‘Star Wars: Shatterpoint’ Is Coming!

2022 for me was a year of peripatetic gaming. I tried lots of different games and rulesets, wanting to branch out, having fallen out of love with Warhammer Underworlds. (I’ve since fallen back in love with it again, but that’s a post for another time.) I struggled to find anything that I want to stick with and play week after week. I played a fair amount of Marvel Crisis Protocol, but I’m not that big a Marvel fan, so whilst it’s a good game, it didn’t keep my attention. Then towards the beginning of this year, Atomic Mass Games (makers of MCP) announced Star Wars: Shatterpoint.

Immediately, I was drawn to it. Set in the Star Wars universe, Shatterpoint is a skirmish game with teams consisting of around 8 models per side. Perfect to jump into and, as the game grows, easy to swap fighters and units in and out, without costing the earth or becoming a massive time sink.

Why Do I Want to Play Star Wars: Shatterpoint?

Did I mention it’s set in the Star Wars universe? The characters and sculpts included in the main box immediately appealed to me as a painter. They are great renditions of favorite, iconic characters. 

The full rules of Shatterpoint have been made available, here.

AMG has also written a number of articles drip-feeding the rules, via their Star Wars transmissions. I have also started a personal blog, hellothereshatterpoint.blog that breaks things down further. 

As I mentioned, the game is a small size – the board will be 3′ X 3′ – and low model count (8 a-side). This is very appealing for those of us who are space and time poor.

The characters included in the core set are as follows:

Primary Units:

• Anakin Skywalker.
• Ahsoka Tano (In end of Clone Wars era mode – “Jedi No More.” 
• Lord Maul (Not Darth Maul!).
• Asajj Ventress.

Secondary Units:

• Gar Saxon.
• Bo Katan Kryse.
• Captain Rex.
• Kalani – Tactical Droid.

Support Units:

• Clan Kryse Mandos.
• Clan Saxon Mandos.
• Clone Troopers.
• Separatist Droids.

On release day, there will also be two more boxes available, one that will feature Obi-Wan, Commander Cody, and two 212 Clone Troopers and another with Count Dooku, Jango Fett, and some Super Battle Droids. The Obi-Wan box is brilliantly titled “Hello there.”

From the outset, there are many different ways to combine the forces and duke it out across the battlefield. But how do you put Shatterpoint forces together?

Pick Your Strike Team. 

Each player brings a “Strike Team,” which consists of 2 Squads. Each squad contains a Primary Unit – A powerful Jedi/Sith strength character. A Secondary Unit – A notable named character from the franchise, and a Support Unit, – nameless troopers/battle droids. (The support units, so far, all consist of 2 models, the others, just one.). 

From a Star Wars lore perspective, the game will be broken down into eras. All the models in a squad have to be from the same era, but the two squads that make your strike team do not. Other than that, there are no lore constraints on what you build. You can have Anakin leading battle droids if you wish.  You can field one squad with Ahsoka and Captain Rex, and another that features Vader and some Stormtroopers. The world is your oyster. (There is one small caveat to that, you can’t include two versions of unique characters in your strike team.)

The ability to mix eras on the tabletop has alienated some purists, but a game needs to be flexible to allow a great variety of tactical and strategic options. Picking characters who would traditionally have worked together is incentivized by abilities that trigger off units with similar keywords. Rex, for example, can aid Clone Troopers in a way he can’t inspire clankers. 

The advantage of a game like Shatterpoint is that, unlike a large army game like Star Wars: Legion (or Warhammer for that matter), where a huge amount of work has to be put in up front to deliver a fully working faction, the designers only need to worry about the rules and balancing for a single squad of four models. This gives them freer rein to take inspiration from quieter and more esoteric areas of the Star Wars canon. Great news for geeky fans of the franchise! Additionally, new armies in bigger games require a large investment in terms of money and time. Adding four new models to your collection, considerably less so. 

Notable and Exciting Rules. 

I’m not going to go over the rules in depth but there are few noteworthy points about how the game is played.

Like many for the games curated by AMG Shatterpoint will use custom measuring tools and custom dice. 

Squad Creation:

When you’re creating your squad you start by choosing your primary unit. This gives you the number of squad points to spend on your other two units. To balance things out the stronger the primary units are given fewer squad points to spend on other units. Anakin is the most powerful unit in the core box. 

Primary Units also have a Force Point value. This tells you how many force points they will bring to the table. 

Force points are combined across both squads in your strike team and can be used by any of your characters. It’s not only force users that can use force points. In arm-waving terms, force points are not a measure of your ability to wield the force, but the extent of the force as a power acting through your characters, manifesting in the actions they take. 

Force points are generally used to carry out character actions. Each unit in the game has an abilities card. Primary units have stronger and more interesting abilities. 

Playing the Game. 

Shatterpoint is nominally a best of three. Across three “struggles.” Struggles are fought using a ladder, similar to games like GodTear. The struggle token starts in the middle of the ladder. Controlling objectives on the board allows players to move the struggle token closer to their end of the ladder. If it reaches all the way over to your side, you win the struggle. 

At that point, the struggle token resets, but interestingly not much else on the board does. The game continues into the next struggle with everything in the same position and state as before the previous struggle ended. This means it might be worth giving up on struggle one, to consolidate your position for struggle two. Win 2 of the 3 struggles and you win the game. 

