In our Rogue Squadron series we’ve looked at a lot of potential squadrons you can build for Fantasy Flight Games X-Wing miniatures game. For today’s Black Market we’re going to look at an easy way to start building your own squadrons. To do that you need a squadron builder.

There are three big squadron builder sites available: Unofficial X-wing Squadron Builder, (Yet Another) X-Wing Squadron Builder, and Fab’s Squadron Generator. There is also one Android app but that has had some issues lately. It wasn’t updated for awhile and it won’t work on my tablet, though still works on my phone, so your mileage will vary on that one. I abhor Apple so I have no idea about any apps there.

Initially I used the Unofficial squadron generator. I really liked having all the available ships and pilots listed out on the side. That made it very easy to see ships and their point cost when looking for a ship to fill into your squadron. They are collapsible which makes it nice to filter out ships you don’t want. You could also enter what ships you have and it will grey out the ships and upgrade cards you don’t have access too. This is a very nice feature and shows you what you might be able to build if you had other cards.

Unfortunately, Unofficial had some problems with saving squadrons for awhile. The site also went down or was just inaccessible some times. Now, it has been more than a year since I used it regularly so these issues might have been resolved. Playing with it some for this article I experienced no problems.

When I ran into problems I then came across Yet Another. It shares many of the features but instead of a side panel listing ships and a popup window for upgrades, everything is listed in dropdown menus. This makes it a little harder to find a compatible ship but the site runs a bit faster.

One thing I really like about this site is that there are three tabs; one for Imperial, Rebel and Scum. That allows you to build one squadron for each faction at the same time. This is really useful for me when I’m debating a squadron to take to a tournament or trying to build a similar style of squadron and want to see how each faction could do it.

It does allow you to save your collection and will warn you if you build a squadron using cards you don’t have but it’s not as robust as the Unofficial one in indicating which cards you don’t have. The main advantage this has though is that there is a nice ride window it generates that will display info about whatever dropdown menu you hover over. If you select the ship, it will show you ship stats AND the ship’s maneuver dial. If you add something like an R2 Astromech it will show the maneuvers that have become green in a different shade so you can see what benefit you’re gaining.

As for Fab’s Generator, I really don’t like this one. I heard some people talk about it and checked it out. Unfortunately, it took me awhile to even figure out how to build custom squads. It also shows a nice picture of the cards you are selecting, which looks pretty but makes it really hard to read what each thing does, since those pictures are very small. Overall, I would not recommend this one.

Between the other two, it comes down to an interface preference. I prefer Yet Another but only stopped using Unofficial because of some server issues, which may or may not have been resolved, not due to a bad design. Yet Another is also really quick to get new ship cards added to the menu (listed in red to indicated unreleased content) so you can start building squads using upcoming ships. What this really shows is that the designers are still committed to the game and the app so it looks to have some longevity.

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