Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Today's review is of the 2022 release, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. For 1-5 players, it takes 60 minutes.

Overview

You are all Jedi during the Clone Wars, trying to complete missions and fend off waves of droids, blockades, and a primary villain. Do you have what it takes to prevail?

To start, you each choose a Jedi (each has a special ability, granting a free unique action), choose a villain to face (there are four; each has a villain card with unique abilities and a 6-card villain deck), randomly choose [x] mission cards (the number determines difficulty), place droids and mission tokens as indicated in the rules, and draw cards to form your hand (which is played face up on the table). Then, the game begins with the following turn structure:

1. Ready cards (untap all tapped cards in your hand)

2. Do 4 actions (move, attack, draw cards, and/or complete missions)

3. Activate villain (activate special abilities on their card, then draw 1 card from the villain deck and do what it says)

4. Invade planets (draw a number of cards from the invasion pile corresponding to the invasion level and place 1 droid on each corresponding planet)

Turns proceed in clockwise order. When all missions are completed, the villain card is flipped, showing rules for the finale. Complete that and win!

This is a game in the Pandemic line, so its structure (or game engine) is very similar to the original. Some differences in this variant:

- there are no 'outbreaks' [of droids in this case]; instead, a planet is 'blockaded' and the threat marker is advanced

- you roll a die to attack droids or complete missions; hits/successes help you advance, but you can also suffer damage (which makes you discard one or more cards)

- your cards (shown face up on the table) have generic categories that dictate their use. They can be tapped once per round to add to the value of the attack/mission die roll, help you move, or defend against damage

- there is an overall villain (Asajj Ventress, Maul, Dooku, or Grievous) that you may remove throughout the game (there are benefits to doing so), but they will come back and you must defeat them at the finale to win

game in progress; image from here

Review

I'm a huge fan of the Pandemic game engine, having reviewed four games modeled on it to date: Pandemic, Fall of Rome, Iberia, and Reign of Cthulhu. In general, the cooperative aspect is fun and the 4 actions grants meaningful decision making- a key to any good game. So how does this variant compare?

In short, this is solid. We played two games on easy mode (meaning you had to complete only 3 missions before you reached the finale), and it was quite easy. I like the variations available here- plenty of mission cards and four villains, combined with the other standard randomizing mechanisms in all Pandemic games, makes for a different experience each time.

Rating: A