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The end of the month is here and after many fraught filled delays, Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) has finally put out their Star Wars Living Card Game. Older brother ordered two starter sets (why? I have no idea) and I ordered one starter set from a place on line that had it for about 1/3rd off. Older brother's sets got here first and we decided to take a night and play a game or two of it. I was really interested in this game, not only because it was Star Wars (I am a huge Star Wars fan), but also it was a Living Card Game. A Living Card Game (LCG) is a type of collectable card game that really has nothing to chase. You buy a starter and boom; all the cards and accessories you need to play a game are in the box. There is no chasing after that Super-Rare Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker and instead getting some crap rare that nobody wants and you cannot trade. Older brother really likes the Lord of the Rings LCG and has bought almost every expansion for the game, and I thought I would give the Star Wars LCG a chance. The deck building mechanics of the game are rather curious. It is a game where you have a deck built with the fixed cards in the starter based on one of six factions; Imperial, Rebel, Jedi, Sith, Smugglers and Spies, Scum and Villainy. The dark side cards (Imperial, Sith, Scum and Villainy) can all mix up in one deck while the light side cards (Rebel, Jedi, Smugglers and Spies) can be mixed into one deck. In those factions there are objectives that you have to defend with the cards from your deck. The thing is; there are only five cards per objective that can be put into your deck. That means for a sixty card deck, you need ten objectives and the fifty cards (total) that go with those objectives. There are no mixing cards between objectives. In other words, if you play with ten objective sets (say 1-10) but there is this really cool card that you want to play in objective set 11; then you are out of luck unless you remove one of the objective sets you want to play with and add in set number eleven instead. To win the game the Light Side must destroy three of the Dark Side's Objectives or make it so the dark side has no cards to draw. The dark side must either get the Death Star counter up to 12 or beyond and they win, or make it so the light side has no more cards to draw. You may ask yourself, why does the light side need objectives if the Dark Side does not need to destroy them? The thing is; they do need to destroy them. By destroying the light side's objectives it helps accelerate the movement of the Death Star Dial towards the magic number of 12. The card playing mechanic is kind of standard fare. On each of the three objective cards you play as well as your faction card, there is a number that represents the number of points you have to spend in a given turn. There are other ways to get more points to spend, but most of the time you will be relying on the three objectives and the one or two points they supply to get cards out in a turn. There's no mana to keep track of or get screwed out of in the opening draw of your hand so you really don't have to worry about not having any points to spend. Since Fantasy Flight Games really likes to have little accessories to go with all their games, not only is there the Death Star counter, but there are also a lot of cardboard tokens to keep track of. You have exhaustion tokens (essentially instead of turning the card sideways to show you have used it, you put one little cardboard token on it), damage tokens that are used to keep track of the damage scored on objectives and on multiple hit point characters and shield tokens (these did not come into play in our first game). I'm okay with using little cardboard tokens to show damage and resources spent, but I suppose you could use different colored glass beads to represent damage scored and resources spent. I think FFG likes to keep things as cost efficient as possible and forty odd glass beads would have made the game much heavier and more expensive than cardboard tokens. The game recommends that you try the fixed decks in the starter before branching out on your own and building your own decks. I can agree with that. Granted older brother and I have played many CCG's/LCG's over the years and we could have built decks right off the bat, we went with the fixed deck route for our first game. The only thing I have a problem with is that the rules are kind of long winded and wordy and use five words to describe something when two would suffice. The rulebook is only about 18 pages with full color pictures of concepts that need to be taught or learned, and I would give them a couple of read throughs so you get a good understanding of the rules before playing. My older brother read through the rules twice and got the gist of them, but then he also spent a lot of time on the FFG message boards for the SW:LCG getting things straightened out for himself before we played. For that I am thankful because I don't think it would have taken only two hours to play our inaugural game, it would have been more towards three. The Imperials, played by me, won the first game we played. I think it was by dumb luck because older brother made a strategic move that he should not have and I got some really good draws in my hand right off the bat. The game is worth the cost you would pay online, but I'm not sure about paying full retail for it. I don't think this game will be an "Android: Netrunner" and sell out really quickly because FFG has learned from their mistakes of under producing them.
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