Hi jospanther!
 
I'd second (or third or fourth) the suggestion about going for the beginner game even if you're a bit of an old hand - the books in there will keep you going for a while and the pregen characters seem a little more skilled than the ones you might make from scratch out of the core rulebook.
 
With regard to the mention of critical hits above, you could also consider getting the Edge of the Empire GM screen. I personally don't keep the screen upright (even though the image is nice) because it's a player-facing game and the dice results are open information (mostly) - namely so the players can contribute some narrative flair using the symbols as inspiration (one of the reasons this is my favourite RPG). The reason I suggest getting the GM screen is because you could use the crit table to make the players wince a little when they get stung by a critical hit. As long as you understand how to trigger critical hits using advantage (explained in the beginner rules, I think?) and keep in mind that every critical hit previously suffered adds an extra ten to the % dice roll to determine the result of a subsequent crit, you'll be fine. It also has range difficulties and other useful info immediately to hand.
 
And then you'll want the adversary decks. And an extra set of dice. And then you'll probably get the core rulebook, plus maybe a splat book about Hutts because you enjoy their streamlined physique. And then the game has you in its grasp...
 
Welcome aboard!

Firstly, apologies for the lengthy post but just wanted to share my Edge experience this evening. I got my eight-year old daughter hooked on Star Wars a while ago and she’s wanted to play Edge ever since. We played it once and her RPGing technique was something along the lines of [rolls dice] “Ooh, one success – I win the game!!!”, and it got so difficult to get her thinking along different lines (though I can’t blame her for trying) that I wasn’t relishing the prospect of playing the game with her again.
 
Anyways, I relented this evening and had probably the best roleplaying experience of my GM career so far. She and I had planned to play D&D with a few others but they bailed and so we decided to return to the edge of the empire for a two player game which I’d GM and improvise off-the-cuff. She took the Oskara pregen and we used the Mos Shuuta map. Disregarding Oskara’s backstory, I explained that she’d been hired by the empire to track down a Bothan spy responsible for leaking the plans for the Death Star – one of those few who DIDN’T die to bring us this information She promptly set about making her way through the spaceport like a hard-boiled detective, shaking down Jawas and other esoteric life-forms until she discovered that her mark had been seen in (cliché alert!) the cantina. This is where she started to surprise me. Her first port of call wasn’t the cantina, but the junk shop where she enquired about some additional ammunition for her carbine (impressive… most impressive…). Alas, she paid top dollar for these – paternal note: must teach daughter to haggle.
 
She then made her way to the cantina, hanging at the bar like a pro, only to fluff a cool check and set the Bothan's spider senses tingling. Rather than leave, she walked through the clientele, sat right in front of the mark and proceeded to ask about his illicit activities and side projects. When advised that he had both hands under the table, she instructed him to show his hands and took out her binders. Here she fluffed a perception check so didn’t notice the rebel enforcer getting into position (I used the rebel cell leader card from the adversary deck - closest card to hand) and she was very lucky when the first shots started flying. At this point the Bothan ran for it, leaving her to get into cover on the stage while the rebel enforcer proxy leapt behind the bar. The rebel made a miracle shot and it was then that I flipped his card over and realised that he had a disruptor weapon (!!!), which did a good chunk of damage – must check these things in future. Oskara ran, failed a co-ordination check to make it through the panicking crowd and ended up in a heap on the cantina floor. When asked what her action would be, she asked if she could shoot from the floor (of course you can, my dear). She bumped up her pool with a destiny point and rolled a roaring success with a triumph. When asked about the nature of the triumph, her ice-cold roleplaying kicked in and she announced that the enforcer was dead. Not wanting to rain on her parade by pointing out that he wasn’t a minion (and admittedly a little perturbed by the monster I have created), I nodded and let it be.
 
What followed was a chase through the streets avoiding storm troopers and culminating in an awesome sequence in the landing bay. She used the successes on her perception check to rule that the mark was in the control room while I used her disadvantages to rule that he was on his comm-link and looking right at her while he was punching in commands. At this point she made her way into the control room (ignoring the blaster bolts streaking over her shoulders from security droids and the fact that two rebel soldiers were leaving the ship to assist), where she wrestled the comm-link out of his hand and bound his wrists. She took so long over it (another fluffed roll) that the Bothan’s team were closing in on her position along with the droids who had set up shop outside the door. When asked what she wanted to do in such a precarious position (her wounds and strain were looking risky at this point), she declared that she would, “grab the Bothan and jump through the window onto the roof of the ship". My heart soared. I gave her a bonus die for being awesome and, thankfully, she succeeded (albeit with five disadvantage – strain from broken glass). She bullied the Bothan at blaster-point into opening the hatch (difficult with wrists tied, so it gave an opportunity for her to be shot by the droids, which led to her rolling down the roof of the ship while the Bothan jumped inside – couldn’t seal the hatch with hands tied, thankfully). She jumped in after him, determined as ever, remembered to seal the hatch above her and then made a beeline for the boarding ramp to close it. She went as far as to bust the controls so that it couldn’t be opened by the enforcers from outside or by the Bothan from inside. She prioritised getting to the cockpit as soon as she felt the ship taking off, incapacitated another enforcer along the way and wasted no further time. She got to the cockpit where the Bothan was at the controls (having had time to slip his bonds) and he took the opportunity to pull some wild manoeuvres, flipping the ship onto its side with the luxury of a seat belt. I asked for a coordination check and used a destiny point to upgrade the difficulty and she rolled the most timely despair in any game I’ve run so far, losing her balance with a head-first thud and then unconscious. And she loved it! It was the perfect cliff hanger. I was proud of her narrative suggestions, imagination, resourcefulness and how she captured the feel of the saga. The moral of this long-winded story? Give it a go with the kids, if you haven’t already!
 
So what could happen next guys? The obvious answer is that she wakes up in captivity with the rebel cell, but I’m all for not-so-obvious.

"Why would anyone ever play a droid?"
 

 
 
 
 
Edit: oops, didn't mean her to be that big.

"Why would anyone ever play a droid?"
 

 
 
 
 
Edit: oops, didn't mean her to be that big.

"Why would anyone ever play a droid?"
 

 
 
 
 
Edit: oops, didn't mean her to be that big.

Having just reached the half-way mark of our group's first IA campaign (and loving it!**), I've started to wonder whether a Road to Legend-esque app for IA would be thematically appropriate. With Descent being a dungeon crawler, part of the app's charm is that you explore, laying down the tiles as you search new areas. In this way, the app adds an element that Descent-in-the-box was sorely missing. That said, I'm not sure that this same kind of exploration would be appropriate to an IA equivalent app. I suppose you could take out the tile-by-tile exploration in favour of the whole map being revealed, but then that's one key element of the app that (IMHO) makes it such an engaging experience. Perhaps rebel players could "explore" the Imperial base they're assaulting, but I like the idea that they have the intel and know the layout.
 
That said, an IA app would remove the issue of the Imperial player potentially feeling guilty for beating on the rebels so much.
 
I'm not saying it couldn't work, I just think it suits Descent a lot more.
 
 
 
**In the week we've had IA, we've already played it more than Descent in the couple of years we've had that. The rule tweaks just seem to make the game faster and a little more tactical, more urgent. Skirmish is great too! Really enjoying it so far!

It's a miracle that link wasn't a rickroll...

@sturn - yeah, it lacks the urgency of some of the other Battlefield titles. I remember playing Bad Company 2, being holed up in an attic while the foundations shook from tank fire and great big chunks of roof were falling off around us. Battlefront needs some of that. Plus, class abilities that lead to meaningful teamwork - I miss being the medic and bringing people back from the brink, or the engineer who could fix vehicles. In some ways, the clone wars would have been a better setting because of the sheer range of land and air vehicles available.

@sturn - yeah, it lacks the urgency of some of the other Battlefield titles. I remember playing Bad Company 2, being holed up in an attic while the foundations shook from tank fire and great big chunks of roof were falling off around us. Battlefront needs some of that. Plus, class abilities that lead to meaningful teamwork - I miss being the medic and bringing people back from the brink, or the engineer who could fix vehicles. In some ways, the clone wars would have been a better setting because of the sheer range of land and air vehicles available.

lords of pizza rule on this place, free delivery from the red topped huts

A friend bought it for me for Christmas. I've played it three or four times since then, but it just wasn't the same as previous installments in the game line. The lack of a campaign mode really does it in for me, to be honest. And the fact that it had a fraction of the maps Battlefront II had when released - and that all maps are paid DLC - isn't encouraging.

I play it on the Xbone - got it when it first came out, played it for a couple of months, left it alone for a while and recently got back into it. A few things to consider that might swing your opinion either way:
 
There is no online chat functionality. So it's a team/objective-based game where you can't communicate with your team (unless they're your friends and you're on party chat). I get the impression that this is to prevent young players from hearing "comm-chatter" that their parents wouldn't approve of. But it makes coordination nigh-impossible. There is a really cool Fighter Squadron mode, but it's completely skewed in the rebels' favour (because the A-Wing is fantastic and the TIEs are made out of confetti) - you will rarely see the Imperial team win (true to the source material, I guess, but not ideal from a gameplay perspective). Now that people know what they're doing, the game has that Call of Duty twitchy-trigger gameplay vibe - if they see you first, you're probably dead. The leveling system is almost redundant after a certain point - you get very little for making it all the way to level 50/60. Most of the decent unlocks happen much sooner. For me, playing as a rebel soldier or stormtrooper every single time gets a little stale. There are no classes and quite limited customisation. I'd have preferred a Titanfall-esque setup where the cannon fodder is driven by the AI, and the humans take on the spec ops-style roles. As Simon says, there's no campaign (it was recently disclosed that this feature was cut so that the game could be released to coincide with The Force Awakens).  
That said, there's stuff going for it too:
 
Excellent visuals and sound. Really authentic Star Wars vibe. Easily accessible in terms of controls and how to play. Walker Assault mode is an absolute blast! As above for the Fighter Squadron mode.  
My advice would be to rent it if possible, and if you decide to go for it and you're an Xbone player, I'll be your wing-man.
 
