Tabletop Review - Star Wars: Rebellion

Developer: Corey Konieczka

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Hide and Seek in a Galaxy Far Far Away

Oh Star Wars, you have been the inspiration for many, many games. If you are reading this, you are probably a nerd like me and have played many of them. I am bringing you yet another from a Galaxy Far Far Away, Star Wars: Rebellion brought to you by Fantasy Flight Games.

Star Wars is an IP that tends to mostly focus on its characters. Less games tend to focus on the war part, and lesser still grapple with the asymmetrical nature of the conflict between the Empire and Rebels. Star Wars: Rebellion puts this conflict front and center. The Empire is a large unstoppable war machine with an economic engine that turns resources into walking death machines (better watch out for that new moon), and the Rebels are just trying to hang on long enough to cross the finish line. You can have that experience as a player on either side. It’s a grand scale….perhaps a bit too much.

The Code

Star Wars: Rebellion is a 2-4 player area control game that pits the Rebels against the Empire. Perhaps the best framing for this game is hide and seek under pressure. We found that it works best as a two-player game with each player facing off to wreck the other (a 3rd and 4th player mostly just divides up the resources that would otherwise be handled by one). Most actions in the game are derived from your heroes in which you are either trying to enact your own master plans or anticipate and ruin the enemy’s strategy. The core novelty of the game is the Rebels are on an unknown planet (to the empire) and they can remain in the game as long as their hidden base stays undiscovered and uninvaded. The Rebels are bidding their time, accomplishing hit-and-run objectives to drop the final turn counter while sweating every time the Empire moves to a new planet. That premise alone is what first interested me in the game.

The Empire is, with no shadow of a doubt, the favored to win. They have greater production capacity, more planets, more forces, and they even have the dastardly ability to steal heroes from the Rebels wrecking their action economy (via your very own “Encase in Carbonite” action). You are the BAD GUY and you get to enjoy the perks. You get the glee of looking the rebel player in the eye every time you move to a new planet and ask, “Are you here?” as menacing as you can muster (not required but definitely encouraged). In my 3 games played, this part never got old especially when you finally get a “Yes”.

The Rebels are a different beast and truly for the underdog at heart. Rebels lost every game that we played although I almost won in the last match we played. Your forces and production capability are meager compared to the forces you are up against, but you have spunk and unpredictability on your side. The Rebels have many hero abilities, allowing them to attack randomly and suddenly which can surprise unsuspecting Empire players. You do this in the hopes of accomplishing objectives that lower the “Rebellion tracker” and bring the game closer to an end. The Empire wins when the Rebel base has been crushed, the Rebels win when they run out the clock.

Both players take turns sending out their named heroes to accomplish missions. Like the Empire sending General Veers to enforce compliance on the recently conquered Kashyyk, increasing production and adding an AT-AT to its future production line to the Rebels sending Obi-wan Kenobi to Yavin, moving his X-wings from nearby planets. With the sole intent to distract the Empire player from expanding closer to Bespin, where their secret base lies in hiding.

Should the two sides meet in combat, then generals are deployed, tactics cards are drawn, and dice are rolled until a player is vanquished or retreats…assuming they can. Combat has more or a Risk feel than anything. It all comes down to luck of the roll supported by as much opportunity to roll as you can muster via the ships and men you have produced. Combat also has two fronts, the land and space surrounding the planets. The troops you produce only work on one front and each general has skills that give you tactics cards depending on their specialty and skills.

It's worth mentioning the Death Star in particular. The Empire player starts with one already built and has a mission (which has to be randomly drawn first) to allow them to blow up any planet in its immediate vicinity. No die roles, no combat, just a blown-up planet. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Rebels better hope they weren’t there. Thankfully they can destroy it with an objective.

Here Comes the Danger Egg

If you have ever played a Fantasy Flight game, you know you are getting some components. Plastic ships, little soldiers, AT-ATs, speeders, and Death Stars are represented by plastic minis on the board. I find the Death Stars inspires a nice sense of dread for the rebels as it wanders around the board taller than other pieces.

Beyond plastic, you have several decks, and all the heroes are represented by cardboard inserts moved around the board. This means that the setup is not short, and the number of pieces could scare some players. What works well is nearly all components are clearly for the Empire or Rebels, so it’s never in question which deck, mini, or hero goes to whom or where.

This game is not abstract, there are lots of little pieces and touches to bring out the Star Wars theme. Fantasy Flight has always done stylized art well, and it shows here as well. All the mission cards, research initiatives, and objectives are beautifully colored and leave no confusion that this is a Star Wars title showing you mini snippets from movie scenes either via art or still frames from the films. The art was one of my favorite parts of the game.

Why Can’t I Do That Again?

As with any asymmetrical game, the success of the game depends on the rules allowing all players to potentially achieve victory even with their different mechanics and end states. That achievability is where we struggled the most and the game fell short.

The game has a rulebook, of course, but we struggled to navigate the rules in such a way that either player felt confident in building longer-term strategies. Decisions or actions that felt intuitive as a player would often run into rule roadblocks where you couldn’t quite do the thing you wanted.

For example, once as a Rebel player, I had a secret objective to take out a Star Destroyer. This would move the “final turn marker” down, which is a huge reward incentive for Rebels. Luckily for me, the Empire player had a singular Star Destroyer by its lonesome on a separate planet, he did this because he was spreading himself thin trying to search as many planets as possible for the Rebel base. My plan was to play one of my mission cards to spawn my secret base navy next to his Destroyer and then move them over to attack him before he could react. That was until he flipped through the rules, and it turns out you can’t move away from a system with a hero in it which I had to play to spawn them. I then had to leave my navy in the open and was crushed by the end of the turn. It was not a fun experience. It certainly doesn’t make me feel like sneaky rebels to spawn a navy and have them sit there for multiple rounds. Even the Empire player didn’t feel any sense of threat because he now knew he could move navies as required to stop any surprise naval assaults.

Perhaps a few more games under our belt and the longer-term strategy will finally be more navigable, but for us, we were left disappointed or frustrated more often than excited after our turn. The vast amount of moving parts did not seem to synergize from a strategy perspective.

Is this the Galaxy for you?

I love asymmetrical games (big Root fan) as it gives a great reason to replay the game. You get a different experience depending on who you are playing, and it delays mastery of the game, which is usually when the game starts to bore me. When deciding if I would recommend this game, I like to think about how I would view this game without the awesome IP on top of it. While the Star Wars lore maximizes the initial appeal and draw for the game, it fails to compensate for the overly complex and unintuitive rules.

For this game, the rule mechanics did not jive for us. Like anything you could get over it, but for us we aren’t sure if there is game 4 in our future compared to other titles. This is a game that I would have loved to introduce to my wife as she is a bigger Star Wars fan than me, but I know she would never have the patience for the unintuitive rules and complicated mechanics to make it past the first game. This game could have been more appealing by dialing back some of its ambition and scope. This would allow it to focus on its greatest novelty, being high stakes hide and seek between David and Goliath via the heroes you know and love.

For everyone else, if you understand what you are getting into and love you some Star Wars, I give this game a: