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This past Christmas, the Star Wars fans of this family got a gift card. With it, we bought Star Wars: Rebellion (a game that happens to be discounted as I type this, although it may not be as you are reading).

It took a while (long story) but we finally played our inaugural game last weekend. I can now appreciate why this game ranks at #8 on BoardGameGeek. I don’t think I can contribute much by “reviewing” the game but I will offer that Star Wars: Rebellion is a combination of excellent physical components and rules which are just complicated enough to keep it interesting without being overly taxing.

What I do want to think about today is the lessons that this gaming “system” might have for the design of wargames.

As befitting the subject, the game is asymmetric. The Galactic Empire has more military forces and the ability to build even more and faster. That military can be used to take over additional planets and then force them to contribute even more resources to the Imperial machine. The Rebellion, by contrast, has smaller, weaker forces and must win over, planet by planet, any ability to add to their military strength. In a stand-up fight, the rebels are no match for the Empire.

Even so, the Empire wins only by locating and destroying the secret rebel base. If they fail to do so before the clock runs out, it doesn’t matter how massive the Imperial Fleet or how many battles have been won. To make it all more interesting, the Rebels (and that player only) can move the hands of the clock. Military or diplomatic successes means popular support and that means that the amount of time the Empire has to achieve victory is curtailed. The sides must be played very differently but (one would hope) they are balanced so as to give a good game.

Obviously a big part of the appeal of this game is the Star Wars chrome. The playing board would otherwise feel a bit arbitrary were it not for the fact that it consists of the planets featured in the movies. The card which destroys the Death Star upon rolling a six (on one of three thrown dice, mind you) would feel arbitrary and capricious except for the fact that we’re all imagining the climatic scene in the original movie as we roll. More than say an A Few Acres of Snow, the combat via cards and dice rolls does not have to “make sense” in any practical terms; it merely has to invoke one’s experience having watched the movies. After all, the combat from the films never really made much sense anyway.

Does an imperial fleet consisting of an imperial destroyer, the Death Star, and a single tie fighter follow any kind of logic? Only because that’s a reasonable assembly of the playing pieces. And because those pieces are really nice; for the now-grown child who still wants to battle with tin soldiers, the “system” that translates it into balanced game play really shines.

Going Commander

One element that should work very well in a historical wargame is how leaders are used in Star Wars: Rebellion. Movement requires a leader placed in a system, allowing adjacent units to then be colocated with that leader. With some rare exceptions, the placement of a leader locks the units with him (or her) in place for the duration of that turn.

The use of named leaders works very well in a Star Wars game. Allocating Darth Vader to lead an attack makes visceral sense to the Star Wars fan. The details of Vader’s bonuses and advantages support that meaning rather than define it. In a historical game, it may work less well or maybe not at all. For example, in a Wars of the Roses game, where senior nobles could be dispatched across the countryside to lead a campaign, it might translate fairly well. In a Vietnam-era game, by contrast, the idea that you could place named commanders willy-nilly in any region of the country and with any units makes a lot less sense.

In the latter case, and maybe any case where the leaders lack known and distinctive personalities, it may make sense to use some kind of command token – a placement that represents the commitment to an offensive or an operation or a region. I think back to The Guns of August and the need to declare offensives ahead of time. I also find myself contrasting the simplicity of the Rebellion approach with the complex leader designations in Crown of Roses.

The Star Wars: Rebellion system works even better when you also factor in the mission cards. I think of these as an alternative to the more-traditional Card Driven Game mechanic where one’s actions are controlled by cards. The common CDG design has the major decision coming down to whether to use a card for the “event” or the “Ops.” Rebellion demonstrates how to make it operation-centric rather than card-centric. In Rebellion, before any movement takes place, leaders are assigned to missions (represented by cards collected, per CDG convention, in a hidden hand). Any leader (or leadership/command token if you’re going that way) not assigned to a mission may subsequently be deployed for movement/attack or used defensively. Assignment to a mission does not require that that mission be executed but it does remove that leader’s availability for any other action.

I would suggest that this system, adapted for a historical design, would allow a more “realistic” representation of strategic allocation and operational planning (relative to the CDG model) while also being simpler and more playable than The Guns of August‘s cascade of phases. Missions need to be planned out ahead of time – just not too much ahead of time. It also really helps that said “planning” consists of putting the card face down on the table and placing the leader (or leaders, you can commit either one or two) on top of it. So simple!

