Star Wars: Imperial Assault
Imperial Assault casts you and your friends into the climatic events following the Death Star’s destruction above Yavin 4, and offers two full game experiences within the Star Wars saga.
60m - 120m
2 - 5 Players
Ages 14+
AlexFS
[i]2018/09/17 - 9 plays at 3-4p[/i] The game has great minis and components in general. I played the base campaign, and became gradually disillusioned with the game, because of an increasing imbalance between the Empire and the Rebellion. The four last plays were smashing defeats for the Rebellion, which was boring for everyone. In the end we did not even play the final scenario, even though it was the only one remaining to finish the campaign. Another problem was rules fiddlyness. Even after 9 plays we were still checking edge cases, slowing down the pace of the game. It seems the skirmish mode is really good, and there also a cooperative mode available with an app, but I did not try any of those play modes.
alenen
1st plays: This is a refined version of the Descent 2.0 system with a better theme. I really wanted to like Descent, but the hand of take-that cards always felt jarring, and the long turns caused it to drag a bit. Threaded actions and less gotcha's speed up the game and make for a positive experience. I do wish there were more Jedi/Sith though. 2nd plays: We played this multiple times in one night, and the campaign was interesting, each scenario was different, and not quite the frantic pace of Descent. It's still a race to complete objectives, but slightly less so, and still a very tight margin for error.
Agnati
Same make but different model from FFG. There are some tweaks to rules from Descent 2nd Edition, but SW:IA is just as enjoyable with just as much (incredible amount) replayability and with FFG giving the community free reign to create content, it'll be fun to play for many years to come. It does take a little getting used to, though, where Descent, every attack could miss if the attacker rolled an X on the always-rolled "blue attack die". In SW:IA, there is no "miss" for an attacker. *A few* characters (both sides) roll a white defense die instead of black and the white defense die has a "pizza" (as we call it) face that means the attack on you misses completely. If I had to find something to criticize it would be the dice symbols. FFG seems to have picked arbitrary symbols for stuff like defense ("shield") or "evade" or "dodge" on the defense dice. It's important to note, though, that you're playing as the REBELS, not the JEDI as a lot of people fantasize about when wanting to play this game. There's one Jedi-trainee of sorts who uses some force-named abilities, but no lightsaber to speak of (save for one specific quest reward that you very well may never even come across).