A long time ago, in a hobby shop far, far away…..
As a young lad, I was a typical nerd kid. I liked war gaming and had gotten my start in
the Warhammer worlds of Fantasy and Rogue trader. However, I also liked RPGs and played AD&D,
Shadowrun, and of course West Ends Star Wars RPG. I had stumbled across the Star Wars Miniature
Battles rules as well but could never find the scratch to buy it. Plus, I was not very fond of the Star Wars metal
miniatures of the time. Consequently, I
never picked it up.
However, today is a different age. No longer do I need to poke around dusty,
dark bookshelves and avoid the store cat to find such archaic oddities! No, thanks to the wonders of the internet you
can find old, no longer produced titles available from anywhere across the
globe! In my wandering I ran across that
which I had not tried before…. Star Wars Miniature Battles. I got a copy and decided to give it a go!
I have clearly played Star Wars themed wargames before.
Upon receiving my goodies of nostalgia, I rushed home and dug out the
Galoob Micro Machine Strom Troopers and Rebels that I had available and scanned
through the basic rules. I was eager to
see what this book held and the long held promise of Star Wars wargaming from
yesteryear. With FFG’s Legion rules on the horizon, now seemed
like a good time to give these a review.
Things That I
Liked
The game has a consistent mechanic for resolving
actions. There are two types of rolls,
Straight Skill Rolls and Opposed Rolls.
For these you simply roll a d6 and add your skill level compared to a
Target Number. If you beat the TN you
succeed. Opposed rolls have the players
roll against each other and add a relevant stat, the higher one wins. Shooting is a Straight Skill, while Damaging
and Close Combat are opposed rolls. They
maintain these two simple mechanics for the entire ruleset. That is better than most other wargames from
the time can manage.
The game uses a 1 always fails and counts as a 0 result,
while a 6 is an “exploding” dice that can be re-rolled and add to the results. This means any soldier can get lucky and hurt
even elite enemy troops, and no one is invincible. Even an Ewok can take out a Stormtrooper.
The game has lots of diagrams and examples to give you a
good feel for how it all works. This
made the rules very clear and easy to interpret.
Things I Do Not Like
This game has a lot of modifiers. This probably stems from the time period and
the RPG heritage of the game. There are
situations that are +1, +2, and beyond.
This means you will want a quick-reference sheet handy. However, the game encourages you use unit
stat cards, which make a ton of sense since the game also has a lot of Stats.
Some of them seem a bit useless except for one off situations and edge cases. The core game does not really use most of
them, and they come into greater play when you add the unique armory, force
powers, creatures, droids, etc.
This game uses alternate activation by phase. Therefore, Player A moves a squad then Player
B until all squads have moved. Then they
alternate firing. Then Close Combat is
resolved, etc. This allows them to use
an Overwatch mechanic where a unit can choose to fire at an enemy moving unit
by foregoing their normal move and shooting.
An early action/reaction mechanic!
It uses individual troopers as a basis for many mechanics
even though it is a squad based game.
This includes true Line-of-Sight, wounds, facing, close combat,
etc. This really bogs the game down with
tokens and other needless crunch and slows the game down. I found this very disappointing and could see
at a glance ways to modernize these rules.
However, for the period they are pretty par for the course.
All injuries do not take effect until the end of the fire
combat phase, and all hits are randomized.
Therefore, a squad hitting 12 times might all hit the same guy. Then, you can’t change him over to injured/dead
until all shooting is complete. I am not
sure how you keep track of it all until the end, but there you go. I guess this is to add “realism” that
everyone will shoot the first Stormtrooper through the breech of the door, but
just makes wound resolution/tracking even clunkier.
Morale has 4 levels from good, to shaken, to demoralized,
to routed. It is one level too many in
my book. Plus, the Threat Rating vs
Command opposed roll is a bit clunky.
Meh and Other Uncertainties
The game covers all the Star Wars items you would want
from armory, creatures, force powers, droids, etc. If you saw it on the screen, you can stat it
up and play it in the game. There is a
unit creation system so you can bring the things from shows to life. In addition, you can add your own gribblies
and aliens too. I am sure this system is easily abusable, and it is a bit
clunky; but it is there. The only thing
missing are vehicles as this is an infantry based game. There are a lot of tools in the Advanced
Rules tool box that a player could use, but doesn’t have to. It reminds me of Force-on-Force/Tomorrow’s War in that way.
Close combat involves pairing off, and means
out-numbering a foe is a big benefit.
However, it will be tough to get into Close combat anyway, as the
attackers and defenders must both pass morale tests, and then the defender can
also shoot at the incoming attackers.
You need to be a Jedi (or at least a hero) to get a Close Combat off
successfully. However, that doesn’t feel off since most combat in Star Wars is
resolved at range
There is an entire section about using a Gamemaster in
this book. Again, I think this is more a
product of the time the book was made.
However, I tend to like GMed games and feel they have their place. I know many do not favor this, and I do not
feel the game “requires” a Game master to run properly.
The book does not have a campaign system at all, but it
does have three scenarios. 1 is a basic
scenario, and the other two are in the advanced rules section.
Conclusions
This is clearly a product of its time. The cover proudly claims an Origins Award for
Best Miniature Rules for 1991! You can
see the “popular” mechanics of the time in the mechanics of the Star Wars
Miniatures System such as individual figure resolution, Gamemasters, and wound
resolution. It is a bit clunkier than
modern games, but yet you can still see some of the ideas that allowed it to be
the Best Miniature Rules of 1991! I can
see the evolution of modern sci-fi wargames in its design even if it is still a
bit unwieldly by today’s standards.
I can also see
where the mechanics and stats were designed to tie in a bit to the West End
Games RPG with the “exploding dice” and the stat choices. That would make it easy to translate an RPG
character into the Miniature Battle game and create cross-over
opportunity. That could equal more
sales!
The only glaring omission is vehicles, but that might get
covered in the supplements such as the Companion and Imperial Entanglements,
which I also have my hands on. Maybe
after trying this out in the field, I will review those two supplements as
well.
Overall, I got it for the right price-point, so do not
hate that I have this. I do not see it
being a staple of my gaming unless I am having a “retro night”. I think other more modern games do the same
thing, slightly better. I would not go
out of my way to track it down, but if you want to give it a go, look here: http://www.d6holocron.com/downloads/wegminiatures.html