Star Wars: Shatterpoint lowers the FOMO, amps up the RNG
In the world of tabletop gaming, miniatures are both a blessing and a curse. Entire franchises have been built on the backs of tiny plastic heroes, giving sizzle to countless crowdfunding campaigns and holding down an attractive bit of shelf space at the friendly local game store. But often the scale of a publisher’s ambition for a product line far outstrips consumers’ willingness to pay for it — much less to spend time painting it.
Star Wars: Shatterpoint, the latest offering from Atomic Mass Games, is an attempt to reconcile that conflict. It’s the most recent entry into a hot sector of the tabletop landscape known as miniature skirmish games: highly thematic games of tactical combat that only require a handful of miniatures to play. So, while Shatterpoint may share the same cinematic universe with Star Wars: Legion— one of Atomic Mass’ several Star Wars-themed miniatures games, and one that requires dozens and dozens of minis to play — the experience of buying, painting, and playing Shatterpoint should be something else entirely.
“Tactically, strategically, it’s a very different experience,” head of studio Will Shick told Polygon during a demo at this year’s AdeptiCon. “In Legion, what you’re doing is you’re building an army that is going to have synergies and tactics. You’re choosing your command cards. You’re choosing your units. You’re making a battle plan. And then your goal in Legion is to execute that plan as well as you can, while your opponent influences you by force.”
“Instead of it being on how your army works together and synergizes, and how you build the perfect Rube Goldberg machine,” Shick continued, “the focus [in Shatterpoint] is heavily on the characters and what the character is doing. And part of
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