“Watch this.”

*Falcon does Falcon things*

“Watch what?!?”

There’s a reason most X-Wing ships have shields. Once the protection of shields is gone, the ​ship’s hull is subject to suffering brutal ​critical ​hits whenever there are any un-canceled ​critical ​hit results on an attacker’s dice. Though the ​​​critical ​hit is only on one face of the die, enough dice are rolled that you WILL encounter them once you are unshielded. Some ships and upgrades even have ways of adding crits or changing ​standard hits to crits. And perhaps most importantly, the rules state that even if you evade all but one damage, if there’s a crit​,​ then it’s the ​crit that ​bypasses your defense dice. ​​​​Your opponent can roll three regular hits and one crit: if you roll three evades, it will be that one crit result that matters. In short​,​ crit happens, so it’s important to know what COULD happen and what’s LIKELY to happen.​​

Let’s start with the ​potential crits:

BLINDED PILOT (Pilot) – While you perform an attack, you can modify your dice only by spending (force) for their default effect. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

CONSOLE FIRE (Ship) – Before you engage, roll 1 attack die. On a (damage) result, suffer 1 (damage) damage. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

DAMAGED ENGINE (Ship) – Increase the difficulty of your turn maneuvers. (x2)

DAMAGED SENSOR ARRAY (Ship) – You cannot perform any actions except the (focus) action and the actions from damage cards. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

DIRECT HIT (Ship) – Suffer 1 (damage) damage. Then repair this card. (x5)

DISABLED POWER REGULATOR (Ship) – Before you engage, gain 1 ion token. After you execute an ion maneuver, repair this card. (x2)

FUEL LEAK (Ship) – After you suffer 1 (critical) damage, suffer 1 (damage) damage and repair this card. Action: Repair this card. (x4)

HULL BREACH (Ship) – Before you would suffer 1 or more (damage) damage, suffer that much (critical) damage instead. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

LOOSE STABILIZER (Ship) – After you execute a non-straight maneuver (straight), suffer 1 (damage) damage and repair this card. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

PANICKED PILOT (Pilot) – Gain 2 stress tokens. Then repair this card. (x2)

STRUCTURAL DAMAGE (Ship) – While you defend, roll 1 fewer defense die. (x2)

STUNNED PILOT (Pilot) – After you execute a maneuver, if you moved through or overlapped an obstacle, suffer 1 (damage) damage. (x2)

WOUNDED PILOT (Pilot) – After you perform an action, roll 1 attack die. On a (damage) or (critical) result, gain 1 stress token. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

WEAPONS FAILURE (Ship) – While you perform an attack, roll 1 fewer attack die. Action: Repair this card. (x2)

So, the first thing to note: there is nothing positive on any of these cards. You will never be happy to get a critical hit. That said, some of them are clear standouts as far as terrible things to happen. Let’s break down some of the most painful of these, and ​why they’re so potentially devastating.

Direct Hit: The classic, and most common, crit. In a way, this crit is the standard by which the others are measured. For that single uncanceled crit that hit​s​ your hull, you’ve received TWO damage. For more fragile ships, this can be devastating, and even for larger ships, it’s unpleasant to see your journey to​ the​ grave shortened. Not to mention it how it interacts with your Hull Breach crit, dealing out a second face up card.

Panicked Pilot: Not just one, but ​two stress. Your ship now has at ​least two turns ​where it can’t perform action​s. ​A​nd that’s assuming that you perform two blue maneuvers in a row, a choice which will probably make your flying slow and very predictable. Be happy there’s only two of this crit, because this will ruin a lot of pilots’ days.

Disabled Power Regulator: This will give you one ion token per turn until you’re ionized ​, starting on the next time that you engage​.​​ ​The Ionized state forces the ship to perform a ​blue 1-straight maneuver on its next turn​, and only allows the ship to focus​. Your opponent gets one turn of knowing EXACTLY where you will be on your next turn​ (or in two or three turns for medium and large bases, respectively)​, and if that 1-straight puts you on top of an asteroid, tough.

Hull Breach: Any of those other crits look bad? How about having ALL of them? Hull Breach makes all of your incoming damage get dealt face up. You can spend an action to ​repair this crit, but that’s a cost in itself​.​ ​W​hich brings me to the next part about crits:

“Wait…I Don’t Care!”

There are a lot of different ships in this game, with different strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Some ships can shrug off certain crits with minimal fuss. The classic example of this is the Decimator and the TIE​ Interceptor, two classic Imperial ships.

With an agility value of zero, the Decimator doesn’t care as much about Structural Damage, since it survives based purely on raw hitpoints. ​A Hull Breach​, however,​ can be truly devastating, since if you don’t ​repair it ​quickly ​you’ll find your ship turning into a giant flying trash pile of stress, ions, and reduced mobility.

The ​TIE ​Interceptor, on the other hand, relies on its high agility to defend its meager three hit points. A single Structural Damage can ensure that you die in the next turn or two, instead of evading your way to victory. ​Alternatively, a Hull Breach​ ​is almost meaningless to an Interceptor, since it only takes a few damage to kill you anyway, so you won’t have much chance to suffer from other critical effects before you die outright.

