Star Wars Unlimited: Shadows of the Galaxy Review

boardgamequest.com:

As mentioned in my review of Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game Clone Wars Edition, I have been a Star Wars fan since my next-door neighbor sold us an original RCA VHS VCR  and we got copies (or bootlegs) of each Star Wars film. I was also an original early adopter of Star Wars the Collectible Card Game by Decipher inc. We ran an amazing legal-ish scheme* to get free holiday gift cards at the local strip mall to buy boxes of that game.

But we were teenagers and once the Holidays ended we could no longer afford as many decks and we lost the thrill of the game. I have since gone on an outright boycott of all CCGs and have limited my card games to LCG or simply deck-building games. So this is my first foray back into a CCG (or now Tradable because they don’t want people to remember how much money they have sunk into CCGs over the years). Will the Star Wars Unlimited: Shadows of the Galaxy game win me over? Read on to find out.

If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering, Lorcana, or similar games CCGs, you know how to play. Like Lorcana this game has the excellent mechanism to use cards as resources.

To start the game, players put their base and their leader into play, for this Starter Deck that is The Mandalorian or Moff Gideon. Each leader has an action they can do when not an active unit and then a trigger that makes them deploy as active units. When the leader is defeated he is returned to the leader area of the play area and can never be deployed again.

Next each player draws 6 cards to form their hand and chooses two cards to be resources (used to pay the cost to play a card from your hand).

The game is played in two phases, Action Phase and Re-Group phase. During the Action Phase players alternate choosing one action from the list below:

Regroup Phase:

Game End:

Game ends when one player has dealt 30 damage to the opponent’s base.

Unlike Magic, play starts right away as you start the first round with resources to deploy cards and/or play actions and the fun doesn’t stop