FFG Unleash a Star Wars Assault!

May 4th having arrived Fantasy Flight Games took the opportunity to jump on this new round of Star Wars love by announcing a heap of new content. Featuring expansions for both Star Wars Imperial Assault their dungeon crawl and skirmish game set in a galaxy far far away and the much requested Star Wars Rebellion using the recent Rogue One movie as the basis for much of the content.

So lets get the big one out of the way.

The Rebellion expansion Rise of the Empire in no surprise to anyone that’s been a fan of the game takes its inspiration from last years Rogue One movie that told the tale of a raggedy group of rebels and the suicidal mission to retrieve the Death Star plans so that Luke Skywalker could put his Womp Rat bulls-eyeing to good use.

The expansion brings a heap of new content including eight new leaders amongst them Jabba the Hutt and a brace of Rogue One characters. Thirty Six new miniatures, new dice heaps of cards and a tweak to the combat system probably the one area the original game took the most flak.

Although its been vague in the details of just how this new ‘Cinematic’ combat will work my suspicion is it will streamline down the clunky nature of those mechanics and root it more in the card play around the fights as well as how the dice are utilised.

It sounds exactly what the game needed and I’m already slavering at the prospect of these new additions when it streets in late Summer this year.

More Imperial Assault is always welcome and in a surprise FFG seem to have done away with the schedule of releasing small expansions between the larger boxed campaigns and have gone straight for another big box extravaganza in the Heart of the Empire  following on from Jabba’s Realm from last year the presumption was that we’d see something set upon the moon of Endor, but instead were heading to Coruscant the heart of the Empire.

Featuring 3 new heroes, 13 other miniatures including the now customary big f’king miniature this time a AT-DP as well as a bunch of new Stormtroopers and droids to challenge even the most heartiest of heroes. Of course it wouldn’t be a FFG expansion without a ton of new cards and environments to play in, I personally welcome a move away from exterior locations and more city content as a majority of the  previous sets have had more than their fare share of woodland and snowy locales.

But there’s more!

As now is the standard for these releases a new wave of additional miniatures will be showing up on release to add some iconic characters to your pool of characters and these are a doozy.

Everyone’s favourite cackling dictator finally shows up in this wave when the Imperial playing can now field The Emperor and we also get two figures taken from the excellent rebels cartoon with the return of Darth Maul and Anakins Jedi apprentice Ashoka.

We really need to knuckle down as we’ve still got to get Hoth and Jabba’s Realm played before this one hits the doormat.

Now where’s that App?