Star Wars: Rebellion - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

oh and you're making an egg for yourself you gotta make it very gently I just felt a disturbance in the force as if millions of voices cried out in excitement and then was silenced Oh kids it's time to shut up and sit down because today we're reviewing what could well be 2016 s biggest box it's time for a Star Wars rebellion review oh yes that's no moon that is a grandiloquent slugfest for two to four players with one side controlling the rebel alliance and the other playing emperor palpatine z' empire trying to find and crush the rebellion secret base for this you will have to pay a terrible price about 65 pounds and here's why contained in this box are two four fold boards creating a galaxy big enough that you can forget that it contains Naboo enough cards tokens and custom dice to reassure your friends that what I was about to happen it's going to be epic and this bag of miniatures seriously the gang's all here civil servant x-wings podraces battle cat the long fella danger egg son of danger egg and so so much more this is what the set up your first game will look like and look at it it's like a Christmas dinner all set up it's a feast beautifully arrayed waiting for the players to tuck in and start having fun now in many respects this is actually quite a straightforward war game you've got units on planets spacecraft will travel units around and they can transport ground units ground units will take control of planets planets will produce factories factories will produce new units that you'll pop in the build queue and then they'll fall out of the bill queue and you can put them on more pallets which will let you conquer more planets and bla bla bla bla bla it's a very sleepy setup and then the probe duck right here comes along and wakes the game up like a taser zapping awake someone who fell asleep at a party this is the deck by which both players will win or lose the game because after the Imperial platform has sneezed all their units across the galaxy during setup the rebel player picks exactly one planet from the deck which contains their secret base welcome to the shittier rebel side of the board now here's the bad news you start with less units than the Empire you can't subjugate planets like the Empire and halfway through your game the Empire will have spread across the entire galaxy like fascist fungus so this is unfair but the Empire can only win by figuring out where your rebel bases know something they only find out when they put a ground unit on that planet where it is and completely wiping it out and all you need to do is survive until this turn and when you start completing objectives this marker is going to start slipping sickeningly back towards the current turn marker until they meet they kiss and you win so Star Wars rebellion begins with a fascinating question where do I put my base or where did they put their base so here's some options you could place it in an area that starts with a load of Units like before we so that when the Empire does find it they're going to find a room ridiculous ward of rebel troops that they might not be able to overpower for a while or you could put it on a useless planet like Tatooine you could be a nerd and put it on a useless planet that happens to be called HOF or you could be really cheeky and place it right in the heart of the Empire because that would be incredibly stupid or would it I was meant to be Yoda just came out as pervert here's the thing though the Empire plan gets draw two cards off the rest of pro-black every time they can draw even more through other nefarious deeds slowly painting a picture in their head of where the rebel base is not and best of all the rebel player has no idea what cards the empire is holding which massively mess with their Bluffs as they move their units around this game of galactic hide-and-seek is so much fun that if you do buy Star Wars rebellion it should be for this as the Empire you're freaking out because the rebels could be anywhere and you're seeing every rebel movement of units as is that them trying to protect their base or they bluffing cuz their base is over here and as the rebel you're obviously freaking out because not only do you have an empire that searching for you the danger egg can blow up planets the feeling of having the danger egg next to your base when you don't know if the Empire knows that it's your base or not when in one turn the egg can slip over and blow up your home is like hiding in a cupboard when there's a monster outside it is completely awesome and obviously when you finish Star Wars rebellion you and your friend are going to explode into conversation of why did you do this oh my god you don't understand I felt like this for the whole game and that is one of the sweetest feelings in all of board-gaming so far so good though I love this I love the board I love the miniatures I love the bluffing I love the emotional puzzle I love blowing up planets and my god you will too and we're also already halfway through my potted rules explanation for the components in the fun contained in this box it's pretty simple you can teach it pretty fast and then lots of the rules are offloaded to cards that you read as you go and by the way fans as you fly you're killing it with this new double manual system you get to learn to play book that you can read pretty fast and then if you don't want to check a rule you check the rules reference so for