Imperial Assault and an Angry Wookie!

      Last Saturday while playing at our local Hobbytown U.S.A., we noticed that a man was there to demo Fantasy Games' Star Wars: Imperial Assault. I was intrigued enough to ask the man named Andrew, if he was able to demo the next day, since my wife and I had other plans for the evening. Andrew agreed to met us the next day. This is one of the great things about wargaming is that you get to meet new people all of the time.
    Now, as I have said in the past, that I am not normally into playing many fantasy/sci-fi games. However, I have always been interested in a Star Wars Miniatures game. It is surprising this one did not already exist, but I know that this is based of the whole license issue with dealing with the evil world of Disney. Yes, they are evil for being so greedy to need to by Lucas Films! As far as I am concerned, they rank up there with my hatred of Walmart. Will I still buy stuff from both companies? Yes, until someone else takes over. But despite my sidetrack, Imperial Assault is more of a board game to avoid license issues and to make this product. There are plenty of expansion packs for this game, and they do use some miniatures made of plastic. Normally, this would bother me, but the way they are made is with one mold. Yes, you loose the customization, but the quality is pretty good essentially for a board game. They do not come painted, but I like to paint my own stuff anyway. What surprised my wife was the fact that the artwork for sharing this game showed none of the figures painted for the game. We are used to seeing the flare of the games involving over-the-top painting schemes for these type of games. Again, not a big deal.
   How did the game play?  For one of the few games my wife and I played together, Kalissa and I were both on the Rebels side. Andrew, our teacher, was running the demo as the Imperial Forces. He mentioned that the scenario we were playing was from another expansion that you can get. He also mentioned that you can choose to run this game as a campaign piece for those who like to build characters or you can run it as a skirmish type game. In our game, it was our mission to get some codes and release a ship's docking locks, so we could take the ship. Each of our characters would go once per turn with two actions with special abilities and what not.  This was a you go/ I go system between characters. The imperials have two to three people in a group instead of a characters.
   So, having a mission, the scenarios stack against the Rebels. Though, you might kill a few, they can get constant re-enforcements. However, my wife decided to go a little off the grid with her Wookie character. She was in bloodfest mode. I won't lie that we forgot about the time limit of six turns to do this, so we did not win this game. For my wife, she had her own personal victory. Her Wookie killed fourteen people, while everyone else, killed two. We lost Han Solo who was more of an Ally than a character that made a major difference. The campaign's do this to enhance your character instead of focusing on main movie characters. We also lost the Wookie on turn six by making Andrew work for it. If we had one more turn, we could have pulled off our goal and won the day. But this was a demo game!
   Overall review is that this game is good and fun two hours of playtime. If you like Star Wars and not as much into X-Wing and Armada, this might be a good game for you. We will probably get it later this year.