Put Up your Dukes

The combat system (and I’ll speak to the original now, not the expansion) works using bespoke six-sided dice combining symbols and colors. This is a great mechanic to eliminate the need for the Combat Results Tables of old. It would be easy enough to print up a rule about how “damage occurs on a 4, 5, or 6” but the graphics-adorned dice make it all work more smoothly and intuitively. Rebellion applies an additional factor by using two different dice colors. Some units attack with red, some with black. Some units have red health, some black. On a 4 or a 5 (that is to say, the equivalent symbol), the attack and defense colors have to match. On a six, it doesn’t matter. It’s a convenient way of making the odds nonlinear and just a little too complex for most people to understand at a glance.

Those leaders (again, not the expansion) contribute what are called “tactics cards.” Better leaders contribute more and more varied cards, and thus a leadership bonus. These cards are drawn before a battle and then applied during a separate “tactics phase” that comes in between each roll of the dice and the final application of the results. One again, it elevates the combat above Risk (count your armies, roll your dice) level to give a feel of a “tactical battle resolution” without the complexity of, say, Crown of Roses.

The combat in Rebellion won’t necessarily translate to a more serious game (although again I note that this particular feature was entirely reworked with the release of the expansion Rise of the Empire). Or it might. For a tabletop game, the appeal of attractively-colored and adorned dice has been proven through Richard Borg’s designs (Battle Cry, Memoir ’44, and Commands and Colors). There is no reason that symbol-dice couldn’t be implemented to create whatever statistical distribution that the designer wants (and would otherwise use the traditional dice and c.r.t. to achieve). If we’re talking a digital game – well, the color and heft of dice don’t matter on the computer screen.

My impression here is that this particular combat system seems to have started with the mechanics and the application of the Star Wars chrome rather than grown from an attempt to simulate a particular result. Presumably that is not what we’d look for in a historical wargame, even if the model may be as good as many and better than some.

Running out the Clock

The last major game mechanic that stands out is how the victory conditions are applied. In a structure that would fit many insurgent operations and maybe even conventional wars, victory for one side consists simply of holding out long enough. In fact, many a wargame has this baked in as a victory condition via a turn limit.

One thing that makes Rebellion special, perhaps, is the fact that the Empire has but a single objective; to find and destroy the Rebel base. They must do it within the time limit. The insurgents must run out the clock. But beyond just hiding and occasionally fighting where they can, they can impact that clock. The beauty of this is that there is but one “victory point” tally and that’s the final turn.

By way of contrast, I am thinking of the victory tally in Labyrinth, the GMT board game treatment of the War on Terror. In that, the “empire’s” (as we’ll tongue-in-cheekily call America) victory depends on the number of Islamic-world nations sporting “good governance.” Failure comes from counting those with hardline-Islamist rule. At different times during the game there are different levels for victory. The sudden death condition is different from the end-of-game tally. Too often I’ve been surprised as one-too-many Islamist revolutions trigger that sudden-death loss. It is all very confusing for me and certainly leads me to appreciate the approach in Rebellion whereby there is a single number – that final turn. From a board game design standpoint, it is beautiful.

Will it work from a historical perspective? Playing Fire in the Lake and other Vietnam War games might offer a lesson that, sometimes, finding and destroying the hidden rebel base doesn’t necessarily buy you anything. Is this another example of applying some chrome plating to the mechanics that work rather than simulating a reasonable situation? For a Star Wars game, does it even matter? After all, the movies made the point that the likes of Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader figured that victory consisted of finding and annihilating the hidden rebel base. How can we say that they were mistaken?

You Can Waste Time with your Friends when your Chores are Done

I’m not a game designer. In fact, I don’t even dive into the design discussions on the internet. As much as I like what I saw this past weekend, I couldn’t tell you what other games out there use something similar and what others might do it all much better. After all, we’re only at game #8 here. If we’re going to steal design, why not go after the top 5?

Nonetheless, there are a couple of interesting aspects of this game that are worth (mentally) chewing on for a while. For those of us who mostly stick to the historical wargaming world, a game like Star Wars: Rebellion might not even be on our radar.