Star Wars: Legion Review

okay here we go another stupid sketch where I have to wear a stall with helmet what can I even do that's funny maybe kylo Ren brushes his teeth no nonsense isn't it and then I have to wear this thing in popular but there's people watching me right now oh my god is that it was no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no I mean that's just sad I want me to Darth Vader helmet but a Darth Vader helmet is a hundred pounds and a kylo Ren helmet is 30 pounds on Amazon wait a minute what if that's the joke what if this is like a meta joke about making a sketch like Deadpool or Deadpool - wait how do I end it it feels so good to be right last year we took a look at the wound was miniature war game fans e-flite games big leap into the vast ocean of large scale miniature wargaming except it wasn't really that much of a big leap and more of a dipping your toes and a hasty retreat before the crabs nip at your heels yes much like a hamsters will theoretically ruin Wars or maybe I should call it ruin was is still going but much of the problems we've first seen in our own review the uninspired setting the clunky nature of this plastic tres the focus of smashing armies into each other until one of them dies have been the nail in the coffin of that particular cardboard rodent yes a doomed idea because hey hamsters do have a shelf life of about two to three years but rune was was also many other things many firsts many innovative concepts in miniature wargaming of this scale and if only there was some sort of less corporal form that fantasy flight could impart those ideas into something timeless something that resonated with a large fan base something eternal something that would make a billion wallets cry out in terror though that was bad I shouldn't do that I'm sorry I won't do it again a promise and thus in the early months of 2018 Star Wars Legion left onto a table like a hulking plastic behemoth full to the brim with your favorite Star Wars characters like storm Vader's the rebel Fett and the fan favorite millennium bug it never has it been clear that to give this game justice I had to rein in my excitement being a board game review channel we used to the products we review being the products we reviewed the complete package the whole 12 parsecs miniature games a little bit different not only is this corset a woefully truncated experience requiring many additional expansion purchases to make it feel like the game that it's meant to actually feel like but also it's a constantly expanding game with miniature packs popping up like stormtroopers after a heavy rain that didn't make any sense I only made sense if you're left waning because we have this saying that like mushrooms popping up after a heavy rain so stormtroopers they look a bit like mushrooms I guess but miniature games uniquely aren't just about playing the game they are perhaps even in equal parts about collecting about assembling your miniatures painting them displaying them creating terrain giving your army a theme and therefore a sense of cohesion but most importantly through this act of care imbuing them with a sense of ownership and this is going to sound sappy imbuing them with a sense of identity and therefore a semblance of life I knew that the right thing to do wasn't to just open all the boxes as when he sent me learn the rules play some games and decide on a verdict that sentence grossly misrepresents our reviewing practices but it'll do for now I had to submerge myself into this game I had to take it slow I had to paint the minis and get the terrain and get a board to play on and after spending countless hours and I mean hundreds of pounds I'm happy to tell you that I have failed I mean it starts well just look at Vader using cirrhosis plating tutorials even a buffoon like me managed to make him look fearsome and give these rebel fleet troopers the first living things you see in the first Star Wars movie the aesthetic justice they deserve I think I even did a reasonable job on the scores and scores of stormtroopers I had to paint and whilst them not in love with my speeder bikes I am genuinely pleased with the color gradients on the scout troopers and totally okay that the base of this a TST isn't done and I can also live with the fact that these buildings could have had a less lazy paint job or the fact that I so far only painted trousers on all these rebel troopers and painted nothing on these snow troopers I even bought this giant and old and very dusty can of toys millennium falcon which seems to be perfectly to scale to these figures and even fits them in the cockpit I even wanted to cut it up in half and make it look like it's sticking out out of the desert sands of Tatooine you know like a terrain piece but then I noticed that these retractable legs and you can actually make it into like a two-tier piece I make it stand on the battlefield how awesome is that even though there are no rules for a terrain piece where something can go underneath it and above it and inside of it at the same time at least that's the reason I told myself I didn't cut it up and not at all because I just couldn't bring myself to do it so I failed but then again maybe I didn't maybe I achieved exactly what every miniature war game of ghost fruit I saddled myself with a boatload of painting and craft projects realized this no way that I can finish it all which of course made me procrastinate and achieve even less I was supposed to and Here I am now trapped somewhere between something I am simultaneously immensely proud of and something that is a shaming failure a state which I believe every miniature wargaming is constantly in I would like to tell you that star wars Legion is one of the best miniature war games I have ever played in some ways Legion plays out exactly like any miniature war game each player will build an army and give it up grades based on a predetermined point limitation place them on opposing ends of a map and roll dice into each other until six rounds are over or everybody on the opposing side is dead no no don't cry this isn't a sad thing they're meant to die but familiarity to genre tropes doesn't and they're each done you can do two out of a number of different actions and once you can