Depending on ​ the​ situation, the ships you’re flying, and the ships your opponent is flying, some of these crits don’t mean much, or you can fly in ways that mitigate the damage. Many of them simply take an action to repair: if your ship, like a Y-Wing, isn’t very dependent on actions and mostly gets by with its raw stats, an action is cheap. That said, some crits are permanent, and can be crippling. Any Ace/Superiority Fighter like a​ TIE​ Interceptor, A-Wing, or ​Fang Fighter with a Damaged Engine is a sad sight to see (unless it’s your opponent’s).

​The damage deck is a grab bag, which is why the deck is shuffled: to add another layer of randomness to the game to represent the chaos of space battle. That said, now that we’ve discussed the sorts of things that CAN happen, let’s circle back to the things that are LIKELY to happen.

MAAAAAATH!!!!

Thankfully, there aren’t equal numbers of all of the crits in the deck. Flying a ​ TIE​ Interceptor wouldn’t seem very attractive if you knew there were three or four Damaged Engine cards floating around your deck. In fact, there are only two of all of the crits, except for Direct Hit (five) and Fuel Leak (four). That makes Direct Hits and Fuel Leaks significantly more likely to show up than any other type of crit, prompting us to look closer at these two.

As I hinted at before, you could argue that the Direct Hit is ​categorically the worst crit, even though it’s the most common in the deck. A ship with two hull remaining can take any other crit and fly on, continuing to shoot, block, support, or whatever else it does. But a Direct Hit says ​”No. You’re done. Thanks for playing.​”​ A TIE Fighter with only one damage might feel reasonably confident that it still has a lot of game left in it, but a single Direct Hit takes that whole imaginary career away and transforms you at that very second into just a tally mark under someone else’s cockpit.

Even for ships with a lot of hull, the Direct Hit means one less damage that has to be pushed through, and thus one step closer to being removed from the game. The point of the game is to stay alive and blow up the other guy, and the Direct Hit greatly increases your opponent’s chances of making that happen. That said, a Direct Hit also doesn’t change anything about HOW the ship flies, or what it does. It doesn’t change where you have to fly, how many dice you roll, or what actions you take.

Our constant ​TIE​ Interceptor example here is actually a​n​ interesting example of how the timing of crits can be so crucial. We’ve talked about how a​ TIE​ Interceptor with one damage is instantly removed by a Direct Hit, but it’s almost the exact reverse case when a deadly ace like Soontir Fel gets a Direct Hit as his FIRST ​damage. Despite only clinging to one hull, Soontir Fel can boost, barrel roll, and get away from enemy ships’ firing arcs just the same as before the Direct Hit.

The double damage is scary, but good ace pilots don’t plan on getting much damage during their game anyway. As long as the ship can still fly as it was designed to do, the Soontir player can still go on to win the game.

The Fuel Leak is the ​second most common crit. Effectively, the Fuel Leak just sits on a ship, no different from a regular facedown ​card, ​until you have the misfortune to suffer ANOTHER crit, at which point it gives you an extra damage. It’s almost like a delayed-action Direct Hit: it doesn’t ​​​​remove you when you receive​ it​, but it still increases the chances of your very sudden death later in the game.

So now with our trusty​ TIE​ Interceptor example, we can see how it’s perhaps a little nicer than a Direct Hit, but not by much. If the first crit the Interceptor gets is a Fuel Leak, most players will rush to repair it, otherwise it guarantees that any other crit will kill you outright. ​Our Interceptor with one damage​ already​​, however,​ is completely unaffected by a Fuel Leak: one more crit would kill you anyway, and this crit doesn’t keep you from doing anything that you do. It’s a tougher decision for other ships in the game: paying an action could mean not taking the focus that would let you put crucial damage on an enemy ship. ​ Leaving the fuel leak ​exposed, however,​ could mean that the next crit that comes in does something awful AND gives you double damage, in effect becoming some sort of Super Crit.

So…Who Cares?

You care. ​ ​The wrong crit at the wrong time WILL make you lose a perfectly flown game, and also give you totally undeserved victories. It’s random, but we know enough about probability to be able to glean a few basic axioms for how to fly:

1. Keep your shields up. If you can avoid taking too much damage, or regen lost shields, so that you don’t even have a CHANCE of suffering critical damage, you’ll have a much better chance of your team flying the way you want it to.

2. Look at the crit, and at your situation, before deciding what to do. A Hull Breach or Fuel Leak doesn’t matter if you only have one hull left; don’t waste an action repairing it. That focus could mean you roll enough evades next turn to stay alive. A ship with a powerful armament should probably repair a Weapons Failure or Blinded Pilot…unless it’s almost dead. If you can boost, barrel roll, or even just focus or target lock in the former case, it might be worth ensuring that your parting shot hits hard, or at least that you get a parting shot at all. Don’t waste actions on the forlorn hope of ship surviving; be realistic. If you’re going to die, take one of ​your opponent’s ships down with you.

3. Crit happens. Acknowledge the randomness of the damage deck, and accept that statistics and probabilities still have to bow to the realities of how your deck was shuffled. What are the odds that you’ll draw three Direct Hits in a row? They’re bad. They’re bad odds. But I promise you, it WILL happen. Our first inclination in these situations is to get angry, to feel cheated out of a victory. Force yourself to acknowledge that randomness is just that: RANDOM. It happens to all of us at some point; remember that you’re playing a game to have fun, and that chance is part of what makes that game fun. Chance gives experienced players new challenges to overcome, and gives new players encouraging victories.