A long time ago in a galaxy far far away the Empire was in search of the Rebel’s secret base. They were sending out probe droids, building new AT-ATs, taking over planets, and trying to deal with those pesky rebel scum. But that wasn’t the only problem, the Rebels were gaining ground as they completed missions to subvert the Empire’s plans and it was only a matter of time before they’d be able to stop them.

If that sounds a lot like the actual Star Wars movies (or at least the original trilogy), good, because that is what Star Wars Rebellion is built around. It’s only a two player game, which is a little bit odd, though I guess you could split up the duties and play as a team, but that would also be odd for the game, where one side is the Empire trying to destroy the Rebel base, and the other side is the Rebels trying to complete missions and last long enough until they have enough influence in the galaxy. Star Wars Rebellions takes the grand space epic feel and distills it down into a board game.

The game is a lot of fun to play and runs off of a number of interesting different mechanics. There is space and ground combat that allow you to battle it out with the other players troops, there are missions that you go on that the other player can challenge. And there is strategy of hiding your secret base and of searching for it. Most of these actions require that you use a commander, which are the named characters of Star Wars, to complete them, so if you decide to subjugate a planet, you use Darth Vader or the Emperor. Maybe you want to sabotage a supply line with Princess Leia. There are tons of different options, or maybe there will be an epic space battle between Tarkin and Wedge.

Star Wars Rebellion is split into different phases of the game as each player picks secret objectives on their turn to try and complete. These objectives, or missions, give you things and you can play them in any order. But if you play an objective, your opponent has a chance to try and stop you by sending in one of their guys that has the skill you are using. However, once you’ve used a character in a round you can’t use them again. Even moving your troops requires characters to do. This turns the game into kind of a bluffing game, can you stop some of your opponents plans or maybe you need to let something that isn’t ideal for you go through so that you can complete your own plans.

Besides these objectives, there is combat as well, maybe I send some ships into a system that contains a couple of enemy ships. If so, now we engage in combat. Combat is based around the ships that you are using and you roll dice with them. So the more or better ships that you have, the more likely it is that you’ll win. But if you send in a leader, like Tarkin or Wedge, you get some cards that can help you in battle. Maybe you’ll draw a card that can help you, and maybe you won’t, but maybe you won’t need them, because your dice roll could be amazing or terrible. The combat is based around dice that are determined by which troops you have, so there is an element of random luck to it. As are the rolls for challenging someone as they try and complete an objective. So even the better fleet might not win. This can be interesting, especially if you’re rolling well, or it can be poor, however, it doesn’t always lead to the most balanced game because finding the rebel base might be deduction, but destroying it is all about the die rolls.

Overall I really do enjoy the game. The cards help balance out the combat so you feel like you can win if you have the lesser fleet, but more often than not you won’t. There is a fair amount of strategy that goes into if you stop someone’s objective or if you need to move the troops, especially playing the Empire side which is searching out the Rebel base. The game takes a little while to play, but it does feel immersive on the story side of the game as you have characters that you really recognize from the original trilogy. I’d highly recommend playing this game, and I do recommend buying the game as well. I haven’t bought it yet, but it’s on my list of games that I want (which is huge), the downside is with the awesome figures, lots of cards, a huge board, the game has a pretty high price tag. The components are worth it, and especially when you play with the advanced rules as to how to set-up the game and leader powers, the game is immensely replayable.

Overall Grade: A

Gamer Grade: A+

Casual Grade: C

Just a little comment on the casual grade, I do think it will be enjoyed by most people, especially Star Wars fans. However, it isn’t a light game, there are a number of rules that all make sense and are written out well, but for a casual beginning gamer, it might be a bit much.

Have you played Star Wars Rebellion before? What are your thoughts on it? Does it feel like a part of the original Trilogy?

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Peder and I first learned about the Star Wars RPGs through Campaign, a podcast run by One Shot. Campaign is just one of the many great podcasts One Shot runs, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and was a great (and hilarious) way to get introduced to the Star Wars RPGs. Through listening to Campaign, I learned a bit about how the game is played — and a LOT about how absurd and fun it can be when your RPG story regularly goes off the rails…but I digress.

There are currently three different modules of the Star Wars RPG — Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny. But even though the one Peder and I were most familiar with prior to playing AoR is the Edge of the Empire module, since that’s the one the Campaign group used, this knowledge still served us well. As I mentioned, gameplay is very similar for all three modules; there are just some different options and basic storylines/timelines within each.

