A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away – A Star Wars: Destiny (advanced demo) review

[Julia 2,809]

It’s a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the Evil Galactic Empire.

These simple words, appeared for the first time in the theaters of the world almost 40 years ago, were destined to have such an impact on our culture we couldn’t even imagine at that time. In the last decades, we had new movies coming and with them a plethora of books, comics, gadgets and toys arrived with the Star Wars logo on. And clearly we also had boardgames. Some were (or still are) incredibly good, some others were emberassing, some others just fun: but the truth is that there is already a plenty of games to choose from.


Then, why the need of a new game? What makes Destiny interesting?

Destiny is a bizarre game. A rather unusual one, I’d say. Usually from a Star Wars game we’d expect to see a specific story arch taken from the movies used as setting for the game. And if an entire story arch isn’t possible, then we had very solid games telling different stories set in the same universe, or we’re ready to field miniatures to revisit specific moments of the classics. But Destiny… it’s different from any of these games. Destiny focuses on characters and vehicles and items that made their appearances during the whole narrative arch covered by the 7 movies. This means that you can field Dooku with Vader against Luke with Han. Or have the Millennium Falcon landing on Coruscant. And so on. Indeed, it’s anachronistic. And chaotic. But it’s also a load of fun! Have you ever had a discussion with friends where you were assessing that Qui-Gon would have been able to beat Vader with just one hand and no one believed you? Well, now you can show them how it could have ended.

So, Destiny for me spells freedom. The freedom to try the unthinkable, to create a sort of temporal revolution and finally have all the champions we ever loved at our disposal to enact the most improbable battles and rage war throughout the starred galaxy.


But how’s the game played?

First of all you need a deck to play with, and in order to have a deck you must first select the characters you’ll be playing with. You have a total of 30 points to recruit some characters. The recruitment cost for a character is expressed in terms of point value, and some characters have two different point values separated by a backslash. This simply means that if you recruit the more expensive version of the character, that character will be allowed to roll two character dice during gameplay; if you choose the cheapest, you’ll be rolling only one die. At this point you need to build up your deck of 30 cards, featuring colors matching the colors of the characters you will field. So, you can’t add Rogue (yellow) cards to your deck unless at least one of your characters belongs to the Rogue faction. And clearly you cannot add cards from the dark side pool if you’re playing characters belonging to the light side.

At this point you’re ready to go: you field the characters, put your battlefield on the table, and roll for initiative. The player winning initiative decides which of the two battlefields will be used for the entire game. The player whose battlefield is not used gains two shield tokens, and the game’s ready to begin.

Each turn players may perform one of the following actions:

- play a card from their hand, by paying its resource cost and following the instructions on the card
- activate a character or a support card, by rolling its die (dice) into the dice pool
- resolve dice featuring the same symbol (for those familiar with RuneBound, the system is the same: you’re allowed to resolve as an action any number of dice in your pool showing the same symbol)
- discard a card from hand to reroll any number of his dice
- use a card action, usually by paying a cost or exhausting the card, as per instructions on the card
- claim the battlefield, which is feasible only if you’re the first player to pass in a given turn; upon claiming the battlefield, you resolve the claim as written on the specific battlefield you’re using (for example, “when this battlefield is claimed, then gain XY”

After both player passed, they refresh their exhausted cards, generate 2 resources, and may discard any number of cards from their hand, to draw new cards until they have 5 in hand.

The game ends when one side manages to have all characters belonging to the other side defeated, or one player with no cards in hand is forced to draw from an empty deck


So, is this game fun?

Yes, it’s a lot of fun. First of all, it’s incredibly fast (one game is played under 30 minutes) without lacking in strategic depth. Having a good timing in dice resolution is vital, and so is understanding when to conceed an initial edge to claim a battlefield and strike first during the following round. Often chosing between spending cards to reroll dice and using some mediochre results could mean the difference between life and death. And sure, there’s luck involved (after all it’s a dice game, where the dice pool is assembled in function of the cards we draw and put into play), but good decks will almost always win over bad decks, and minds good at proper strategy will rarely loose a game to bad luck because they’re given a lot of options to control the impact of luck on the game.

Additionally, results on dice are different enough to allow a lot of builds to be effective: some players will just go for mere damage, while others could enjoy more focusing on dice and resource manipulations, and some others finally will just mill your deck to oblivion. Factions seem to be very well characterized both in terms of theme and in terms of specific damage.


And what about the distribution model?

Well, as you know, the game is a collectible. Some people will love it (the magic of opening a booster and see what’s inside, the fun of trading the cards with friends and play together), some people will hate it. Some people will say that collectibles are money pits deeper than any LCG ever existed, some others will assess the contrary; truth is we could debate the whole night without reaching any conclusion able to have both sides happy. But regardless of all of this, I think there’s something very important to tell: the game is varied enough and so brilliant and allows so many solutions that having that legendary card or just going with something more moderate will not ruin the fun of the game. Get the starters, a few booster packs, take a few friends, and go play. Every game will be different and fun. And then, if you love it and wanna start the collection, well, the whole galaxy is there, waiting for you.

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DISCLAIMER: I had the chance to demo an earlier version of the game, and received permission to post this review. I don’t have any info on the final quality of the dice, nor on the frequency of cards, and my hinsights on rules is limited to what my memory remembers. I still hope this review could answer some of the questions the community had

[Julia 2,809]

(cross-posting the review from BGG. Original link: here)