Star Wars - Outer Rim - Fantasy Flight Games
You play a bounty hunter in the Outer Rim of the Star Wars universe. You are trying to obtain victory via different paths to become the most famous outlaw in the galaxy.
The game is for 1-4 players with everyone starting on an even footing. The decisions that you make allow you to improve your skills, ship, and crew.
The Star Wars skin is a lot of fun. There is enough from the main movies, as well as other characters from niche spin offs, to entice even the most avid fan.
Goals
In many Fantasy Flight games I haven’t liked the way quests have operated. Through setup or decisions that the players make quests become available. But they are available to everyone at the same time.
So if you were working on something else or are far away on the board you can be severely disadvantaged. In this game all the quests are individual.
You choose your path to victory. And the paths are clear – the cause and effect is pretty obvious. Importantly, all the different routes to victory appear achievable
Your Decisions Matter
Your actions feel like they have an effect on your path towards victory rather than the world continuing around you and you having little control over your victory or defeat.
You have to be efficient with your actions – while you may be able to make a motser delivering contraband from one end of the galaxy to the other – your opponent will likely be well ahead of you by this point.
You can also focus excelling in one aspect of the game or becoming a jack-of-all-trades. The expert will have to avoid areas that they do not excel at but the jack with be able to have a go at all but the hardest of quests.
Typical Fantasy Flight Game
All of the pieces are here. You have a board and about the same room taken up with the different decks of cards.
You have cards to collect to improve ship and character. Missions that require you to move along a board and randomness via dice that you can modify by increasing your abilities.
This game feels like a mishmash between Fallout and Eldritch Horror. Player board has a lot of items and quests. You character has control over a ship which you can get upgrades and a crew for.
There is a lot going on. If this is your sort of thing you will find the game has a lot to offer. If it isn’t there might be too much to keep track of but it isn’t on the scale of Eldritch Horror.
Bad Aspects of the Game
There isn’t any player interaction – other players simply roll for the enemies. This is a huge downfall because the whole point of board games is to get people together – if we have no reason to interact what’s the point?
The different characters you can play as are unbalanced. Once you have had a few games your play group will be able to pick the broken characters. The Doctor is one. She can choose a skill for a turn that she excels at.
This removes the need for you to have a diverse crew or to increase your own skills. This makes her better than any other character apart from in combat, which you can just avoid.
