Star Wars TCG: Revenge of the Sith

Overall score:

Out original review of Wizards’ Star Wars card game was underwhelmed but tolerant—it wasn’t a bad game, and in fact had many good things going for it, but it didn’t blow our socks off or even, to be totally honest, make us want to play again. I don’t even know where those old cards are; I must have given them away.

To sum up the game in brief, there are three arenas of battle: Space, Ground, and Character; three types of units, each corresponding to an arena, battle each other for supremacy, and the player who controls at least two arenas at the end of any turn wins. Combat is a simple matter of dice: when a unit attacks it nominates a target and rolls a certain number of dice; for each hit (a 4, 5, or 6) it causes one damage to the target. When a unit has taken damage equal to its hit number, it is discarded. Each player begins the game with 30 “build points” worth of units in play, drawn from a shuffled deck, and can subsequently play more units with build points gained each turn. A second type of resource, known as Force, slowly builds up and carries over from turn to turn—you can use some or all of it, or save it for next turn.

The resulting game is very fast-playing and easy to learn, but suffers from actually being too simple—deckbuilding is not nearly as varied or as important as it is in other CCGs, and the die rolling adds an element of randomness that many CCG players found grating when the game debuted two years ago. It felt more like a board game than a CCG, and was passed off as childish—but that was two years ago. The game is in its tenth set now, and there has been a lot of fine-tuning in the intervening years. The new set, Revenge of the Sith, manages to keep the simplicity and speed intact while adding a lot of depth and strategy. It still has a board game-ish feel, but it’s a very fun board game that captures the spirit of Star Wars admirably.

One of the great new innovations in the game is that the units are typically stronger and flashier than before. The old game had jedi with expensive, 8-force abilities that didn’t seem all that exciting when you finally saved up to pay for them; the new game, in contrast, lets Anakin more than double his already impressive attack power for the low price of 3 force—this isn’t power creep, it is a vital injection of fun. The new powers are cheap enough to play a time or two, and scary enough that they feel very satisfying when you do. It truly feels like a clash of titans rather than a skirmish between minor characters.

The strategy that felt lacking in the older cards was still there, but the excellent set design in Revenge of the Sith brought it out and made it more interesting and more noticeable. Even deploying your starting units becomes a tense mind game, as you try to cover all three arenas while faking your opponent out, and still leave room to shore up a weakness or react to a scary play.

The combat system is simple but can involve a lot of choices to play correctly—at least in the Character arena. Ground and Space units don’t have nearly as many tricks up their sleeve, so battle there is really a matter of managing numbers and build points. On the other hand, every one of our test games has come down to a neck-and-neck battle in the Character arena, which is a nice sign that the heroes of the movies are still on center stage in the game. This may seem like a problem at first—if the game is decided by Characters, why have the other two arenas at all?—but they can still come in very handy. I was able to win one game by bluffing out a massive Ground unit when my opponent was expecting a Character; he was so intent on winning one arena that I was able to sweep into to a poorly defended one and steal victory.

The result is a very fun game that’s easy to sit down and learn (or teach), and which has a lot of replay value even with the same deck—it’s a nice combination of CCG and board game that uses conventions from each genre, and uses them well. The starter set is your ideal portal into the game, but we noticed a few problems with it that make an additional booster or two almost a necessity. First of all, our starter set was packaged wrong—each player, light side and dark side, has a pre-built 30-card deck, but our dark side deck was missing a key Ground unit and had only 29 cards. That may be a rare problem, I don’t know, but the strange part is that the dark side was able to win consistently (and never lost the Ground arena) despite the loss of that card. This is a pretty drastic imbalance, and a big flaw in whoever designed the decks, but they still serve admirably to teach you the game. Once you know what you’re doing it’s easy to crack open a few boosters, divvy up the light side and dark side cards, and balance out the decks a little better.

I can’t imagine that hardcore CCG fans will sink hundred of dollars into Star Wars the way they do with their other games, because it lacks the depth of deckbuilding that most CCG players crave. It’s also not balanced for more than two players, which is a big strike against it in the casual market (which is where this game will find most of its players). What it does have, though, is a simple engine and a lot of flavor, and a game that’s quick and fun to play. If you’re a Star Wars fan of any variety I suggest you give it a try, and if you’re a CCG player looking for a change of pace I recommend it to you as well. You may be surprised at how much fun you have.

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Written by Fellfrosch on April 19th, 2005