So if Star Wars Legion is the favourite game of one of the saga’s characters, my money would be on Leia. Meanwhile, Admiral Ackbar strikes me as consummate Armada commander, thoughtfully stroking his weird chinny-string things as he painstakingly plots the crushing destruction of Star Destroyer after Star Destroyer. I find it easy to imagine Poe Dameron being hooked on the fast-forward thrills of X-Wing, hooting and hollering every time he gets to roll a handful of attack dice.
In my experience, a typical game of Legion lasts a rollicking 100 minutes you would often have two X-Wing games done and dusted in that time, but it’s still much less of a time investment than any of the actual Star Wars movies. Of the three, Legion is the most up-close in scale, with its focus on ground battles, but it still manages to approach the pace of X-Wing over its somewhat longer playtime. Then came Armada, a much larger scale, slower game that emphasises long-term strategy and coordinated planning. The first of the wargames was X-Wing, a dogfighting simulation with both deep-space and lower-flying battles, usually taking under an hour of gaming time. Legion is the third game from Fantasy Flight to stage miniatures wargaming inside the Lucasfilm galaxy, and the latest of 12 Star Wars-based games overall. Going eye-to-eye over the table with your opponent is an altogether different, often more unpredictable and intense experience than any online smackdown.
But then Star Wars: Battlefront didn’t offer solo play until the second game in the series, and then only through a series of rather superficial story-based levels.īut one of the wonderful things about tabletop gaming in general, and Legion’s battles of wits make for a great example, is that every session can bring about a real meeting of minds. Every game of Legion requires exactly two players.
Star Wars Legion – whether they can shoot straight is up to you Tabletop WarsĪnother downside to tabletop wargaming over, say, the Star Wars games you can play on PC or console, is that you really can’t play by yourself. I spent less than two hours building my Legion starter factions in full, with a basic trooper popping together in just seconds and the speeder bikes and walker taking only a few minutes each. Not the least of which is that the figures don’t come assembled, and you’ll even need a little tube of glue if you want to put them together properly.Īssembling all 33 figures is not a huge job, certainly alongside comparable Games Workshop titles like Warhammer 40K or Age Of Sigmar, assembling either of which realistically requires a hobby knife as well as puddles of glue, blood, sweat and tears. In the interests of restoring balance to the Force, here’s some bad news too: there are a few obvious barriers to entry with Star Wars Legion. But the good news is going to have to keep coming if Legion wants to be as popular as most things Star Wars, or if this game is going to crossover and attract new players to tabletop wargaming.
Why are wookiee soldiers fighting the Sith's clone troops with crossbows when they could easily be bombed by any of the dozens of aircraft flying around or mowed down by the troops defending from prepared positions? Why are the mobile infantry of Starship Troopers executing frontal assaults against the “bugs” when the enemy was decimating dozens of spaceships in orbit just a few minutes earlier? Battles for distant planets look like the Battle of the Somme, if the Germans had lasers, couldn’t hit anything, and France was the size of a phone booth.Here’s the first bit of good news: those 32 pages are full of pictures and diagrams and, even while they’re quite densely packed, they’re not too difficult to follow. With anything better than a musket on the other side, rushing into battle shoulder-to-shoulder is just a very orderly means of committing mass suicide.
Actually, it took about four years of horror in the trenches, but eventually they got it right.
A bow or a muzzleloader takes a while to get ready, and as the Westerns say, “You can’t shoot us all.” In 1914, the world figured out quickly that machine guns had rendered that tactic obsolete. When weaponry was less advanced, this was a pretty good idea. If it weren’t for all the aliens running around, it would look like the Battle of Gettysburg. In Starship Troopers, Dune, and most notably, every single Star Wars movie, the human wave rules the battlefield. On the ground, troops in the year 3099 still fight like it’s 1899.