certainly make some more esoteric choices like ducking for cover and getting a dodge token or taking better care to hit your target and claiming an aim token most of the time you will move your armies and then you will give you that's the budget for this video gone HB Bureau will have a weapon that weapon will tell you what nice you're rolling for it get all the dice together roll them see how many pews become hits all critical hits the defendant will then roll the defense die for each hit and everyone that doesn't produce a shield means that they should probably call the ambulance but might as well not bother because honestly it's it's too late okay nothing too exciting to ring your mom about yet but here's something that might make you pick up that phone Star Wars Legion has multiple potential weapons equipped to each unit whether it's this unit of stormtroopers with but Mac rocket launcher who seemed far too much but also has a rocket launcher or this friendly neighborhood a TST and believe you me when I say this the phrase armed to the teeth does not do it justice so here's the thing you can combine different weapons into the same attack applying all of their abilities together let's translate that into English say your ADHD wants to attack some fleet troopers those fleet troopers are hiding behind a very badly painted barricade and even despite it's bad paint job that barricade is providing every trooper here with heavy cover which means that even on a pretty good attack role two hits will be removed even before any defense dice are rolled putting a big deficit on potential casualties that's okay I have some options I could find him my grenade launcher it doesn't add that many dice but it does ignore cover oh I could try and just barrel through my turret which adds an avalanche of octahedrons hoping that I caused enough happen anyway or I could and this is clearly the best option combine all of them together and then I'm rolling a whopping eight dice and all of them ignore cover there's only seven dice in this illustration but that's is because Fantasy Flight Games which makes thematic sense of course if I blast my grenade launcher then spray how afterwards then there'll be a big hole in that barricade and it won't matter anymore but the most astute viewers will observe well where is the fun in that there is only one obvious choice or is there see the really clever thing about Legion is that one unit with multiple weapons can fire them different enemies with the same attack let's use the previous example but reduced number flee troopers hiding behind the barricade and add a whole extra unit of rebel troopers with a machine gun right in front of this buffoon I could of course split up my weapons and hope the two dies from the grenade launcher are enough to deal with the egg helmets and the six thoughts from the turret are enough to deal with the rugby helmets but what if it's not what if I'm just taking too big of a risk and leaving both of these units alive and then they're gonna fire back at me so she like then concentrate instead and if so on which one of these units as so often is the case in war starved or otherwise your choices have no clear outcome and the right decision will only reveal itself after it is very much too late have no doubts however this war is definitely of the star variety and the rules for each unit reinforced that everything kind of makes sense if you get Luke within spitting distance of a stormtrooper unit he will stick his lightning stick into every which place where you can stick a stick into and soon there will be no stormtroopers left to stick a stick into that's powerful yes but to count a man that not only is he one of the most expensive figures in the game but leave him out in the open and he'll turn into a puddle faster than you can say Yoda swamp on Dagobah are the speeder bikes fast yes they're fast but remember that time when in Episode six Keanu Reeves jump to the speeder bike to chase after Luke but then he got a message that said if he slows down below the speed of 40 miles per hour then he'll explode so he rode the speeder bike through the streets of Los Angeles without slowing down but then he hit a massive tree and exploded anyway that's in there in this game each time you activate a speeder bike unit you have to perform a mandatory free move with the longest template and if you hit anything tall that's it you explode and it's such a nice little touch because I've got this cold figure the cool pupil and speedy but there's an extra thing I have to worry about so it doesn't die and I don't know why it's so much fun to have an extra thing to worry about in games but I like it I I think I like worrying and this is all fine these are nice touches but what really got me going in this game is the initiative system no wake up I know there are no two words in the world that make you fall fast asleep then initiative system but trust me if this game was a part and we lifted the metaphorical lid then the initiative system is that big corner where the maid sits and sweats it's juicy its tasty and it will very likely eventually kill you in most miniature games someone will have some form of priority and go first either activating all their units and then passing the time Oh in smarter systems alternating one by one with your opponent here you do alternate but deciding who shot first will be an eternal debate they'll get star wars fans going like this no too hard did it again didn't I at the beginning of each round each player will secretly select a command card and simultaneously reveal them whoever has less bits of the command card will get to go first but the less beeps you have the less orders you can issue and the next bit is a little bit complicated so bear with me during a round you will get to activate all of your units but control over when you get to activate them depends entirely on how many orders you can issue each unit that didn't have orders issued will have their activation token shuffled into a stack whereas any that did you just take the token and put it down wherever is convenient really when your term comes along and you want to activate a unit you either activate a unit that has an order you should to it or draw a token randomly from