I played my second game last night, and it was a completely different play experience than my first - the obvious thing now was that in my first game the DS dial was being advanced every balance phase, not only on the DS turn, so that definitely explains why it only took about 10 minutes to play! 

Using the deck lists advertised here and here, and playing as the DS this time, it was really lots of fun, particularly the edge battles, with the fate cards messing things up and whatnot. The fact that the edge-enabled icons seemed to be dominating made me really want to win the battle, sometimes throwing people like Vader into the stack to ensure a victory. In the end, it was a very close game, with the dial being I think two turns off giving me a victory when my third objective was destroyed, so I lost again but still enjoyed it much! 

It's nice to see so many people enjoying the game on here though, as I feel like I read through two or three months' worth of folks disparaging the game based on the gencon previews. I'm really pleased with the way it's turned out, and am rabidly looking forward to the expansions to get more cards! I think the only sore point I have is that it's a 2-player game, and seems impossible to solo, so I can't play as many games as I want to, as I'm having to arrange for people to come over etc. Damn people having real lives of their own!!

Finally got to play my first games today. My core sets arrived just before I had to travel for the holidays, and I brought my cards with me hoping to find some people to play with. Can't wait to get home and play more with those of my regular gaming group who have picked up Star Wars.

I played four games today, alternating between the sides. My first game was Jedi v. Scum; second was Navy v. Smugglers (though it was largely Rebel Alliance cards); third was Rebel v. Navy (my opponent started with the Sith affiliation card, but we realized he'd included The Ultimate Power in his objective deck so he swapped out his affiliation during the first turn); and the final game was Scum v. Jedi. Light Side won the first three games, while our final game was the only time the forces of tyranny finally got to triumph.

The least fun game was the second one, where I was just torn apart by my opponent's Smuggler/Rebel deck. He got out a Battlefield Engineer and Heavy Blaster Emplacement out right away, and good god did that combo ruin my game. With absolutely no extra resources (or least any non-character resources, I did have a very short-lived Tarkin and Duty Officer) and crap draw, I could only get one or two units out a turn, none of which were long for this world. I think by the end, my opponent had at least eight units out. The other games were far closer, which were much more enjoyable. I think the best game was our third, the Rebel v. Navy game. I pulled ahead near the end, destroying two objectives to win the game, but up until then things remained quite neck and neck.

As I think others have noted, momentum is certainly an issue right now. I'm not sure what I could have done to stop my opponent's inexorable bulldozing of my forces. Coming from AGOT, I'm used to resets being a big part of the environment; being able to clear the board (and knowing how to bounce back from a cleared board) is a huge part of AGOT. Perhaps Star Wars doesn't need anything quite as extreme as Valar Morghulis (which kills every character), but I do think that every faction needs to have access to a reset. Currently I think Rebel and Sith are the only ones, with A New Hope and There Is No Escape (if there're other resets I've overlooked, let me know; I'm still learning all the cards). Affiliation-specific resets might be nice and thematic, though it could also be helpful to have a Neutral pod for each side with a reset.

One thing I will definitely need to adjust to is some of this game's terminology. For example, there were several points where I realized I had misinterpreted a card because I was thinking in terms of AGOT jargon. For example, things that targeted Character units, where I found myself thinking of all units as Characters; sadly Boba Fett is not able to capture Redemption. I also got tripped up a bit by enhancements, which cover the card-archetypes of AGOT's location and attachment cards. For whatever reason, I mainly think of them in terms of attachments, overlooking that the location-like enhancements are also enhancements; during a game, I suddenly realized In You Must Go would affect Dagobah Training Grounds, for instance.

The most egregious problem: the name for Blast Damage, and the icon for Unit Damage being a blaster. I couldn't count how many times during our games that my opponent and I fumbled over those two, confusing each other and ourselves.

Played a bunch of games today for the first time using constructed decks.

Love the game, there is far more to it than I thought there was. Some definite times where there was brain drain for optimizing moves. With just a core set and small pool of cards, there is alot of room for this to LCG to get as complicated -- maybe even more so -- as AGoT.

