Board Game Nights – Star Wars Rebellion and Scythe

Another reason I've not blogged recently is that I've also been indulging in some board games, namely Star Wars: Rebellion and Scythe. Both of which are in the top 10 on Board Game Geek and it's pretty easy to see why.

Rebellion is a lopsided (or asymmetrical if you're being fancy) two player game where unsurprisingly one of you plays as the Rebels and the other plays as the Imperium. I've had it since my birthday in April but only recently managed to get some games in. It was definitely worth the wait. It's got a fantastic mechanism for assigning heroes to missions that really builds the tension and somehow they've made both factions feel exactly as you'd expect them to. The Empire have a massive advantage when it comes to materiel but the plucky Rebels hamper their plans with daring raids and subterfuge. The Empire is trying to find the hidden Rebel base before the Rebels gain enough support in the galaxy to make their search impossible. We've only played a handful of games so far but for an asymmetrical game the balance is just right which is a difficult thing to achieve. They're also releasing an expansion for the game in time for Christmas!

Not our game. It seems I didn't take photos even though I thought I had!

Scythe is a totally different animal. I think you can have up to seven players but for our game we had four. Matt had read through the rulebook but none of us had played before. In spite of this we picked up the game really quickly and I don't think we had to refer to the rules once. That's pretty impressive for a game which is actually pretty complex when you get into it. I'm sure people who've played more board games will draw parallels to other games but this is the first time we've played something like this and it was a great experience. It obviously helped that I won but there's again a well designed scoring system that keeps things close to the end and there's a lot of gambling to do to make sure you don't end the game too early and not actually win it!


It's tough to pick which of the games I prefer. I think the decision would be pretty easy if one of them wasn't set in the SW universe though. Ultimately they're very different games that I'll hopefully get to play a lot more of.

I'm hoping to get more BB games in soon but also trying to start an SW Armada campaign against Matt and I'm actually playing some 40K on Tuesday against Dan. That will also hopefully be a campaign game as my Orks take on his Death Guard and we figure out a narrative from then on.