Tag Archives: fantasy flight games

Star Wars Games That Are Actually Good!

Posted on by
Reply
may-the-fourth_6

I know Star Wars Day was a few days ago — check out the Star Wars crossword I constructed for May the Fourth — but while the spirit of that galaxy far, far away is still being celebrated, I want to recommend some Star Wars-infused fun for board game and RPG fans to savor.

Now, there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of Star Wars-themed games. But, as I proved with my history of Godzilla games, it can take a long time for a beloved franchise to get a tabletop game worthy of the subject matter.

Thankfully, there are some choice options out there with Star Wars sauce for your tabletop enjoyment.

Image courtesy of BoardGameGeek.

Star Wars: Asteroid Escape

In this space-based variation on the game Tsuro — one of my all-time favorite board games — you try to navigate your ship through space by laying tiles and following the path as it connects to other tiles. Each player is laying tiles, quickly filling up the board, so you need to grow more and more strategic with your plays as the stack of tiles dwindles.

But with asteroids also roaming the field of play, can you outlast every other ship on the board? This is a terrific mix of Star Wars flavor with everything that makes Tsuro fun and challenging. It might be hard to find, but it will be a welcome addition to your game shelf.

Images courtesy of BoardGameGeek.

Star Wars: Timeline

I love the Timeline games. (I own nearly a dozen of them!) The simple act of trying to place your card in relation to other events on the table is both a great trivia experience and an opportunity to engage in some deduction and logical thinking.

So when I heard about Star Wars versions of Timeline, I happily snapped them up. With editions for both the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, it will definitely exact a toll on your memory to see if you can precisely place key moments from the movies in the proper order.

Although easier than some of the other editions of Timeline (like their Inventions edition), this is still great fun for Star Wars fans of all ages.

Image courtesy of BoardGameGeek.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

In this prequel era take on Pandemic, players take on the role of Jedi trying to battle back the onslaught of battle droids across the galaxy. Can you stop the spread of Confederacy forces by saving one world at a time?

While Star Wars versions of Risk and Monopoly are pretty much the same game with Star Wars seasoning, The Clone Wars takes the best of the Pandemic system and feels like it takes it in a fresh direction. This isn’t just another version of Pandemic, this is a very clever marriage of the two that takes the best from both.

Strategy and cooperation is absolutely key in this one, and the cooperative aspect separates it from many of the other games on today’s list.

Image courtesy of BoardGameGeek.

Villainous: The Power of the Dark Side

The Villainous games are amazingly well-designed games. Balancing different mechanics for four different villains as you try to achieve their goals and foil the efforts of the villains played by other players, this Disney franchise continues to expand and never disappoints.

And The Power of the Dark Side, their first Star Wars edition of the game, is one of the best versions of Villainous available today. With five villains to choose from — spanning the original, prequel, and new trilogies, as well as the Clone Wars TV show –there’s truly a villain here for any Star Wars fan.

Can you achieve your villainous dreams, or will the other evildoers at the table outmaneuver you and realize their darkest ambitions?

Image courtesy of Nerds on Earth.

Star Wars: Outer Rim

Embrace your inner scoundrel with this game, where each player strives to complete jobs for their employers, collect bounties, smuggle cargo… you know, your usual day-to-day shenanigans in the Star Wars universe.

This game sorta gives you the roleplaying experience in a one-session microcosm. You’ll make your character, make your choices, upgrade your gear and your ship, and make some money, all while dealing with shady and dangerous folks. It’s a whole narrative arc crammed into a single sitting.

Image courtesy of Entertainment Earth.

Star Wars: Rebellion

While Outer Rim is a personal journey, Rebellion is Star Wars on a galactic scale. This is full-blown war between the Rebellion and the Empire, where one side has a Death Star to build and an insurrection to crush, while the other builds alliances, plays cat-and-mouse with the Empire, and plots to destroy the Empire’s greatest weapon.

I’ve only played this game a few times — it’s expensive, a bit overwhelming, and takes a while to get good at — but it’s been a blast every time.

The tabletop scene for Star Wars sure is stacked, but there are plenty of terrific immersive options out there as well for roleplaying fans looking to explore the universe of Star Wars.

And while officially licensed games are great (I’ll be mentioning one below), sometimes the best stories are told in the shadows by companies that understand the spirit of that franchise, but can’t afford all the bells and whistles.

Here are two of my favorites:

Rebel Scum

If, for any reason at all, you felt like punching a Nazi in the face, you can do so in Rebel Scum by 9th Level Games. Yes, they’re space Nazis running an evil empire, and you’re an intrepid anti-fascist trying to save the galaxy, but hey, punching Nazis, amirite?

This game manages to feel like an epic battle across the stars AND a session of playing with your favorite action figures all at the same time. It’s childhood wonder and all the heroic action we wish we could undertake as adults.

Will you stop Baron Deathray and his Killtroopers with a handful of dice and a lot of gumption? Only one way to find out.

Scum and Villainy

If you really like the Han Solo-esque scrappy smuggler making his way through the universe sorta thing, Evil Hat Productions have you covered with Scum and Villainy.

While the Evil Galactic Hegemony is ever-present, this game is more about criminal dealings, clever negotiation, devious schemes, and profiteering adventure. It feels like the day-to-day trials and tribulations of a struggling spaceship crew.

I love the focus in Scum and Villainy on the roleplay aspect of RPGs. So much of the game is about character and the worlds you visit, and not as much about swinging lightsabers and dodging turbolasers.

