I've played a lot of different collectible card games over the past 30 years. I didn't get into Magic: the Gathering when it first came out, but I did play Decipher's Star Trek and Star Wars CCGs pretty heavily throughout the 1990s and early 2000s (I still play Star Trek regularly today), and I've at least tried a fairly large number of others, including On the Edge, Doomtown, Highlander, Aliens vs. Predator, Judge Dredd, Legend of the Five Rings, Shadowfist, Dune, and more others than I can count or remember. Magic finally got my attention when they started adding properties I know like Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings, and Doctor Who to the game. I even played Decipher's other two Star Wars CCGs, Young Jedi and Jedi Knights, and the short-lived Star Wars game that Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast did in 2002.
I like the format a lot. I like building customized decks from a collection of cards and then playing them against a variety of opposing decks. While I was perfectly happy with "living card games" like Lord of the Rings or Marvel Champions that did away with randomized booster packs in favor of fixed sets of cards, I never really minded the collectible aspect of this type of games. There's something exciting about ripping open a pack and seeing what you got, especially if it's a new game with unfamiliar cards.
After pioneering the non-collectible living card game format, Fantasy Flight Games has decided to re-enter the collectible card game market with Star Wars Unlimited. Unlike their earlier Star Wars: the Card Game, Unlimited will come in random booster packs supported by a two-player starter set. In advance of the game's March 8 release, FFG has offered a pre-release pack consisting of six random boosters, two fixed foil cards, counters, and a quickstart rulebook. The product is meant for a single player to use in an organized tournament event, but we were able to just about squeeze two 30-card decks out of the contents so we could try the game out.
The game is wonderfully simple. Each player chooses a leader and a base, and build the rest of the deck around the colored icons those characters provide. You can include any card you want in your deck, but cards with icons that don't match your leader or base will cost you more to put into play. It's a great bit of game design for this type of game -- you have incentive to focus on cards that match your leader and base, but if you really want to throw in a favorite character or starship that wouldn't otherwise fit, you can, and you can even mix light side and dark side characters in a way that no previous Star Wars game has allowed. In theory, any stack of cards can be a functioning deck, which makes organized play using sealed boosters a lot easier and more fun.
Unlike Magic, which requires matching land cards in order to get other cards into play, Star Wars Unlimited allows players to use any face-down card as a resource. This eliminates one of the major frustrations that can happen when playing Magic or other resource-based games -- sometimes you just can't play anything. Star Wars Unlimited's approach means that you never have a useless card in your hand, as you can always play it face down as a resource.
The structure of the game is very straightforward. Once you get your units into play, you use them to attack and eventually destroy your opponent's base. Since they're trying to do the same to you, each turn starts with a decision about whether or not to keep whittling away at their base, or take out your opponent's units so they can't attack you. It's pretty similar to Magic, but without that game's 30 years of keywords, rules additions, and edge cases weighting it down.
Another nice element to the game is the artwork. I'm never sure about using artwork for games based on films or television shows -- why not just use screen captures, especially for something like Star Wars that has a lot of high end visuals to work with? The use of artwork allows them to use elements from across the franchise's 47-year history of live action and animation and have it all look consistent, and it also makes it easy to accommodate characters and scenes that we never saw in any of the films.
If the pre-release pack is any indication, Star Wars Unlimited is off to a great start, but it remains to be seen whether it can flourish in a market that has seen several booms and busts over the years, and is currently dominated by a small number of games. Hopefully it will, as this first set of cards barely scratches the surface of the extensive, one might even say Unlimited, Star Wars universe.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) It lacks the depth of some of the earlier CCGs, but that isn't necessarily a disadvantage as the game's simplicity should make it a lot more accessible to new and casual players.
- Star Wars Unlimited official website
- Star Wars Unlimited on BoardGameGeek