AoR is, to my understanding, meant to be set at about the time that the Rebel Alliance was at its peak (so, close to when Luke, Leia, and Han were entering the picture — or at least, that’s how I choose to imagine it). In our session, we and the other players played as the motley crew of a Corellian YT-1300f freighter — the same type of ship as the Millenium Falcon. Together, we had to work together to stop the evil Director Lucas from releasing edited versions of a certain trilogy of beloved films to suit his “great vision.” We had to destroy the master copies of the edited (read: degraded) films before they were released across the galaxy — and before the original versions were destroyed forever! Much quoting and some George Lucas impressions (even one from me…) ensued.

This storyline was a really fun one, and struck the perfect balance between casual fun and high-stakes action that you want for a one shot session. Some of us played as human characters, and some as aliens (I was a young human woman, Peder was a Bothan); this let us get a feel for the spectrum of different characters you can play within the Star Wars RPG universe. And even in that short time, we were able to pack in a fair amount of character development. I kept on rolling horribly throughout the game, so I used that to style my character as absurdly clumsy and absentminded. And during our first combat encounter, Peder had his character use his knife — he then took this moment and ran with it to make his character super sneaky, sly, and obsessed with stabbing people, and used that element to hilarious effect several times.

Though the Star Wars RPGs have character sheets and skill mechanics that are similar in some ways to what you’d see in a few other RPGs, what’s really interesting and unique about these games is the dice system. This is because these RPGs use their own special set of dice — instead of using the usual many-sided numbered dice like in most other RPGs, the Star Wars games have different colored dice printed with symbols, which correspond to different aspects of the game. There are green dice, which determine how successful a given action is, yellow dice, which determine how successfully a skill is used, purple dice, which influence an action’s difficulty, and red dice, which are added in for especially difficult actions. There are also blue dice, or boost dice, that can be used to make a skill more effective, and black dice that add in extra threats. The white die you see in the image is a Force die; however, we didn’t use this much, and it’s one that never really seems to get used often, so for our purposes, I won’t go into it for now.

There are a couple of elements involved in how the type and number of dice to be rolled is determined. Beside each skill on the character sheet, there are symbols showing which dice should be rolled when using that skill. In addition to this, the GM will let the character know how many dice to roll for the difficulty level when the character performs an action.

For a quick example–let’s say I’m dressed up in a stormtrooper uniform, trying to bluff my way past a superior officer. I’d likely use my deception skill to do this. We’ll say I’m really good at BS’ing, and that there are three green symbols and a yellow beside my Deception skill. The GM decides this is a reasonably difficult maneuver, so he’ll tell me to add in two purple dice. So I’ll roll a total of six dice (getting to roll huge handfuls of dice is another great feature of this game, incidentally) to get my result. Successes (on the green and yellow die) and failures (on the purple and red die) cancel each other out, as do advantages and threats. So we’ll say that, all told, I’ve rolled well and gotten two successes, one advantage, and one threat. I would then need to describe just how I succeeded, what my advantage was (maybe I’m so good at bluffing that I strike up a friendship with the officer), and what the threat turned out to be (maybe I don’t know the answer to a key question the officer asks and I have to make up something on the fly).

If it sounds complicated, well…it is, a bit. And this isn’t even touching on some of the other elements of the game (which I’ll avoid going into for now for the sake of keeping this simple as I can). Getting used to the way the dice interact with each other can take a little time to figure out, and I was glad that I already knew at least a little about the dice mechanic from listening to Campaign. However, once you get going, it starts to feel pretty natural, and the GM can likely help out if there’s a dice roll with a particularly confusing result.

In any case, I really like this mechanic overall. Due to the way the advantages and threats affect the successes and failures, players have to be more creative and detailed when they explain what’s happening, and this adds a lot of flavor and depth to the story overall, in a way that feels more baked-in than with other systems. As I tend to favor the narrative side of RPG play over the combat element, this is my favorite thing about the Star Wars games, and getting to experience it firsthand was as fun as I imagined. Beyond the compelling story element, we had a great GM and a player group that gelled well, making for a truly enjoyable session as first-time AoR players!

So, have you played AoR or any of the other Star Wars RPGs? How do you feel about the unique mechanics of this game? If you haven’t played it, is it on your list of systems to try?

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So, to some people, this concept might seem kind of absurd or obvious, but too often, there is a line drawn between liking Star Wars and liking sports. There are some who believe that if you like sports, you really can’t be a true fan or as much of a fan of Star Wars as they are, because they don’t waste their time with stupid sports. And some people on the other side of the equation believe that if you really like Star Wars but don’t like sports, that probably means that you are living in your parents basement and have no social life.

