Star Wars: Imperial Assault (or, how the kids and I have spent our summer vacation)

guest blog by John

To commemorate the end of the school year in June, we went to a very nice games store (Card Kingdom in Ballard) and bought a new game: Star Wars: Imperial Assault. I had heard good things about it, we're all Star Wars fans, and when I pointed it out, the kids were excited. So we bought it.

Overview

How do you play? There is "skirmish" mode, single half-hour games, one player on each side, and there is "campaign" mode, which is how we've spent most of the time. In campaign mode, one player controls the Imperial troops and everyone else controls the rebel scum heroes. It works best with four rebel heroes, but each person can control more than one hero, so we've mainly been playing with three players: one Imperial, two rebels, each rebel player controlling two heroes.

So the game is asymmetrical from the start. In addition, the Imperial player reads the Campaign Guide, which gives the special directions for each mission. That is, the rebels don't know that when they open this particular door, they are going to be ambushed by half a dozen storm troopers, or when they flip that switch, two doors will close and lock, and they'll have to cut their way out with blasters, or ...

But let's back up. A campaign has about a dozen missions, some of them "story missions," which move the plot along, some of them "side missions," which are temporary diversions. All together, the missions should fit together to tell a story, set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Each mission has objectives for each side, and afterward, everyone gets a small reward, with the winner getting a bonus. Each story mission leads into a choice of several other story missions, depending on the outcome: I think that if the rebels win a story mission, the next story mission is a bit harder for them (and vice versa). Each side mission has a special reward for one side or the other: maybe a special weapon for one of the rebel heroes, maybe a bounty hunter that the Imperials can recruit in future missions. Each mission takes an hour or more, so since we can get at most one mission played each day, the whole campaign takes at least two weeks to finish.

The rules are a little complicated – it took us a few missions before we weren't making any mistakes – but not terrible. The kids are 9 and almost 13, and they can handle the rules just fine (although they are pretty experienced game players). The reference manual is pretty clear when we have questions.

(I have heard that Imperial Assault is based on Descent, 2nd edition, with some changes (improvements, according to most people). I haven't actually played Descent, but it was on my long wish-list of games. Once I found out about Imperial Assault, it bumped Descent off the list.)

The good

The missions fit together to tell a story. Not a great story: it's a Star Wars game, not Dostoevsky or Tolkein or the Arabian Nights. But you might come across Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, or Darth Vader. No Jar Jar, either. In the game itself, there are interesting decisions to make: which character should go next, should they stay and fight or should they keeping moving toward the mission objective? (Hint: probably they should keep moving.) There is drama: when the rebels open a door, they don't know what the imperial player might have up their sleeve. Toward the end of a mission, there can be exchanges of blaster fire whose outcome determine the results for the mission, so everyone is focused on a roll of the dice.

The not-so-good

There are winners and losers. Okay, it's a (non-cooperative) game, so this is to be expected. Some of the time, a mission is close and turns on one roll of the dice or one last decision by one of the players. Those missions are okay (at least for me). Some of the time, though, maybe because of poor overall planning or bad strategy at the start, the mission seems completely unwinnable by one side and feels hopeless for the next half hour. Those missions are not fun. We have now played through two campaigns, and the final mission of each one has come down to the wire, with the rebels winning one, the imperials winning one. Those final missions were satisfying ones, since they were so close.

Links

Visit the official web site or watch Fantasy Flight's video trailer, including close-ups of the miniatures.

A craft project

As a companion project, toward the end of June, I suggested to the kids that we paint the miniatures. Here are some of the unpainted ones, and you can see others in the trailer.

I've never done anything like this, but through Shut Up & Sit Down (see also their review of the game), I discovered Sorastro's Youtube channel, which tells beginners how to paint these miniatures. None of us has particularly steady hands, nor experience doing this kind of craft project, but by now we have done about three-fourths of them, and they are looking pretty good:

Using the painted figures really makes the game more fun: the storm troopers look good, the probe droids have a sort of metallic sheen to them, and Darth Vader looks even more imposing, painted, than he did before. We have about five figures still to go. And then there are the expansions...