I love deck building games. These card games that usually involve each player starting with a basic deck of cards that they use to purchase newer, better cards towards an eventual goal of defeating a villain (or the other players) or just accumulating victory points. The format gives me a lot of what I like about trading card games, but without the massive investment of time, energy and money, and has become so ubiquitous as a game mechanism that it has become just one of many design elements in recent (and immensely popular) board games such as Dune: Imperium, and Lost Ruins of Arnak.
Like most people who were children in the 1970s, I love Star Wars. Although the franchise has seen its share of ups and downs over the years, I have enough nostalgic affection for it that I'm prepared to forgive its occasional excesses, and I think its current owners have started to figure out what works and what doesn't, and it's still pretty spectacular when they get it right.
So imagine my relief when Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game turned out to be a pretty good, if not fantastic, game.
The game's theme has invited a lot of comparisons to Star Realms, but honestly both games borrow their core mechanisms from games like Legendary: cards generate one or more different currencies (in this case, resources, attack, or Force) which are then used to attack your opponent or purchase from a center row of available cards. The game adds two new elements to the deck building game formula: a tug-of-war Force track, and the ability to attack unpurchased cards in the center row.
The Force track is a simple board with several spaces and a marker. When players play cards that generate Force, the marker moves towards their side of the board, and their turn starts with it all the way at their end, they get an extra resource to spend. There are also a handful of cards that have additional abilities if the marker is on one side of the board or the other. It's a game element that's not all that developed, but given the absence of major force-wielding characters like Yoda or Obi-Wan Kenobi from the game, I suspect this will be further developed in an expansion.
Normally in deck building games, players purchase new cards from a common pool or row of available cards, but how do you address that in a world as unambiguously black-and-white as Star Wars? It doesn't really work to have Han Solo working with a squad of stormtroopers, or Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin suddenly resolving their differences and teaming up. The game solves this problem by having all the cards marked as Empire, Rebellion, or neutral. Anyone can buy neutral cards, but rather than the Rebel player being able to buy Imperial cards, or having them just sit there in the row taking up space, each player can attack their opponent's cards, giving them a short term reward and freeing up space for (hopefully) one of their own cards to become available.
The ultimate goal of the game is to destroy your opponent's bases, anywhere between 3 and 5 depending on the desired length of game. Different bases have different in-game abilities, and players can defend their bases by putting capital ships into play -- these horizontally formatted cards stay in play from turn to turn (unusual for a game of this type) and soak up damage directed at their players' bases along with supplying other resources and abilities.
Thematically the game sticks to content from the original Star Wars trilogy and Rogue One, which is set at the same time. In addition to the aforementioned Force-users, the franchise's droid characters such as R2-D2, C-3PO and K2-SO are missing from the game, which makes me think they've been held back for a possible expansion that would introduce additional mechanisms, which would be a good idea -- while the game is perfectly entertaining and playable as-is, it is a little on the simple side and could eventually benefit from some added content to keep players interested.
- Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game official website
- Star Wars: the Deckbuilding Game on BoardGameGeek