Some gripes I have

• Realistically only going to play 5 of your objectives making that first 4 extremely important and there's no mulligan!
• Too fiddly with all the chits (mainly bothered by focus tokens)
• Focus chits and damage chits are the same color (red) and I get confused sometimes knowing what I have ready or not

Things I noticed

• Light side card targeting effects are more generic than Dark side. Target UNIT for Light side and target VEHICLE / CHARACTER / DROID for Dark side. Makes Light side much more versatile.
• Factions seem equally balanced currently as each deck type has a counter (although tactic icons are universally strong). I thought my Imperial deck would crush and it definitely crushed Rebels and Jedi, but it fell short versus Spies/Smugglers (yes, I faced a constructed Spies/Smuggler/Rebel deck and it was really strong). I still need to play through all the factions to get a better feel for their match ups…

Playing some more in a few days so I'll have some more thoughts later…

FiendishDevil said:

I don't mind the abundance of tokens, but I agree that the damage should have been more visibly distinct from the focus. Blue for focus, red for damage, white for shield (or something like that). I love the mechanic connected to the focus tokens, but I do occassionally mistake them for damage chits.

Ever since fokus tokens were first explained I saw them as yellow for some reason. Blue is a calming color, which echoes the protection shields provide. Red is universally the color of damage tokens in any game.

dbmeboy said:

True, but you'd think they could preserve the same (+) shape but with yellow instead of red. :p

I'd just like to point out that I'm colorblind (well, red-green color-deficient) and I've only once confused the Focus and Damage tokens. Don't know what's the matter with all you "full visible spectrum" people 

I love this game. I threw together a couple decks in no time flat (not my best work, but they function)., and am looking forward to tweaking them, especially when the force packs start hitting.

I don't understand what the problem is with distinguishing between the tokens…

Color similarities or not, how can you mistake a grey octagon with a red 1 or 3 (which are larger than the focus tokens, too), for a small circle with a red crosshair? The shapes alone should be distinguishable enough, even without the fact that the design on the focus tokens matches the tactics icon almost perfectly, while the damage provides numbers for easy quick reference.

stormwolf27 said:

When I'm consciously thinking about the differences between them, it's obvious. But during play I prefer to have my thoughts on what my opponent is doing, and how I will respond. When there gets to be a pile of tokens that fall in the same region of the visible spectrum, in two varieties that have nothing to do with each other, I instead have to make the same conscious consideration that I do outside of play, and this would not happen for me if the focus tokens occupied a different area of the spectrum. I know this because I have not once mistaken a shield token for a damage token, but have done so several times in the case of focus tokens versus damage tokens. Again, my attention has to be focused (pun not intended) on the tokens in order to reliably add or remove the right kind, and I don't like this.

I bought the core set yesterday and I've played a couple of games so far and I like the game more than I thought I would. After having some experience of the LOTR LCG I was expecting the game to play more like that but there is a lot of things about the system which I like.

I bought the core set yesterday and I've played a couple of games so far and I like the game more than I thought I would. After having some experience of the LOTR LCG I was expecting the game to play more like that but there is a lot of things about the system which I like.

Played more yesterday, and although I enjoyed it greatly, I definitely found myself frustrated again by how hard it is to overcome momentum. My friend and I played six games--Jedi v. Sith, Navy v. Rebel, Navy v. Rebel (this was the only game I won), Sith v. Jedi, Rebel v. Sith, and Jedi v. Navy--and ever game fundamentally came down to who got out a hard-hitting unit out within the first turn or two and pulled so far ahead their opponent was effectively locked down.

In particular, I discovered just how obnoxious Protect Character is. The game needs more removal options, events and effects that can help you deal with your opponent's Luke or Emperor, and it's incredibly frustrating to realize that you will never, ever be able to hit their sweeper because they've got Royal Guard or Guardian of Peace out to eat any or most of the targeted damage you might be able to put out.

Some of these issues can no doubt be accounted for with better deckbuilding. As I was introducing my friend to the game, I opted to use the baseline 8-objective decks. Doubling up on the sets with important characters is obviously going to help with the arms race to establish your board position first, and there are certainly sets that wouldn't make the cut. The inability (or at least extreme difficulty) of making a comeback in this game is definitely its most glaring flaw, and adding more removal options and resets to the card pool would hopefully help.

Hans Chung-Otterson said: