Star Wars Rivals Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Star Wars: Rivals, an area control game published by Funko Games. In Star Wars: Rivals, players are fighting for control of locations set in the star wars universe.

I’ll apologize now—Star Wars has entered our collective consciousness so it’s hard to write without throwing in a Star Wars reference or two here and there. There are a lot of Star Wars games; some good, some bad, a bit of both. For every excellent game there’s one that screams “danger Will Robinson!” So, let’s aim to misbehave as I walk you through how to play Star Wars Rivals. Engage!

Rivals is a collectible game where each player will pick three characters on either the light side or the dark side and 12 locations from the Star Wars Universe to battle over. Personally, I can’t wait until the Wall-E and Dalek packs are released.

To start the game, each player will draw a hand of three cards from their deck that’s comprised of the cards for each of their characters. One of the players will take the Higher Ground token and the prismatic die.

Each round plays out in the following manner.

• Starting with the player with the higher ground token, each player will alternate placing one character at a time on one of the 3 locations. Instead of participating in the galactic battle a character can also go full dad-bod (sorry Daimyo) Boba Fett (or Luke Skywalker for old school fans) and hang out in their bacta tank to remove all -1 influence tokens. • Roll the die to see which areas are going to be contested this round. The inverted V symbol means just the highest value area (or areas if there’s a tie) • Each player selects an action card to play and then starting with the higher ground player, takes their action. • Score the locations by summing the total