the stack this is great you might have made a position in the key location like a dad who barges into his son's party and punches the DJ and says party's over go home and you can have him go fast and do that but then the rest of your troops are an uncoordinated mess whereas on the opposite side you can coordinate the troops but then fada might just get blasted to bits military games are so often about who goes first Allegiant plays with it confidently giving you a great amount of choices but also this palpable sense of tension its equal amounts opportunity and unpredictability and honestly I love it let's not forget that this is a Fantasy Flight Games game and it's produced by a publisher who is known to love putting player comfort first every set comes with cars that list all the point costs relevant rules information for each unit and even each keyword is explained in detail and let me tell you about movement unlike other miniature wargames you don't have to measure the distance for every single figure you move you just measure it from the unit leader and the rest just kind of bimble along together with you it's so nice and convenient and not fiddly and as soon as the game starts because everything is so focused it is just shooting at each other from a distance you immediately feel like you're in a do-or-die firefight if I had one big criticism to the system and some mission objectives each time you set up to play you'll get objectives either trying to intercept transmissions or hold key positions play smart and you'll score victory points which win you the game but in our games they didn't really matter because one player got eliminated in that scenario victory points become moot which is all miniature war games to be honest but I would have loved for missions to have mattered more although do know that that's just our experience and your mileage may vary but despite my clear infatuation with this game well perhaps some very obvious reasons I can't recommend that everyone should go out and buy this game right now first of all make sure that you have someone who's as invested into the idea of playing this game as you are before you fork out what is pretty much half a minimum wage month's salary on all the battle boards and terrain and brushes and paints and lots of lots of plastic because you'll be stuck with it on your own and maybe you just want to paint them and have and that's fine but there's another thing if you have tried miniature wargames in the past and they haven't quite done it for you as much as I love this it doesn't stray too far from the genre tropes for you to really bother but if you're intrigued here's another thing to consider and this is where all the waiting really paid off like you said miniature wargames are just as much about playing the game as they are about that sense of ownership and pride assembling a cool mini taking time and care to paint it and make it not just look right or at least reasonable if you're like and the best you can do is make your troops look like an almond sausage is awesome if there are cool minis to pain legions started out very strong with a tsts the size of your arm and those things with the tow cables that took down the space camels but as the game continues the releases seem to be less brave so far we've got more troops some more troops more specialized troops not leia organa and some crates and things that either make moisture or take it away I'm not quite sure future announcements also don't fill me with excitement you'll get some bookies you'll get your grandpa in a hood I'm sorry Clone Wars fans but I feel like printing Clone Wars figures is just a pretense to print prequel figures and if you like Droid because that's your thing that's fine but I would not much rather see more creative approaches you know that picture or the stormtrooper riding a Dewback give us that give us two bags give us Panthers you know give us a TIE fighter who cares if it's not perfectly to scale and still if I were to choose any miniature walking right now I would without doubt or hesitation choose star wars legion over all of them and maybe that's because I'm still a child at heart and for some reason like Star Wars or maybe because it's actually a really good game and I've really enjoyed myself and that's that's cool that's powerful but maybe you don't want to invest a lot of money into it because this isn't just a game this is a hobby onto itself aside from all the other games that you might be playing so if you worry just watch the future releases and see if there's figures that actually capture your imagination and grab your attention and if they do then make the force be with did you enjoy that that was good wasn't it I like this and if you're sad that it's over don't worry just before the end of this video there will be some links on the side and then you can click them and they'll take you to more of the videos that we make isn't technology amazing you know what's also amazing if you if you like this and more people to see it click some buttons on YouTube and then YouTube will know that you enjoyed it and then that way more people will get to watch it but if you haven't had enough of us and especially want to meet us in real life guess what we're going to a board game convention called sharks it's organized by these people show up and sit down we'll be there we'll be doing some cool things there but one of the cool things we'll be doing if you watched our musical panel show from UK games of export and if you haven't oh my god you need to watch it anyway if you can have watched it then you'll be glad to know we're doing another one it's going to be in Chuck's gonna be online later but if your art sucks you really don't want to miss this one it's gonna be good I hear some team shut up and sit down members are gonna be on the panel some other guests so yeah stick around and that's it I have got an ending again this is so annoying if you got an ending now

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 49,495

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, star wars, legion, core set, terrain, minis, miniature, wargame, ffg, fantasy flight, fantasy flight games

Id: XR0p4xDx7bg

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018