The Mandalorian: Adventures board game, co-designed by Corey Konieczka, is full of surprises
Corey Konieczka, acclaimed board game designer of strategy games such as Star Wars: Rebellionand Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, launched his own studio, Unexpected Games, in 2021. After a series of high-concept titles, including puzzle-based The Initiativeand the dynamic 3,000 Scoundrels, he’s back for another stab at a licensed franchise. The Mandalorian: Adventures is a cooperative board game with multiple modes, and itarrives at hobby shops and online in the third quarter. In a recent interview with Polygon, Konieczka revealed some of its secrets — including what promises to be a highly anticipated traitor mode.
The Mandalorian: Adventures is a card-based action game, Konieczka revealed, where players will take on the role of one of eight iconic characters from the first season of The Mandalorian, guiding them through missions based on the streaming television series. The first sees Mando teaming up with IG-11 to rescue the Child.
“Enemies don’t tend to survive very long [in that first mission],” Konieczka said with a laugh, “as you’d expect from the show. They walk into town, IG is firing his guns, two of them, in different directions at the same time, taking guys off the roof.”
To make it through the game’s various scenarios, players will need to work together by playing cards from their hands to one of several action slots on the table to do things like move, attack, or gather information from the environment. The strength of a given action depends on the value of the card played, so a four played to the move slot will let a character move four spaces. Some cards have special abilities as well, but those can only be played to certain actions on the table.
“There’s often a push and pull on your turn,” Konieczka said. “I really want to do this action, but maybe I’ve got this special ability in my hand, so I might want to play it over here.”
That tension is made more complicated by the fact that when a particular stack of cards reaches a total value of
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