or even to strict. But that’s how I view it. I’ll admit to not always following it myself. The highly competitive store championship season can tempt anyone to Win At All Cost. It can be discouraging when you see how you could have won a game if you had been just a little bit more of an asshole.

But when those times come up, remind yourself why you play. Are you only playing in order to win tournaments? Or are you playing so that you can spend a few hours moving little Star Wars spaceships around a board with a bunch of other Star Wars geeks? Most of us do it for the that second reason.

Now, as for the long pondered question of what Han meant when he told Chewie to “I don’t know, fly casual,” in ROTJ I have no idea. Seriously, how do you casually fly a captured Imperial shuttle toward a Death Star? What is that supposed to look like?

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