Neither of these are nice or accurate things to say about someone who likes Star Wars and not sports, or vice versa. There have been issues for a long time between those who are considered the “jocks” and the “nerds.” One side bullies the other physically, and the other side bullies the other mentally. Both of these things happen way too often, and too frequently, both sides fail to realize how similar they really are to the other. I’m fortunate that I know and enjoy both football and Star Wars quite well. I haven’t read a lot of the Star Wars books, but I want to read some of them, and I never played football in school, but it would have been cool if I had been able to. So I’m coming from a point where I can say with confidence that while I’m not a true expert, I’m a nerd who nerds out over sports as much as I do over Star Wars.

With the Super Bowl happening last weekend, it brought up a few things for me, and way too often, I saw my nerdy, non-sports-loving friends complaining about how much stuff there is around the Super Bowl, and how people expect them to care, and how noisy Super Bowl parties are. It also then made me think of when Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out a month and a half earlier, and what that was like as well. When the Super Bowl happens, there are advertisement telling you to stock up for Super Bowl Sunday, get that new TV, get your snacks ready, get your beer, and get ready to enjoy the game. This can be seen as annoying to people who don’t care about it. Why should I be bombarded with something I don’t care about? But before Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out, there was another massive advertising blitz — you could get soda cans with Star Wars figures on them, there were many advertisements for Star Wars products on television, and even your clementine oranges were being brought to you by BB-8.

So, then, leading up to the Super Bowl, people at work talk about who is going to win the game, what is going to happen in the game, and where they are going to be watching it. And in the weeks leading up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, people at work talked about who Kylo Ren is, who Rey is, what the storyline might to be, theories about why Luke wasn’t in the trailer, and when and where they were going to be watching the movie.

Starting to see some similarities?

So now comes game day for the Super Bowl, and release weekend for the movie. People show up at your neighbor’s to watch the game, and you can hear them through the old apartment wall, even though you don’t care to be hearing it. And the weekend prior to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you watch some of the original trilogy with your friends (and, if you are brave, the prequel trilogy), and your neighbors end up hearing the party you have.

Finally, the Super Bowl is done and you’ve seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What do you do now in either case? You talk to your coworkers about it. You try to be nice to anyone who might have had to DVR the game, but you’ll probably accidentally spoil it or they’ll have it spoiled online. You talk to those who have seen The Force Awakens about all of the surprises, and you tell those who haven’t gone yet that they should see it, without accidentally spoiling it, even though it’ll probably be spoiled for them online.

But you really don’t like sports, and you don’t want to hear anything about it — what do you do? Do you complain to your friends about how annoying it is? Do you say how stupid it is that people watch grown men play a game (even though you know you’ve watched TableTop)? Do you post comments on Facebook and Twitter saying “Oh, is there something big happening in sportsball today?”

The answer to all of those questions is no, you don’t. Because you know how annoying it is when people call Star Wars dumb; you know how annoying it is to have something that you like labelled in a derogatory way; you know that you watch things on TV and online that other people don’t care about as well. You let other people be nerds in their own way; you let them play their fantasy sports while you read your fantasy novels. If they talk to you about it, you listen politely like you’d want them to do if you talked to them about your favorite fantasy novel. You let them geek out over the game like you geeked out over Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You do that because you want the same respect when you geek out over what you care about.

But maybe they don’t listen, or they change the subject when you bring up something nerdy. Maybe they use negative terms towards something you love. Maybe they seem annoyed when they can hear your movie marathon. So it’s okay to just poke a little fun at them, at least to your friends, or maybe put something up on Facebook about it, right? Most of your friends really don’t like sports anyway.

NO!

Don’t be a bully. Don’t cut down what other people like, and if someone cuts down something you like, just walk away and don’t complain. Why? Because that’s how mature, smart people handle situations like that. You lead by example instead of being passive aggressive about it; you don’t make fun of people behind their backs, and you don’t post derogatory terms in your Facebook posts.

We are nerds! We are supposed to be smart, and now that we are starting to get our culture much more widely accepted, let’s not undo that work by showing how not-smart and petty we can be. I’ve borrowed this line from The RPG Academy before about role playing games, but it is very true about everything nerdy: “If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.” So let the people who love Star Wars have fun and do it right for themselves, and let the people who love the Super Bowl or other sports have fun and do it right for themselves, too.

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