X-Wing - Introducing List Building to a 5 year old

We just got Penny's report card back earlier this week and she appears to be doing well.  Her social skills are also meeting expectations which is great as my wife and I were worried because she's an only child and has not had much interaction with peers outside of pre-school and kindergarten.  She can count fairly high in both French and English which is great and her addition skills seem to be on par with everyone else.

As a math teacher I'm ok with that but I'd like her to be better at math than her peers.  Call it pride if you will.  So in that regard I've decided that I'm going to introduce proper X-Wing list building to her soon.  Not sure how far I'll get though but from what I have seen her do and the report card comments she should be able to add tens (so add like 20 + 10) and she can already do ones addition (things like 1 + 4, and 5 + 2).  Shouldn't be too far of a stretch to do something like 12 + 23 (a Bandit Z-95 + Red Squadron X-Wing) or 16 + 5 (HWK-290 with Ion Turret).

My plan is basically to give her the points value for one of her ships and have her add upgrades to it and see what the new total is.  If that goes well, we can move on to adding the costs of ships together and hopefully get to a point where she can pick ships that add up to something close to 100 or whatever points total we decide to play at that day.

So the next game we play will be with a list that Penny makes herself!

X-Wing - Things are Escalating Rather Quickly

Exciting day today!  A little over a week ago I had asked Game Quest if they did special orders as I was looking for a 10th anniversary edition of Ticket to Ride that didn't cost an arm and a leg (the other game store in town had a few copies of it but they were selling them for $160 + tax!).  I knew I could order it via Amazon for way cheaper but I liked Game Quest and wanted to support a local business.  Turns out they were able to order it for me and at a price comparable to Amazon.

Not content with ordering just the board game I asked if they could order a few X-Wing ships as well so with my board game order came the Millennium Falcon and a pair of TIE Defenders.  Game Quest also got a restock of other ships so I will probably add more things to both Penny's Rebel Alliance and my Imperial Squadron in the near future (as it stands I have 6 ships to her 5 ships and she thinks it's unfair despite her having two large ships).  The influx of reinforcements for both sides coincided perfectly with us having finished our starfield battle mat!

Before we played with the new ships though I took some time to rearrange the ships and pilots so that both sides were roughly even in points and came up with the following squadron lists.  I also added some ordnance because in the last game we played, Penny had asked what the "alphabet tokens" were for.  I explained to her that they were called Target Lock tokens and next time we played I'd show her how to use them.

Penny's Rebel Alliance - 160 points

• Han Solo in the Millennium Falcon - 47 pts
• Dash Rendar in the Outrider with a Heavy Laser Cannon - 48 pts
• Rebel Operative HWK-290 with Ion Cannon Turret - 21 pts (I opted for the ion cannon turret as it doesn't require focus to be used and I can try and introduce ion tokens to our games)
• Bandit Squadron Z-95 with Concussion Missiles - 16 pts
• Blue Squadron Novice T-70 X-Wing with Proton Torpedoes - 28 pts

Mr. Arocena's Imperial Squadron - 160 points

• Gamma Squadron TIE Bomber with Homing Missiles, Proximity Mines - 28 pts
• Bounty Hunter in a Firespray with Heavy Laser Cannon, Seismic Charge - 42 pts
• 2x Zeta Squadron TIE/fo - 32 pts
• 2x Delta Squadron TIE Defenders - 60 pts

So a quick recap of what rules we have played with so far:

• All the basic rules from the Learn to Play guide except for stress tokens
• Focus Tokens
• Evade Tokens
• Secondary Weapon cards (just Cannons and Turrets so far)

We still don't play with pilot special abilities as her reading comprehension is not at the level necessary to understand the abilities.  I could just tell her what each pilot does and I think she'd remember that but I'll hold off until she can read better.  We also don't play with critical hits for the same reason.  Interestingly enough, Penny tried to make a case for dealing two damage with the big explosion because it's a bigger explosion.

In this game we learned about target locks, how to use ordnance and ion tokens.