As you can see, there are many different ways to play a Star Wars game. It can be a war game, an exploration game, a scheming game, a storytelling game… sometimes all of them at once. And Fantasy Flight Games brings a seriously impressive narrative tool to the table with their Star Wars Roleplaying Game.

There have been Star Wars RPG games since the 80s, but I don’t think any of them offered the same spirit of choice, chance, and adventure that the FFG edition of the game does.

Like most RPGs, you pick a class and build your stats and roll dice to determine the outcome of your choices. But unlike many RPGs where the number you roll declares your action a success or a failure, the narrative dice of Star Wars FFG offer a much more exciting and engaging answer.

It’s not just a binary option, you succeed or you fail. With narrative dice, you can have additional complications, both positive and negative.

You could fail, but with some unexpected advantage: You missed a swing of your lightsaber, but you cut through the awning supports and blinded your foe for a round.

You could succeed, but with some negative consequence: You might have caught the bad guy with your blaster, but you also shot the engines of your ship, and now they need repairs.

Your actions tell a story that goes well beyond yes and no. And in a world where scoundrels often make mistakes while trying to do good, it’s a more interesting, more immersive journey every time, and it truly brings those adventurous moments to life.

Whether you’re a scoundrel on the Edge of the Empire, a hero during the Age of Rebellion, or someone caught between the Light Side and the Dark Side in Force and Destiny, they’ve got a place for you to tell your story.

Did your favorite Star Wars game or RPG get mentioned? Or are you miffed I left out Star Wars Trivial Pursuit and its bweepy little R2-D2 dice roller?

Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.

How to Define Success vs. Failure in Roleplaying Games

Posted on by
Reply

Roleplaying games are some of my absolute favorite pastimes. The simple act of telling a story with friends is rejuvenating for me. I love sitting at a table — or on a Zoom call — with friends and collectively creating an adventure in our imaginations.

I know that the dice and the rulebooks and all the numbers can be daunting for new players, but honestly, they’re just the laws of physics, fate, and chance given form. In the simplest form, roleplaying games consist of you telling the gamemaster / dungeon master / game runner what you want to do, and the dice determining how it goes.

In many RPGs, there’s a success/failure line. If you roll above a certain number, you succeeded. If you roll below it, you failed.

[Image from Stranger Things courtesy of The Verge.]

That’s certainly simple enough. But it can be frustrating for some players, new and old. After all, if you had to beat a 15 and you rolled a 14, why should the result be the same as if you’d rolled a 2? The 14 is much closer, after all.

Some roleplaying games stick to the strict success/failure model. But others have a different approach that players might find more rewarding.

star-wars-edge-empire-rpg-core_1_97bac45707850006a463c742ecc746af

Fantasy Flight Games offers a Star Wars-themed roleplaying game that has one of my favorite dice systems. There are different colored dice that represent different aspects of the game (your character’s ability to do something, the difficulty of the action they’re attempting, advantages and disadvantages to their action at the time, etc.), and the dice don’t have the traditional number values you’d expect.

Instead, they have symbols that represent success, failure, advantage, threat, triumph, and despair.

So, depending on the dice roll, it’s not just a success or a failure. You can have an overwhelming success, or an overwhelming failure, or many things in between. You can fail at the task, but end up with something unexpected and advantageous still happening. Or you can succeed, but with some consequence.

It opens up the narrative floodgates WAY beyond the success/failure binary option, and it has led to some of my absolute favorite moments in roleplaying.

Naturally, this requires a little more creativity from both the player and the game runner, but together, you can tell some fantastic adventures.

81YTNmLLMLL

Ninja Burger is a humorous quickplay roleplaying game that uses standard six-sided dice. In the game, you’re a ninja secretly delivering fast food. It’s very silly and great fun.

One rule in the game that can lead to enjoyable chaos AND take the sting out of the traditional success/failure mechanic of roleplaying games is that you are instructed to act as if you never fail. Even if you’re failed a roll.

So, say you’re using wujenitsu (ninja magic) to pretend to be a bag of golf clubs to sneak into a country club. But you failed your roll. The caddy who grabbed you is clearly carrying a ninja on his back, not a bag of golf clubs.

But you must proceed as if you succeeded, no matter how ridiculous things get.

Sure, failure has consequences in any game, even silly ones, but if you’re in on the joke, then failure isn’t so bad. Especially if you can find a way to make your friends laugh along the way.

dreadJenga

Dread is a roleplaying game that doesn’t use dice at all. Instead, you set up a Jenga-style tower of blocks, and to accomplish certain tasks, you have to pull a certain number of blocks from the tower without collapsing it.

It’s a brilliantly simple way to add tension to a game AND put your fate in your own hands. There’s no single unlucky dice roll that can condemn you to defeat. Just gravity and your own steady (or unsteady) hand.

And of course, as the game continues and the tower grows unsteadier — and your options for wood blocks to pull become fewer and fewer — the tension mounts and mounts.

Eventually, the tower — and your character’s chances — collapse in a clatter.

[Image courtesy of Lewis Brown.]

Of course, the rules of every roleplaying game are eventually up to the people running/playing the game. If you decide that the success/failure rules of your game should be more nuanced, you can do something about it immediately.

But for new players and new game runners, sometimes it helps to remind them there are always other options available. Whether you ditch numbers entirely for narrative dice like in FFG Star Wars, pretend failure isn’t failure at all in Ninja Burger, or ignore the dice completely with something like Dread, you can still build tension and tell some wonderfully fun, exciting, and action-filled stories.

Good luck, and happy roleplaying, everyone!

dailypopwsicon

Well, summer’s over, but we still have deals galore for you to check out. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!