Cardboard Corner: Review of Star Wars: The Card Game

If there is any IP that has been exploited by table top games, it is Star Wars (though Lord of the Rings is currently having a go at the top spot...) Dozens of different playable experiences have appeared, and in many cases, disappeared. Star Wars Monopoly to Star Wars: Legion, Star Wars Deckbuilding Game to X-Wing Miniatures Game, and on and on. Old to new, there are dozens of games available for people looking to immerse themselves in Jedi, lightsaber duels, the dark side, blasters, and spaceship battles. One of the most divisive Star Wars experiences ever released is Star Wars: The Card Game (2012).

Star Wars: The Card Game is a TCG/CCG type experience within FFG's LCG model (fixed releases as opposed to random). The top-down view is as expected: players construct decks to duel with an opponent, generating resources to play cards to achieve the win conditions. The bottom-up view, however, features several exceptional aspects that significantly distinguish the game from every other TCG and CCG.  It's unlike any other game out there.  Let's go layer by layer (or wheel within wheel, as you will see), starting with asymmetry—the dark and light sides.

In Star Wars: The Card Game, one player takes the role of the light side and the other the dark side, each who are trying to achieve their own win conditions.  For the dark side to win, they need to push the Death Star dial to twelve.  The dial starts at zero and advances automatically once per round, but can advance faster under certain conditions the dark side are aiming at.  Racing against this clock is the light side, who wins if they are able to destroy three of the dark side's objectives.

As mentioned, players will be paying resources to play out units, units which can attack and defend like other such card games.  But the wheel within this wheel is the second unique element to Star Wars: The Card Game: Edge battles.  Edge battles occur after players have declared attacking and defending units.  Not as simple as mathing out damage and hit points remianing, Edge battles are a mini-game within the game that determine how the actual battle of units will occur.  There mind games of ante-ing, bluffing, and trickery, and the winner will get to attck first and get some bonuses.  The loser will still get to attack, just with less firepower.  Most players would likely agree Edge battles are where the game's rubber hits the road, but at a minimum are at  least a huge part of the tension and fun.  

The last wheel I will mention here is the Balance of the Force.  If deciding how to use your units and Edge cards weren't enough, each round of Star Wars: The Card Game likewise features a tug of war with the Force.  Players must choose which units to commit to the Force, and the player with the most gets an added bonus at round's end.  The light side, for example, gets to do a bonus damage to a dark side objective while the dark side gets to advance the Death Star dial and extra time.  But it comes at a cost.  Units committed to the Force exhaust twice (instead of the usual once), taking them out of the action for an extra turn.  

Not quite a wheel within a wheel, but the final point distinguishing Star Wars: The Card Game from other TCG/CCG/LCG/etc. is deck construction. Rather than card by card, decks are constructed of preconstructed sets of six cards called objective sets. Each objective set contains the same number of units, events, upgrades, and fate cards. Rather than mix and match these cards, players mix and match the 6-card objective sets. On one hand this type of deck building might seem limiting; there is undoubtedly the desire to take cards from objective set X and mix them with Y. But the game was designed around the objective set principle, meaning balance and fairness have deeper roots. It also means winning becomes more skill- and experience based.  Players who know which cards in which sets can infer their opponent's potential cards, and likewise, know which cards are not available.  

Those are the key points making Star Wars: The Card Game truly unique.  But there are lesser points, too. The resource system is unique: it's not throw away a card and get a resource, wait and hope to draw mana, or any other such limiting system. Instead, it's based on the aforementioned objectives.  Different objectives grant different amounts of resources, in essence giving players a controllable salary each turn. Another minor point is combat. Beyond the afore-mentioned Edge battles, fights do not occur in line 'em up and shoot it out style.  

All of this leads to the big question: How “Star Wars” is Star Wars: The Card Game? How much does the theme come through? The answer is that the game is more abstract than thematic. The Star Wars pieces are all there. The Edge battles are heady.  The four factions (Jedi, Sith, Rebellion, and Empire) have clear boundaries that identify with the player's knowledge of the lore. And everybody's favorite (original) characters are present on the table - Yoda, Darth, Obi-Wan, Palpatine, etc.  But the Star Wars flavor doesn't comes through as strongly as it does in other such games - Star Wars Destiny, for example. And if we're being honest, thematic flavor is where the rubber hits the Star Wars road.  Players will need to use more imagination than usual to connect those dots for this game.

If it wasn't clear, Star Wars: The Card Game is on the more sophisticated, think-y side of the LCG/TCG/CCG spectrum. It's not like Star Wars Unlimited, Lorcana, Pokemon, Magic: the Gathering. Those games possess 80-90% of TCG mechanisms players expect. Star Wars is something different.  Players will need to retrain their TCG muscle memory.  Several games will be needed to understand the indirect and direct manner of conflict and achieving victory conditions.  For example, a player's first instinct will be to play powerful characters and smash heads. The path to victory this is not.  An experienced player will quickly shut down this type of play in ways that befuddle the newbie. It's a gamer's game, and finding players may be more difficult as a result.  That just means the rewards are greater for those who invest the time, paticularly players looking for something more than the vanilla of Lorcana, SWU, Pokemon, etc.

In the end, your view to the fun of Star Wars: The Card Game will likley depend on two factors. First is how much you want theme to come through. For players looking at Star Wars as a universe of clashing ideals, the game has a chance. Conflict is abstracted across multiple battlefields, a lot of mind games, and not all of which are blasters and lightsabers. And second is how complex/accessible you want your TCG/CCG/LCG experience to be. Star Wars: The Card Game has wheels within wheels within wheels and will require multiple sittings to grasp.  For those who stick around, it's great fun that offers gameplay unlike any other expandable card game out there - zero hyperbole.