A cooperative game of daring missions.
First up, I have to admit the shine wore off Star Wars for me a long, long time ago – probably about halfway through Return of the Jedi when the ewoks showed up, but definitely within the first few minutes of – oh look, I can’t even remember what that atrocious first prequel film was called. And while I occasionally try bits of the new shows, it all just seems a lot of tedious exposition and poorly-aimed blaster shooting padded around endless footage of spaceships landing and taking off. Sure, I have a few Star Wars games in my collection and enjoy them, but I certainly didn’t go into this thinking “oh wow, Corey has made a game based on The Mandalorian!”
Thankfully, he’s such a great game designer that you can substitute whatever adventure sci-fi wrapping you like; the game would still be heaps of fun. Take an ingenious mechanic where you assign action cards to a row of action slots printed on the edge of the ‘board’ (actually a spiral-bound book, a popular way of depicting multiple play areas these days, though no substitute for a proper board in my opinion), add a slowly escalating number of special abilities introduced through a clever introductory campaign system, and cap it all off with a hidden traitor mode and mix-and-match mercenary missions, and you have another triumph.
I do wish it was competitive rather than cooperative, but that’s just me. The system works smoothly and beautifully, the game is just pure fun – and surprisingly puzzly, not something I’m usual a fan of but it works very well here – and it doesn’t outstay its welcome or pretend to be anything other than it is. Though I must say that while on first blush it seems simple, levels of complexity and challenge reveal themselves as you play more.
Sadly, Corey recently announced he is leaving the boardgame industry for new pastures, which is a great loss to gamers; he’s designed and co-designed some corkers in his day. This is a lovely one to go out on however: straightforward, elegant, and entertaining. So good I even don’t mind that it’s another Star Wars game.