example if I've got a query about deploying units and a kind of d4 deploy this is important they'll turn off the video Queens I'm not changing my review for their tiny attention spans was I any different when you taught me I'm turning this off if you turn me off I'll become more powerful than you could possibly but really very powerful more powerful than the big big dog as to how you actually affect the board we come to the other half of star wars rebellions rules which are leaders each side is going to have a bunch of leaders you'll get one extra on most turns just bang my elbow but it's okay because Darth Vader wouldn't want me to complain so we've got Darth Vader we've got all these people and the beginning of each turn you're going to assign them to one of two things you have a hand of mission cards cool things you can do so ruling by fear that sounds good I can then assign one or two leaders secretly to that and I know my opponent doesn't I'm doing that and everyone else goes in my leader pool my opponent would have done the same thing and then we take turns activating a leader and either that represents flipping a mission I'm gonna gather Intel and then I have to decide where in the world both George Arad is gathering Intel or I activate a region and pick up someone in my leader pool put them in a region and then suction in any number of troops from any number of adjacent regions now two important things to know when you've suction troops in like that you've created a situation because if one of your leaders is in an area troops can no longer move out of it it's how the game ensures that everything in the game can only move one space usually the other thing is that when you do a mission lime off dirt or gathering Intel your opponent can reach into their leader pool and take anyone out put them into the same region and then counter them depending on their stats and then you roll some dice very quickly to see whether the mission happens or not there's actually some fun juking here because if you have a really important mission that you want to do and you don't want output a powerful time to come stomping out of the leader pool and canceling it you try and coax them out with other less important missions that send him off to Dantooine so you can drop the really important mission later you can also force your opponent into some clever situations like if you do a mission where the Death Star is if they want to counter it and make sure it doesn't happen automatically they have to put a leader in the area with the Death Star and then units can't move out of an area with a leader mmm that's really it that's all the rules so you might rightfully be asking at this point how do I build a superstar destroy them how do I attach this cool Yoda ring to a character or in case someone in the Carbonite ring how do I actually blow up planets with the danger egg or how do I blow up the danger egg when it's listed as having no hit points on the on the Empire's cheat sheet the hunters of that last question is of course nothing can blow up the danger egg it's a galactic super weapon and there's no force in the galaxy that could possibly destroy it the answers to these questions and many many more are in this deck and this sec and this deck and this deck and this deck dislike this deck and that deck and in a heartbreaking case of shut up and sit down sacrificing it's entertainment value for your enjoyment of this game we're not going to tell you anything about them because this game is absolutely best played like the Empire or the rebellion don't look through any of the decks when you get it just put them down shuffle them if you have to and start playing and as the Empire you're going wait the rebellion did what and as the rebellion you're going sorry they built what how big and how many and that that's the joy of it but it's not that we're not gonna not show you anything each side actually gets four cards that always bounce back into their hand four basic cards to give you just a tiny tiny bit of flavor I'm gonna walk you through the rebellions four basic actions listen all your this is sabotage an unopposed sabotage action will let players place a sabotage marker in a panic preventing that plant from producing units which is fine or deploying potentially severing the Empire's ability to reinforce a region that you're attacking the rebels Ardex it's true that the rebels can't subjugate planets but they can build an alliance an insufferably annoying ability where one diplomat slips past on a shuttlecraft goes to any planet on the board and can turn it rebel yeah you're going to be wanting to stop that as well god banning the decks you're in a good place is the empire looking in entirely the wrong sector of space well then you can probably afford to do a little infiltration by sending a leader to an imperial sector of space you can be good take a stroll over to the objective deck take two cards off the top and put one of them on the bottom usually replacing one you can't do with one that you almost certainly can the final card you'll always have is rapid mobilization and insufferably annoying ability that lets you pick up a handful of troops from somewhere and move them to the rebel base turning it from something the Empire could defeat into something now that they can't or if the rebel base has been discovered oh it was on Ord Mantell in this example you can place a new base you draw three cards off the top of the probe deck that the Empire hasn't