Hi all! I'm back again with another review, this time with a very different kind of game. This is a game with a Star Wars theme, however it is perfectly enjoyable with no Star Wars knowledge whatsoever. The mechanic behind it is so fun and intriguing that the Star-Wars identities of the various pieces (which can essentially be split into good guys and bad guys) aren't important. Of course, if you do know who they are, it can add enjoyment for you, but it isn't essential.
Here's the game set up and ready for action! You can see that pieces are color-coded, meaning that knowledge of who is a hero and villain in the world of Star Wars isn't required.
Buying this game was a bit of an experiment. I went to the flea market with my parents a week or two ago and spotted an old 2000s Star Wars game being sold there. I've played a tremendously fun game from this era called Star Wars Epic Duels and so I thought to myself: "are there other old Star Wars games lurking in the cabinets of the board game fans of this world, just waiting to be played?" The answer was a resounding yes. I snapped this one up on Mercari for $14, where you can still (at the time of writing) find more pretty inexpensive copies. It's really made me intrigued to try more board games from this era, which, hopefully, I'll review here.
But boy, is it fun! Silly, yet highly strategic fun, as you run around trying to take out the bad guys while avoiding being backstabbed by your fellow players using those very bad guys! On a turn, you move either one of your Jedi or one of the bad guys up to six spaces. You can then attack a bad guy (if you're a Jedi) or a Jedi (if you're a bad guy), provided it's in a space adjacent to you. To do so, you roll dice, a very elegant mechanism that makes the game's battles very straightforward, yet nail-biting fun.
My dad, poised to do battle in the midst of hordes of bad guys!
If you succeed, you take the bad guy to put on your Jedi card – where, crucially, it will be worth a point at the end of that game if the Jedi survives – or wound the Jedi you hit. If you fail, that's it, and the next person takes a turn. Failure for the bad guys is just a blank space, representing a miss. But for the Jedi, it's an illustration of Yoda. If you roll this, Yoda's piece moves a space along a kind of timeline. When he reaches the end, it's game over.
In this case, since this player controls these two Jedi, and one has captured one bad guy, while the other has captured three, they have four points. The Jedi on the right is called Yarael Poof, so you can see that the silliness doesn't end with the mechanics of the game!
Because of Yoda's gradual movement along the timeline, your strategy morphs over the course of the game. Players' point totals will climb, but as Yoda moves along the timeline, some players might decide to move the villains more in order to stop them from finishing with more points than they have. It becomes pretty cut-throat, in a truly delightful way, and up to five people can play.
Once you've had one round, you can add "the Reek", a four-legged monster which you can roll a dice to control instead of moving one of your Jedi or one of the villains. It moves one zone (the black, bolded edges surrounding many spaces at once) at a time and takes out any one villain or Jedi of your choice in that zone. The catch is, of course, that you don't know where it will go – or even if it will move at all! You also won't be able to collect any bad guy you defeat with the Reek unless you're riding it. Yep, that's right, you get to ride a giant monster around and crash into stuff at random. Sounding fun yet? You need to roll a hit on your Jedi die to climb on board though, so the risk associated with the Reek isn't limited to its movement.
Here's a Jedi riding on the Reek. It's just as silly as it sounds. Watch out bad guys (and fellow players), here it comes!
If you're looking for a game which is simultaneously goofy, cut-throat, and full of intriguing strategy, while being very easy to learn, I recommend Jedi Unleashed. Whether you're a Star Wars fan or not, defeating bad guys and your friends while avoiding getting trampled by a giant four-legged monster is lots of fun, and just cries out for another round. I played two in a row when the game arrived, and the second made me eager for a third. That's because no two games are alike: Yoda moves along his timeline at a different pace every game, which leads players to adopt a different strategy in each.
Hopefully this was a useful review. I discovered that the comments had been turned off for site visitors, and I have turned them on now. Please let me know what games you'd like to see reviewed, and what you think about themed games like this one. What categories of games would you like to see?
Thank you and happy board gaming!
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