Quick Review (based on 2 games and several readings of the rules – yeah I know that's not a large enough sample size but here goes anyway):
Stuff: high quality miniatures that paint up very well. Hard plastic seem to take both super glue and model cement. Assembly of vehicles a bit tricky. Both sides come in the same color so even a non-painter may want to spray the Storm trooper white to tell apart (bases have different colors). Drawbacks: too big (already covered) and can only be assembled one way (with out out right conversion). Not like Perry plastics made to swap arms head to get endless variety – you get the same seven guys for each side.
Game Play: its Bolt Action with a slight twist. You have one use "command cards" that dictate who goes first and allow you to designate some (1-3) units to activate. Cards that have more units are slower to go. Rest of your unit chits go into a bag to draw out randomly. Much to do about nothing. You still activate one unit at a time switching back and forth. You can pick out of the "bag" or one of the designated units. But as all the trooper unit chits are generic (so you don't care which one you draw out of the bag) it doesn't make that much difference. The leader has only one chit (usually Darth or Luke) and the Vehicle has one chit. So you always want to give a designated chit to the Leader or Vehicle (once you have lots of Vehicles so lots of Vehicle chits go into bag you won't care about this either) so you don't have to get lucky and draw that one leader/vehicle chit out of the bag with all those generic trooper chits. Lots of cards and mechanics but very little player thinking. I suspect they originally intended the slower acting cards to let you activate multiple units at once but at some point in playtest chickened out of this more dynamic mechanic.
Movement is a bit clumsy and depends on weird measuring sticks of no (as far as I can tell) standard length (so you need FFG sticks rather than cheap rulers). It does have the nice effect of making vehicle movement less "crab" like, in that you have to pick a direction and have limited number of turns on your "stick".
Combat is typical FFG with lots of colored d8s to shoot and color d6s to negate hits. Dice have Hits, Critical Hits (effect Armored Vehicles and ignore cover), Surges (activate special abililites and blanks. Must use FFG dice and base set doesn't have near enough dice to play even a small game. Count on buying an extra set of dice (for a cool $15 USD).
Each unit has a card for data, takes a moment to find everything and the movement stat is give as a number of red bars (I associate red with shooting not moving so at first thought this was a range stat). Weapons are defined by the number and color of dice to roll (white bad, black OK, red good). Ranges are again measured on a FFG stick (no adjustment though for close or long range). In the advanced game suppression plays a role and is fairly well handled but is yet another marker counter (and can build up). Units have 2 actions which can be: shoot, move, ready, aim, dodge and a wait/defense fire. Cover is very basic, soft stops one hit, hard two hits so effects "small" units more (as they have less chance of getting multiple hits). This can build up: dodge cancels a hit, suppression cancels a hit, cover etc. – so you can get up to 4 canceled hits (pretty harsh as the basic squad can only shoot with 4 die). As mentioned Critical Hits are NOT canceled. Luke and Darth are their own unit and have special powers as you may have imagined (its Bespin Luke so he still has a blaster pistol).
Determining victory conditions and battlefield environment uses a weird and rather tedious elimination system. Time consuming and overwrought in the classic FFG manner.
Overall: all that said I still had great time playing the game as I love Star Wars and the setting. Alternating activation is not very exiting or tactically interesting but its so common now that I guess we just have to live with it. I suspect FFG (which did produce the well designed X-Wing) had a much more interesting system originally but watered it down in playtest to insure player decisions didn't have too much impact and certainly didn't threaten anyone playing the latest uber list.
I like having a community of gamers (and don't always want to play/run my own designs), so I've bought in as an alternative to 40K (since I like both the mechanics and world of SW Legion much better). A decent game and we'll see how the community develops.
TomT
discovers a lost dinosaur.
