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+
12from1
Original rating: 4 - Dated: 2015-04-29 I should have known that games that require a dungeon master are not for me. Couple that with lots of fiddly rules and multiple aspects to keep track of with no real rhyme or reason, and you end up being one of the most dissapointing games I've played in awhile. I want to like this game, but its like the really cool looking bottle of wine or beer with a cool label, yet tastes terrible and leaves a bad taste in your mouth. What I did like: the maps and minis. Everything else in this game either requires learning too many rules that aren't intuitive or waiting through significant scenarios for meager rewards. It's not as deep as the Star Wars RPG's I grew up playing, and it's not as fun as battling with the Star Wars minis. I'm sure i'm in the minority, based on the BGG rating, but this game just isn't what I thought it could be, and wasn't all that fun. Updated Rating: 5 - Dated 2017-03-10 I am starting to soften on my stance with this game. Originally, I had rated this at a 2, but that was unfair. It was due mostly to having played the game (campaign) with two different groups, where in one, the DM was very unfair, leaving out explanations of rules, and not working very hard to correct obvious mistakes we made as Rebels, the other being a group where the two other players (one the DM, the other the Wookie) seemed content to have their own in-jokes, and own RPG-Lite going on, irregardless of me, or the campaign we were playing. That soured the game for me. I updated the rating to a 4, because it was unfair to judge the game on the players I played with. After having restarted the campaign (this time as the DM) with a group I enjoy playing with, the game is fun. But what I've already stated about fiddly rules are still true. The rule book comes out once a scenario, even after multiple plays. There are some things in the game that don't make intuitive sense, and in some cases, detract from the theme. I will, however, keep playing now that I've got a good group to play with. I'm also hopeful that the eventual app fixes some issues with how to build and maintain a campaign, and that the rules come a bit more naturally after multiple additional plays. EDIT: updated rating to a 6 after playing many skirmish missions. This seems to be the "best" mode of the game - although the rules issues still plague this version of the game as well. If I were to make this game over, I'd strip out half of the rules requirements. Battles should be seamless and easy (similar to Memoir '44, for example).
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).
5mokus
I don't like that there is only a single campaign in a big box game, but skirmish mode and the app bumps this to 10.