Best wishes
Pac_Man3D

Having just reached the half-way mark of our group's first IA campaign (and loving it!**), I've started to wonder whether a Road to Legend-esque app for IA would be thematically appropriate. With Descent being a dungeon crawler, part of the app's charm is that you explore, laying down the tiles as you search new areas. In this way, the app adds an element that Descent-in-the-box was sorely missing. That said, I'm not sure that this same kind of exploration would be appropriate to an IA equivalent app. I suppose you could take out the tile-by-tile exploration in favour of the whole map being revealed, but then that's one key element of the app that (IMHO) makes it such an engaging experience. Perhaps rebel players could "explore" the Imperial base they're assaulting, but I like the idea that they have the intel and know the layout.
 
That said, an IA app would remove the issue of the Imperial player potentially feeling guilty for beating on the rebels so much.
 
I'm not saying it couldn't work, I just think it suits Descent a lot more.
 
 
 
**In the week we've had IA, we've already played it more than Descent in the couple of years we've had that. The rule tweaks just seem to make the game faster and a little more tactical, more urgent. Skirmish is great too! Really enjoying it so far!

Okay, let's be serious now. In all likelihood, Rey issued forth from Beldorion the Hutt's splendid uterus.

What would be awesome is if Rey was Obi-Wan's grandaughter - just to bring the training cycle full circle.
 
And what would make it REALLY awesome is if Padme was her grandma! (cue soap opera cliffhanger/end credit theme of your choice)

Honestly I think the prequels get a lot more negativity than they really deserve.  No they're not great movies, but they're far from the worst things out there, particularly in the scifi genre.  If they didn't have 20+ years of Star Wars fanatical fan expectations to deal with, and just looked at in their own right, they're not that bad.  Sure the acting isn't great in some cases, but they look pretty **** good, the plot mostly hangs together (if you ignore the OT stuff and just look at them on their own), and are for the most part, an ok experience with some genuine humor, and some genuine emotional moments, at least for me.
 
Do I plan on watching them ever again?  No, probably not, but there are several movies that I love that I have no plans on watching again, mostly because I just don't rewatch movies all that much as a general rule.  But if they came on tv, I'd probably leave them on in the background while I did something and enjoy it. 

Having just reached the half-way mark of our group's first IA campaign (and loving it!**), I've started to wonder whether a Road to Legend-esque app for IA would be thematically appropriate. With Descent being a dungeon crawler, part of the app's charm is that you explore, laying down the tiles as you search new areas. In this way, the app adds an element that Descent-in-the-box was sorely missing. That said, I'm not sure that this same kind of exploration would be appropriate to an IA equivalent app. I suppose you could take out the tile-by-tile exploration in favour of the whole map being revealed, but then that's one key element of the app that (IMHO) makes it such an engaging experience. Perhaps rebel players could "explore" the Imperial base they're assaulting, but I like the idea that they have the intel and know the layout.
 
That said, an IA app would remove the issue of the Imperial player potentially feeling guilty for beating on the rebels so much.
 
I'm not saying it couldn't work, I just think it suits Descent a lot more.
 
 
 
**In the week we've had IA, we've already played it more than Descent in the couple of years we've had that. The rule tweaks just seem to make the game faster and a little more tactical, more urgent. Skirmish is great too! Really enjoying it so far!

Perhaps have two people sharing the Imperial side of the table. That way, they can enjoy being evil together and it also fits the theme very well - always two there are...

Perhaps have two people sharing the Imperial side of the table. That way, they can enjoy being evil together and it also fits the theme very well - always two there are...

May 4th served me well indeed - one of our local shops had a copy of Imperial Assault at 50% off the cover price! Played a couple of skirmish games to get a feel for the rules (Vader is a beast!) and we're going to play the introductory campaign mission this evening. Can't wait!

Old man with beard triggers nerdgasm.

Blobbo the Hutt: Hey baby, I've come to unblock your sink. Where do you want me?
(Cue steamy funk.)

Blobbo the Hutt: Hey baby, I've come to unblock your sink. Where do you want me?
(Cue steamy funk.)

I've always enjoyed one PC games - and I love the idea of one PC F&D. Reminds me of Obi-Wan's solitary, mid-to-end-of-life adventures on a certain dust-ball planet.