seen and then play one and just move the rebel base to there now this is interesting for a couple of reasons because first off you could draw three cards where the Empire already has boots on the ground at which point you can't relocate the other reason that this is interesting is your new base will have no units on it probably which means the very next time the Empire could drop one stormtrooper down kick open the doors to that warehouse and conquer you still dicks so there you have it Star Wars rebellion is beautiful it's big it's tense it's interesting and it is unquestionably Star Wars and a boss and perhaps most importantly it's just really fun but oh yes I like big butts and I cannot lie all you other brothers can't deny that when a game walks in with an itty bitty floor and a problem in my face I get sprung when the game has a problem I get an erection is what I'm saying firstly and most simply and also most worsley as to what happens when units actually meet and start fighting the combat sucks you've got a deck of ground combat cards in a deck of space combat cards and you draw hands of each for each leader and then third they tell you some things to do and then there's also a load of dice but in all of this mess there aren't actually any interesting decisions there are dice and then you sometimes draw more cards depending on the general then you assign your hits and this is this I mean it's both legally and physically messy there's not quite enough room for it when you start trying to assign hits and then remember where your sign hits because those units have to attack back and you're doing all of this bookkeeping without any fun or choices by the end of the first of the several games of Star Wars rebellion I played I already wasn't looking forward to big fights which is not a great sign for a 65-pound game the best thing I can say about the combat is it doesn't take up a great deal of time in the greater tapestry of space happenings my other criticism is a little weirder and you might not care about it at all but this game was sold to us as tell your own version of Star Wars right and the marketing materials now the board game reviewers have talked excitedly about how you know you can use the danger egg to blow up take about pong and then no one can find Yoda or or Princess Leia gets frozen in carbonite you know captured by Oprah Palpatine oh isn't that cool and it is you know it's it's funny but it's not a story and what happens with Star Wars rebellion and this might be because now working with Disney I don't know but its attitude towards the original movies is so tediously deferential as to imagine the only thing that can happen in this beautiful sprawling universe is stuff that happened the film's you know all the narrative beats that this game offers are scenes from the movie and as they happen in weird orders and in weird places with weird people it's basically just like watching Star Wars on shuffle and sometimes with characters you don't recognize it definitely doesn't have the arc of a story and it definitely doesn't give you the breathing room to imagine what's happening you know characters can't die and they disappear every turn they reappear somewhere else they succeed or fail and then they disappear again there's no flexibility the game it's not letting you use your imagination when you compare it to other story-driven board games like dead of winter archipelago merchants and Marauders what as the Arabian Nights where you open those boxes and you have no idea what's going to happen or what your your role is going to be in those games star wars rebellion you pay at once you see all the cool stuff it does and then it's just only ever going to do that same cool stuff in a different order you play it once you've seen 95% of what it does and it just shuffles it every time and that's not storytelling it's kind of cool and like I say it's funny as hell but it's not storytelling you buy this as a war game or not at all ah now I've noticed that on the internet whenever we criticize a game people go are they didn't like it as if the only two states a review can be are it's perfect it's perfect yeah it's not true we're just looking out for you guys trying to provide a completely rounded view from every angle of this thing before you part with your precious cash so on that note if you're one of those people who were salivating over this and going I went now what I want it shot up and sit down recommends get it you will not be disappointed but if you're one of the people who when I de merely revealed that we'd received our review copy tweeted at us going ah am I gonna have to buy this no no no you don't have to buy it you know they're going to be I think better games released this year they're just not going to give you the opportunity to slide a super stardestroyer over towards half and land some 80 80s on it and look at the rebel blow in the eye and go you on half and hang on where the hell is the rebel base you

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 651,426

Keywords: shutupandsitdown, shut up and sit down, susd, su&sd, game, review, game review, boardgame, board game, boardgame review, board game review, star wars, rebellion, star wars rebellion, fantasy flight, fantasy flight games, corey konieczka, conflict games, minis game, miniatures, thematic game, heavy game, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Quinns

Id: eaEic-y_poE

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016