At the moment there is only one mission pack available. This provides a basic objective map for the first struggle, giving the positions of objectives you’ll be competing over. In the first struggle, they’re equally and symmetrically placed. In the 2nd and 3rd struggles, things get interesting. Priority objectives appear which count double. These shift over the course of the subsequent struggles, but interestingly, it’s the person who LOST the previous struggle who gets to skew the position of the priority objectives in their favor.

Struggles can be further influenced by the addition of momentum tokens. These, when you gain one, are added to the end of your ladder. Each time you add one it means you have one less space to move the struggle token before it’s considered to have reached your end of the ladder. There are a number of ways to add momentum tokens and doing so is vital if you want to win the struggle against your opponent. 

What’s in a Turn?

There are no strict turns in Shatterpoint!

Each unit in your strike team gets an order card. This will make a short deck of 6 cards. To this, you’ll add one “Shatterpoint” card. You’ll then shuffle this deck of 7 cards and draw from it each time it is your turn. The card that you draw is the unit that you’ll activate. If you draw the Shatterpoint card, it counts as wild and you can activate any unit, even if it has just activated. 

If you don’t want to activate the card you’ve drawn you can place it in “reserve” and immediately draw and activate the next card in your deck. You can play your reserve card at any time afterward instead of drawing your next order card. 

When you reach the bottom of your order deck you reshuffle and continue drawing. At this point, your Force points are regenerated, so you want to use them all before you get to the bottom. If you lose a unit, its order card is removed from the deck. You keep drawing and reshuffling in the same way, so a small bonus to losing a unit is that you can activate the others more regularly and you replenish your force pool more often. 

When you activate a character you are able to carry out any of their force abilities as well as picking two actions off a list of standard actions, like move, attack, or recover.

You score the objectives you hold after every unit activation, so the struggle tracker will swing back and forth after each unit is used.  

Stance Cards and Combat Trees.

Combat in the game runs off a standard opposed attack dice vs defense dice mechanic. This ultimately leads to a number of successes. It’s what happens with those successes that is the innovative part. Each fighter has a stance card. This gives you the number of attack and defense dice you roll in combat. It also has the unit’s combat tree on it. 

When attacking you count up your total number of successes and then starting from the leftmost box (colored orange) on the combat tree, you move across each box in turn applying the effects. The trees often have multiple pathways and players must decide which route best suits their needs at the given time. As well as dealing direct damage (the little explosions on the card), you might also be able to “shove” opposing characters, or take additional moves with your own characters. Other conditions make enemies easier to hit, make them less good in combat, or force them to use up an action to avoid taking additional damage. 

Support and Secondary units only have one side to their Stance Card. Primary Units have 2, and you can switch between them. At a high-level, these are almost the equivalent of a defensive stance vs an offensive stance, but they’re more subtle than that. You’ll often be faced with the choice of dealing damage to your opponent’s fighters or controlling the positions of fighters on the board. With objective holding being key to winning a struggle. It’s not always best to go all out offensive. 

Bringing Characters to Life. 

It’s the abilities and stance cards that really bring the characters to life, and where the Shatterpoint designers have tried to imbue its Star Wars characters with traits recognizable to fans of the franchise. Abilities like “Mandalorians are stronger together,”  “Bring in on Clankers,” or Ahsoka’s “Fierce Protector,” directly align with the characters’ personalities and motives we see in the shows and movies.  

Similarly, the different stances and effects that the stance cards show bring the characters to life. Asajj Ventress has access to all manner of movement shenanigans to keep her out of trouble. Maul is a reckless powerhouse. Anakin is superb in combat. I haven’t played the game yet, but it really does look as if the character’s personalities are depicted in the way they fight on the tabletop and that is an impressive piece of game engineering. 

The Future.

I don’t have many concerns about the game. I do worry that there could be a lot to keep track of (each unit has quite a large number of wounds to track). One of the problems I had playing MCP is that I could never quite remember which hero had which ability, and also whether I would remember to apply their effects correctly at the right time. This problem is largely my own, as 100s of other people manage just fine.

The other thing I worry about is the release schedule. There is so much absolutely great stuff coming, but if you want to go “all in,” despite what I said about it being a small model count game, it’s going to get costly quickly. As well as the core box and two units to be released in June, 3 more unit boxes are coming in July. If that release rate continues, I’ll be buried under grey plastic by Christmas! 

It’s hard to begrudge AMG and the design team this, however, as there is so much great content coming, all announced at this year’s Adepticon.

Here are few choice highlights with thanks to Chaosgoesmu on Reddit. Just looking through them again for this piece, I can’t decide which I’m most excited about. The pictures certainly show AMG’s commitment to a diverse Star Wars experinece. 

Click to view slideshow.

I’ve probably warbled on enough now about Shatterpoint. I’m supremely excited to get a copy in my hands, start painting the minis and, above all, play the game. It’s slightly disappointing that the game isn’t on hand for May 4th, but hopefully, by this time next year, I’ll have strike teams galore battling it out in a galaxy far far away!

I’ll hopefully bring my Shatterpoint journey to GeekDad, but if you want to check it out in more depth, do follow me at @agentsofsigmar on YouTube and hellothereshatterpoint.blog. 

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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.

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