"Star Wars Legion - is it a good game?" Topic

I'm about to embark on another major historical project but, I might have money to burn, as a mixer, on less historical stuff too.

I'm thinking a large cowboys skirmish type game but, without cowboys. I'm thinking of a £300.00 GBP-£500 investment – done and dusted.

I love X wing, though I only get to play once or twice a year, and was wondering if Star Wars Legion might fit the bill for a big cowboys type skirmish game.

Your thoughts, please.

You could do a lot worse, Legion is quite clever and most of the film and series characters up to Bobba Fett timeline are in it.
You can get all the rules and cards for nothing and proxy whatever you like blackshawgaming.wordpress.com/2023/02/21/star-wars-legion.
There is a lot of 'best list' advice but as the points change at least once a year any advice more than a year old would be suspect. If you want to cost buy in look for the 4 battle force sets – about £115.00 GBP a set – each will work up as a full 800 point force. You'll need to buy the dice and measuring sticks separately. The starter boxes are not really enough for a full game.

Yes and no….

Legion is skirmish heavy, like 40K or Bolt Action. Think "platoon plus." The new AMG game, Shatterpoint, is much more "man to man skirmish," with just a few figures per side.

Legion has some good ideas: the command cards tied to to individual characters adds a lot of individual flavor to how you build and army and use them. The command system itself also has some good ideas: playing a card which allows you to choose units to activate when you want, while others are random. Cards often have special "powers" and limit which units you can choose to "auto activate." Command ranges are supposedly integral to the game.

However, in actuality, the command system really ends up being irrelevant. While command cards often allow you to choose exactly what units you want to activate when you want, the rest of your units are random, and I've found in many cases, the randomness evens out and it just ends up back to IGOUGO. Command ranges end up being irrelevant as well in most instances as there are very few penalties for being outside that range.

As more units were and are added, the amount of cards for units and upgrades needed grows and grows, and has become very cumbersome to build an army. Many are just variations on the same theme, or so specific they only have one or two practical uses in a whole game-if a specific opportunity even allows the use.

The card "footprint" for A full 800 point army with upgrades is not insignificant, taking up a lot of valuable play space. Unique movement sticks, range sticks, and tokens, tokens everywhere! clog up even more space. Many of the tokens end up being used sparingly, if at all, but you'll sure have plenty of them after a starter set and a few expansion sets!

The figures are great, and have gotten better with each new batch released. There is plenty of room for additional sets, but I'm unsure just how much AMG is going to continue to support the brand, with only a few releases planned in the next few years as they focus on their new, and totally incompatible with Legion figures, Star Wars skirmish game, Shatterpoint.
Lots of characters, and types of units are still unrepresented, and even if they were, the range of the command system is strained as is; with each new unit, they create new rules…which as I said are just variations on old rules…

I definitely recommend buying the figures, but offer that Galactic Heroes/Bigger Battles or Xenos Rampant are better games to play, with set ups in 1/3rd the time.

thanks for that,

James