Five Things I Like About Star Wars Legion

Good morning gamers,

Part of my drive to return to the cantina this year was to write some articles about Star Wars Legion. I spend most of my online writing talking about the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game by Games Workshop, but thanks to my son Gorgoroth and my good mate Centaur, I took the plunge early this year with Legion and I have to say that with about 20-30 friendly games under my belt, I feel like I have a few things I can safely say I like about the game. The more I've played, the more impressed I've become with the system - though no gaming system is perfect. Here's five of the things I've come to appreciate about Legion.

Love It #1: The Command Card System

I've played three Fantasy Flight Games (now acquired by Atomic Mass Games) Star Wars systems to date: Imperial Assault (which I love - see my previous work here on this blog), Armada (which I kinda know how to play - Rythbyrt and Centaur are the real Armada players), and Legion (which I also like, possibly more than Imperial Assault). In Imperial Assault, one player gets to go first on the first turn, then the "Initiative" token gets passed to the left, so if you're playing a four-player game, if you get to go first on the first round, you're probably not going first again during the rest of the game. This . . . usually isn't great. In Armada, two players alternate who gets to go first each round, which means you're guaranteed to go first over half the rounds. That's fine, but also gives you no opportunity to change that. 

Legion has an advantage over both of these systems in that players have a "deck" of Command Cards that they use to determine who gets to go first each round. Each deck is (usually) composed of two 1-pip cards, two 2-pip cards, two 3-pip cards, and one 4-pip card. Certain characters have command cards that can manipulate how many pips are on different cards (like having a 1-pip card that counts as a 3-pip card when building your deck, or having a 4-pip card that counts as a 3-pip card), but in the main, both players have the same basic tools as each other (though the specifics of each command card might be different).

Each round, players will pick a card to play - the higher the pips, the more powerful the card. However, the player who played fewer pips than the other player gets the first activation. This means timing your "1-pip" cards vs. your "3-pip" cards is a matter of skill and patience. While there are shenanigans that you can use to deal with ties (by having the Cunning or Interrogate keywords), the main thing that's going to determine who goes first is player skill (and if you tie, a random roll). I like this a lot better than what you get in the other two systems (which are more deterministic) and it also gives a bit more control than what you get in other gaming systems (like MESBG, which is my favorite tabletop game).

Top 10 Upgrades for Commander Luke

Hey Reader!

We're taking a break from unit reviews today to look at the top ten upgrade choices for Luke Skywalker (Commander version - we'll take a look at Operative Luke in a future post), as he 1) comes in the starter set, so he's pretty ubiquitous, but also 2) because as a force user there's a lot of interesting choices available to you due to force powers, but some of these are traps either because you're Rebels, and don't need the benefits of that ability, or because Commander Luke is the only major force user who doesn't have Master of the Force, so he has to take a Recover action to get those abilities back.

Since Commander Luke has 2 Force slots and 1 Tech slot, the top three are my recommended picks for his loadout. If you disagree, or think another option should be higher, let me know in the comments below!

And with no further ado, let's jump into the list! We'll start with an honorable mention that is situational, but when that situation comes up it's very useful, so I couldn't in good faith place it in the top ten.

Skirmish Upgrades: Extra Armor

Good morning gamers,

Last time, we talked about the Spectre Cell skirmish upgrade, and today, we're turning to one of my favorite upgrades (and one that was released with the Zeb and Sabine pack): Extra Armor. There's nothing fancy about this upgrade, but if it's added to the right team, it can be a GAME CHANGER. Let's see what it does and what kinds of models we want to use it with.

Extra Armor

For 1 point, you can distribute 4 Block Power Tokens (BPTs) at the start of the game. That's it. Yep, a start-of-game, one-time dump of defensive buffs. This may not seem like much, but there are a lot of ways that it can be helpful - the first of which is that it can make fragile-but-powerful units (glass cannons, as it were) just a bit more resilient. I talked about how BPTs are good on Ezra and Sabine last time (two characters who take most of the damage they receive, unless they can get a dodge on their white defense die), but any white die character who has a good combat profile is a good candidate. Even single black die models that have limited health and good combat stats can benefit from this.

Second, units that aren't able to generate power tokens love this upgrade. Since you can only have two power tokens at a time, models that generate their own power tokens aren't going to benefit from this upgrade as much, but any models that were released before Heart of the Empire are certainly good candidates (and even some who came afterwards benefit). The least useful units to benefit from this are certainly Riot Troopers, since they generate a BPT at the end of their turn if they don't have one already . . . and if they start with them, they're skipping out on a free BPT.

Third, units that have absolutely no defense dice LOVE having something they can throw in their defense. There aren't many units with no defense dice, but they do exist and they can even be pricey. Most of them also have good damage, so they're more of a glass cannon anyway than your usual glass cannon models.

This is simple enough, right? Okay, let's look at my top picks for this upgrade . . .

Star Wars Legion Unit Review: Tauntaun Riders

Hey Reader!

Following up on the Medium Blaster Trooper, today we're looking at Tauntaun Riders - arguably the crowd favorite of the "Hoth Models" that currently exist for Star Wars Legion. We will start with the profile analysis, then examine the units that synergize well with them, and then we'll discuss the tactical uses of the Tauntaun Riders, as I think sometimes they get slotted into a singular role when they are very much a multi-functional support unit.

I.  Stats: Death on the Wind

From a stats perspective, Tauntaun Riders are one of the strongest profiles in the entire Rebel army list (and one of the strongest support units in the game). You pay 90pts base for it, so it's justified, but basically all of the stats you like are on this unit: Move-3 means you can cover distance like crazy, and Agile 1 gives you a dodge token every time you do that, so you are rewarded for doing what you do.

Offensively this is a great unit: it's a solid melee attacker with 3 dice (4 if you take Tenacity and have suffered at least 1 wound), Ram 1 (converting a dice to a hit when you charge), Reposition (so you can get the angles to charge), surge to hit (so averaging 2 hits per model), and Relentless helps you get into combat more easily as you can Move-Move and still Attack on the same turn if you get into melee. And thanks to Unhindered you don't have to worry about losing move distance due to difficult terrain.

Skirmish Upgrades: Spectre Cell

Good morning gamers,

Today we're going to talk about a very niche skirmish upgrade: Spectre Cell. This upgrade was one of the driving reasons for me to get the Tyrants of Lothal expansion and the primary driver for getting Chopper and Hera. It heavily restricts the units you can run, but boy is it powerful (even after its errata). Let's see what it does!

Spectre Cell: Running the Star Wars Rebels Team

When my son and I first opened the Tyrants of Lothal box last year (we didn't get our hands on it fast enough when it came out), we looked at the Spectre Cell upgrade and said, "Well, that looks busted." The skirmish upgrade is simple: to use it, the only characters you can run are the six members of Phoenix squadron (Hera, Chopper, Kanan, Ezra, Zeb, and Sabine), all friendly figures get +1 damage and +1 block, and you can exhaust the upgrade during a friendly figure's activation to either perform an attack or give two movement points to another friendly figure. Easy right?

Yes, very easy - and FAR too powerful. A free damage with everyone and a free block with everyone was oppressive, especially in two-player games. We basically said, "Yeah, you can't use this card outside of a four-player team game." Then I looked up the erratas for Imperial Assault and found that they too thought that it was busted - at least the free damage/block part. Instead of getting a free damage/block, at the start of the round, you get to hand out 1 damage power token (DPT) and 1 block power token (BPT). That's . . . far more reasonable.