Star Wars Rebellion

Thoughts after one play. I played as the Empire.

Liked:

Structured planning phase — This is a big, complex game, yo, and by the fifth round you each get up to eight important moves per round. There are, like, nine or ten rounds? Imagine playing that with somebody over-analyzing every action between turns. That would be a mitigating factor in a murder case, I'm sure. Rebellion, though: at the beginning of each round, both players (somewhat simultaneously) commit to at least some of their actions for that round, based on the board state at that moment. When it comes around to actually executing those actions (each side taking one action at a time), the choices have been restricted and the game overall seems to flow much more nicely as a result.

Thematic combos — Taking actions on cards involves combining a mission with a hero on a particular planet, and then an opponent's hero can oppose the mission, and each hero can have have some a droid or a ship or some other attachment from the Star Wars stories. Even with games that are lauded for being thematic, I often find it hard to get in any way immersed into the theme, but these little combinations, sending Darth Vader to kidnap Leia, sending Palpatine to spread fear across a system opposed by, I dunno, Wedge — it's all pretty evocative, even when it's stuff that doesn't happen in the movies.

Original and strategic — Rebellion is really a wargame, but it's unlike any other Wargame I have played or heard of. Only being able to direct the flow of battle with a limited number of heroes is super strategic but seems unusual for a wargame. Same with the whole hidden base victory condition. Same with being able to oppose card effects if you commit your own hero to a card an opponent played — so cool. Then each space on the map being connected to building specific units — if you don't have a planet with that symbol on, you can never build that unit — a strategic decision that I've never seen in another wargame.

I say that without knowing a lot about wargames, but this was the impression I got. I did just find out that Rebellion is actually a remake of a game from 1979 (Freedom in the Galaxy) which looks like this:



Didn't like:

Fiddly — Working your way across the whole map every two rounds to count up how many of each unit to add to which section of your build queue. Trying to work out which probe cards you don't have. Bleh.

Losing — Self explanatory.

No strong opinion on:

Combat — It's fine I guess.

I agree with most of your points, but I would also divide the combat into a few points that I like and dislike. The red and black dice are a great, simple way to create a difference between capital ships and fighters (and between X-wings and Y-wings). However, other aspects of the combat seem to fall under your 'fiddly' heading, like going through the entire rigmarole with shuffling and drawing tactics cards for a battle you don't care about because of the 7% chance you'll draw the right card and actually be able to do something. I've thought about variants to fix this, but I'm not quite sure any of them are an actual improvement.

"Trying to work out which probe cards you don't have" can certainly be improved. I sort mine in my hand by the region of the board they're located on, which tends to help. When I'm playing online, I keep a text file open to keep track of cards I've drawn and regions I've checked. I think some people keep a laminated map and a dry-erase pen in the box to let the Empire player keep notes.