Pairs well with: Blue Milk and Rhuvian Fizz, according to Wookiepedia.

Traitor rating: 10/10. This game is straight up you and your opponent ruining each other’s lives and dreams through the medium of small printed cards.

Briony has recently been involved in a pub quiz. It wasn’t any old pub quiz though, it was the University of Southampton’s Rock and Metal society pub quiz. Having been a member for the full five years of her University life she knew exactly why most people would be caught off guard and end up with a score of -27. Rocksoc pub quizzes have very sporadic rounds which can be worth different values of points, either for getting the right answer or for getting it monumentally wrong. The questions follow no logical sequence and often feature dubious rounds, for instance the ‘decipher the name of the metal band from the logo’ or ‘recognise the fewest pop artists’, which confuse a lot of folk. It is a proud traditional that has certainly gotten out of hand over the years, making regular pub quizzes look like a basic pre-school maths test.

This year however, there was a welcome edition of Star Wars trivia. Despite having a team who were 75% blind drunk and regularly absent during and between rounds, Briony’s team managed a cool 9/10* in this segment. This was in fact the best score they got for the entire quiz and later prompted the old** Star Wars card game to be played over the following weekend.

Star Wars: The Card Game is a two-player deck building game. It is set loosely during the height of the Empire’s control in a way that allows the different card affiliations to have beef with one and all of the others at the same time. Although not plot-specific, the decks will feature characters, places and events that occur during the novels, films and general Star Wars universe.

It’s almost like we’re in control of our own Star Wars adventure, guys! … Guys?

 

The game comes with four pre-made decks: the Sith, Imperial Navy, Rebel Alliance, and the Jedi. Each deck will feature cards with affiliations from their respective force sides. There are affiliations in total (but some cards may be neutral or without an affiliation). These are: the Sith, Imperial Navy, Rebel Alliance, the Jedi, Scum and Villainy, and Smugglers and Spies.

Obviously there are now several million expansions and other decks to pad out these beginning few, but the game works excellently just with these basic four. Mmmm, tasty vanilla decks. One player will play the light side of the force which may use either the Rebel Alliance or Jedi decks, which are formed of cards from the Rebel Alliance, Jedi and Smugglers and Spies affiliations. The other will play the dark side using either the Imperial Navy or Sith decks, which are composed of cards from the Imperial Navy, Sith, and Scum and Villainy affiliations.

Now, because this is a card game there is going to be a lot more cards. Like, a lot. Unit, enhancement, event and fates cards will be included in your deck and enable you to do some other stuff other than playing Chewie to entertain the moral of your troops. But why would we want to do anything other than that, you ask?

Units cards, like Chewie, are used for attacking and defending in engagements and may also contribute to balancing the force (don’t worry, we’ll come back this like Han Solo comes back to bars). Enhancement cards do what they say on the tin – play the card to do or get a better thing, or to improve existing cards. Event cards are sudden effects which are played directly from the hand instead of having to be placed in the play area first. They usually cost resources or cancel effects of other cards. Finally, fate cards are similar to event cards but usually have more powerful effects. You can only play these during a certain phase, and when used correctly can be a game-changer***.

During the setup of the game you will firstly, and rather obviously, be excited by seeing your favourite characters being played****. Secondly, usually later on in the game after staring at your cards for so friggin’ long in a vain attempt to make some sort of plan, you’ll be excited by how awesome the artwork is.

 

During setup you’ll also pick and layout three objectives. These are what the game is really all about: each player will be trying destroy their opponent’s objective cards. A light side victory requires the destruction of three objective cards (even though more may be played throughout the game). A dark side victory occurs if the death star dial advances to 12. This is a dinky little clock which will advance once per turn, and twice if at the beginning of the turn the dark side of the force is more powerful.

A player’s turn has many phases. In the rule book this is listed as 8 or so phases, with very specific things you can do within them. Sometimes you can only even take part in a phase if it is your turn, for example. When in doubt it’s safe to assume that you’ve just progressed to a phase you have utterly forgotten about. At the beginning of turns there is a re-fresh phase (removing old tokens), draw phase (drawing cards into the hand), and deployment phase (play cards from the hand into the play area for the cost of the card). After these there is a conflict phase.

Pew! Pew, pew!

The attacking player (the player’s whose turn it is) can choose to use cards in their play area to attack. Their opponent can choose to defend with cards in their own play area, or not to commit at all. Defending results in deadly exploding space battles with lots of fire and casualties and screaming and an epic soundtrack*****.

If you manage to kill, damage, or immobilise all of the defenders you can take a stab at the objective cards. More powerful objective cards can only take a few damage tokens before they are destroyed, whereas weaker ones may be able to take more. Deal some damage to the cards, and then your little rag-tag army will fly all the way back home to your own play area.

The force struggle phase happens at the end of each turn, in which players commit cards to the force. Whoever has the most committed points to the force means that for that round, the force will be changed to their side. Committing cards to this however means being unable to use them in the later stages of the round.

 

AND THEN IT ALL HAPPENS AGAIN. Until one of you wins, or you get so wound up at all of your cool cards being killed off that you give up and set up a nice game of Tobago instead. This regularly happens to Bob who finds the stress of the game too much to bear, which always ends with her throwing the remnants of her deck in Robot Boyfriend’s face.

If there is one thing that Briony has learnt from this game it’s that she is not qualified to single-handedly bring peace to the universe through military might. This makes her a little bit sad as someone who plays a lot of turn-based strategy games, but also a little bit glad that she won’t ever have to apply for the job ‘resource manager of the Empire’, because boy does that look like a stressful job utterly void of job security.

In conclusion the game is very well thought out and balanced. The art, and range of characters and cards are excellent. It is a constant struggle from beginning to end, but once you get better at it it feels like you have the might of the Empire emanating from your very being. Unfortunately, like similar deck-building games such as Magic the Gathering, it’s going to take a while for you to get really good, kid, and until then you’ll need to be prepared to loose a lot. But it’s ok, even the best Jedi loose sometimes.

 

 

*They still argue that the last question was in fact correct, and they should have gotten full marks. Scruffy looking nerf herders… *mutter, mutter*

** It’s actually a fairly recent release of much older games. Everyone loves having a whole range of games from the same universe, right? Fortunately it is much better than the original.

***A phrase that gives most board-gamers an apprehensive feeling. You can just feel the traitor scale edging up already.

**** Shouting ‘Yoda! I call upon you to defend my honour!’, or ‘Jabba the Hut – I CHOOSE YOU!’ never gets old.

*****It definitely only ends with you counting up some numbers and maybe giving them a couple of damage tokens. Actually killing a card is pretty exciting. And by killing I mean taking a small piece of coloured card off of the board and back into the discard pile.