by Ed Fortune
Star Wars is a world that will always be of interest to wargamers. The word ‘war’ is right in the title, after all. In recent years, we’ve had a variety of tactically deep games, from the dog-fighting X-Wing to the fleet action epic battles of Armada, as well as more grounded games such as the dungeon-exploring Imperial Assault and the complex wargame Star Wars: Legion. All of these have been pretty successful and captured the vibe of the larger Star Wars galaxy.
The new game, Star Wars: Shatterpoint, breaks this vibe by making things personal. This is a skirmish game, Jedi vs Sith leading small units against each other on dense battlefields. Whereas the previous offerings from Atomic Mass Game have been about blowing up Death Stars or defending whole alien worlds, Shatterpoint is about lightsaber duels on war-torn battlefields, peppering Mandalorians with blaster fire and kicking Darth Maul in the shins whilst preparing to cut him in two (again).
It’s a very different offering than previous games in this series. It is in 40mm scale, which means the models tower over your average Space Marine or Heroclix. It also means the models are much less fiddly to assemble and easier to paint. Atomic Mass Games are so confident that you’ll do a good job that the core box comes with two back-drops and instructions on how to photograph your models so they look good on social media.
Inside the box, we get enough terrain to play the game, and it’s on various levels. We haven’t seen the various terrain booster packs, but there’s enough in the box to give the game that ‘close quarters’ feel, with enough pieces so your snipers can hide on a gantry somewhere.
The models are high quality, unpainted and need to be assembled. We get 16 models, which can be grouped into small teams. So we get the Kalani strategy droid with some B1-Battle Droids, Lord Maul has some Mandalorian allies, as does Bo-Katan, and so on. Models include Lord Maul, Gar Saxon, Captain Rex, Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano and Asajj Ventress. They are simple to assemble (and instructions are online) and fun to paint.
Set-up is about 30 minutes, and gameplay takes about an hour once you know the rules.
What makes this game different is that each conflict is designed to tell a story. A core mechanic is called ‘Struggle’ – basically, as the conflict evolves, you use tokens to indicate that the stakes are getting higher as your team draws upon their inner strength (and The Force) to succeed, which means you rarely find yourself feeling that winning or losing is inevitable. When the struggle is over, the game resets and the mission priorities are changed by drawing cards. Each game feels more like an episode of the Clone Wars or The Mandalorian than just another session of rolling dice and calculating damage. It also helps that actions are dynamic, and you have many different ways to inflict harm on the enemy beyond simple damage.
Rules-wise, the actual rule book is more of a manual that makes the game fair rather than something you flip through in a hurry. It’s written with competitive play in mind, which makes it a little bit unfriendly for new starters. The game itself is very good, and once you ‘get it’, it flows quickly and seamlessly, but getting to that point might take a couple of hours of gameplay. We recommend looking at some online tutorials first. It’s worth the investment of time and designed with the assumption that you’re willing to take the time to get to know the game.
That said, it is designed to be accessible and swift to play. The cards are big and friendly; the rules are all written out clearly on the cards and sheets, and all the fiddly elements are absorbed into the overall design. If you’ve played other Atomic Mass Games, this approach to game design will feel familiar. Lots of tokens and cards, but once you know what they all do, it’s an incredibly smooth game.
Atomic Mass only gave us the core set to play with, but there is a lot in that box to be getting on with, though we’ll be intrigued to see how future expansions evolve the game. This is clearly intended to be a major competitor for games such as Deadzone and Kill Team, and it looks like it’ll be readily available for a long time to come. It’s the best miniatures game we’ve seen this year.
Proper lightsaber-swinging, stakes-raising, blaster-dodging, and jetpack-exploding fun. Recommended.
