Not long ago, there was a huge lack of good Star Wars titles on the tabletop. best star wars board game The list looked a little corny. Well, here comes Star Wars Shatterpoint, a new miniatures game. This meant that his two main lines of Star Wars-themed wargames became this and this. star wars legion. This has led to many questions about how the two differ and whether one “fires” the other. So let’s dig deeper into Shatterpoint and see if we can answer those concerns.
what’s in the box
what’s in the box? plastic. Lots of plastic. If it weren’t for the rulebook at the top of the package, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were buying an Airfix model kit, not a game. This makes sense since most miniature games these days are made from plastic sprues and require you to assemble them yourself with a craft knife and polystyrene cement. But when you open the lid, it’s still a bit overwhelming not to find all your favorite Star Wars characters staring at you.
Luckily, most of the figures here are super easy and quick to assemble, but there are no instructions on how to make them on the box, you have to download them online. It comes with angular joints that only fit in certain poses, so it’s easy to assemble, but you have to be careful with the lightsabers, which are very flimsy on some models. The droids are an exception, as they use ball joints and are difficult to assemble in the correct pose. His scale is 40mm, so it’s easy to handle. For reference, popular figures from Games Workshop are 28 or 32mm scale.
There are 16 different figure parts available. These are all from the Clone Wars manga series. Most prominent among them are his four main characters. Anakin and Ahsoka Tano from the blue corner, Lord Maul and Asajj Ventress from the red corner. The Mandalorian with the jetpack is a nice sculpt, but not outstanding. There’s also plenty of chunky scenery to build, including a loft his gantry to make sure the action spans all three dimensions of him.
The bottom of the box contains other real game components buried under a layer of cardboard. A bag full of custom dice and some small decks of cards. Most of these are plain colors, but the character artwork on his cards is bright, sassy, and very reminiscent of the Clone Wars show, yet with his own recognizable style. Avid figure painters will enjoy the fact that the box includes two of his printed cardboard backgrounds so they can photograph their painted miniatures in front of it.
rules and how to play
Shatterpoint comes with a thick, spooky rulebook, and the game is pretty hard to learn. However, if you can find rules videos online, you’ll find that the core flow of the game isn’t too difficult to understand. Complexity comes from covering all conditions such as disarming and tension, as well as edge cases that the movement miniatures open up. A game like this can puke. Since this is a skirmish game, the idea is that you can enjoy cinematic action with a small squad, unlike Star Wars Legion, which doesn’t have as much detail in the larger battles.
The procedure begins by selecting a game figure. Selecting two characters gives each character points to spend on secondary characters and support units. Her 16 figures in the box provide exactly what both sides need to play the game. You’re then drawn into three random struggles that determine where the objective tokens are placed on the tabletop, choosing missions, and which objectives are active during different stages of the game. Capturing objectives earns you points, which reduces the number of points needed to knock out enemy characters or win battles through other actions. Winning a struggle will change your objectives, expand the battlefield again, and win two struggles to enter the game.
Each of your characters has a card to put in the Order Deck along with the Wild Shatterpoint card. At the start of your turn, you can draw a card to activate that unit, or you can spend a “force point” to put that card into your reserve and later activate it to draw another unit. increase. Force points are also used during turns to allow characters to use more powerful abilities, but are in short supply. They are updated when order decks run out and are reshuffled, but organizing them for best effect is a difficult and fascinating tactical challenge.
An activated figure can, as you might guess, perform two actions: move and fight. Movement is handled using the included tools, saving you the minor hassle of a tape measure and including not just ground movement, but jumping and climbing in a dynamic struggle for position. There are several other actions you can choose from. Figures can also hide, allowing for small moves and a defensive bonus: concentration that adds dice to your next attack. As with his limited force point pool, his two actions are never enough, and the game forces him to make tradeoffs and take risks to reach his goals.
Shutterpoint combat has a lot of interesting mechanics, but it feels a little awkward and over the top. Each number has melee and ranged attack values, sometimes zero. Roll that number of attack dice for hits and crits. Targets have similar defense values and roll different dice to block hits, but cannot block criticals. Both types of dice generate “expertise” that produces additional effects depending on the number of these faces, and can be cross-referenced with the character’s chart of cards. This may feel long, but it allows characters in the game to feel and play very differently from one another, giving you a different palette of strategic options to tap into.
The same is true for the hits themselves. Shatterpoint doesn’t do anything as simple as converting unblocked hits into direct damage. Instead, there is a chart for each character with multiple branch points and different combat effects along the way, and on this chart he can make one “movement” for each hit. Again, this slows things down, but at the cost of having to think about what path to choose and what effect (usually including damage) to apply to the target. Some characters have multiple charts, and you can switch between them for more choices or slower play, at least until you understand all the possibilities.
As if the expertise and combat chart system wasn’t enough to make each character feel unique, they also have their own palette of special abilities. Jedi like Anakin can deflect blaster her bolts, droid units buff other droid units nearby, and maul can gain instant revenge attacks and buffs from wounds. Combined with the highly dynamic nature of movement, this palette of effects gives Shatterpoint an impressive level of narrative detail. Force-users push and pull objects and characters around the battlefield, Manarorians fly around with jumppacks, and droids communicate with each other by radio. It seems that you can hear the sound of the lightsaber.
