Star Wars Shatterpoint Jan 18th 2024 Star Wars ShatterpointShatterpoint is a game where each player fields two heroes along with their small posse (that can be from all over the place alignment-wise as long as the share an era) who activate (mostly) randomly and earn points by outnumbering their opponents near rotating objective markers, which builds up toward winning a tug-of-war like “struggle” between you and your opponent. Just like in tug of war your goal is to pull a rope across your line, but here you can earn the chance to move your “line” closer to the center as time goes on. If the “rope” crosses your line you win the “struggle,” but this usually means your opponent will have an advantage on the next struggle, and the first person to win two total struggles wins the game. Shatterpoint has the “attack results” flowcharts of Arena Rex and Guild Ball but with significantly more player choice and options. Basically, if you roll 4 hits on offense and your opponent rolls one block on defense, then you don’t just do “3 damage” but rather get to move 3 spots up on the combat tree. So, in the example below, Maul could basically do 10 damage and shove his opponent twice or 7 damage and shove his opponent THREE times. Damage and Shove are two common examples of effects but these also include status effects, jumps, healing, abilities, and full movements. This makes “fighting” itself very dynamic, one good roll can have half a dozen different effects.Obi wan kenobi is a commnader in shatterproint for cloe range attacks.The game plays somewhat like Marvel: Crisis Protocol (MCP) if it was only “Secures” but it’s now fair to say that early assumptions that Shatterpoint would be anything close to a “Star Wars MCP Clone” were actually quite a ways off. The minis count per game is substantially higher than most MCP matches (16 total minis on the board for Shatterpoint versus usually around 9 for MCP) and there is significantly more movement that happens per activation in Shatterpoint as well. Characters in Shatterpoint share a resource for abilities that cost resources instead of each character having their own supply as in MCP, and everyone in Shatterpoint has an an active or reactive ability that’s free (at least while that character is un-hurt) and is usually very significant. Finally, these games certainly share a similar aesthetic when it comes to the cards and the minis themselves, but the board itself usually looks quite different.The “tug of war” style scoring system somewhat reminiscent of connoisseur-style. European board games like Twilight Struggle and Churchill but is a fresh concept in miniatures. This system also implements significant but not-insurmountable “rubber-banding,” to make it harder for a player who is winning to pile on. That said, the winner of the first struggle definitely has a big advantage, so don’t worry that this is the minis version of a blue tortoise-shell.Fighting is about Maiming, Not KillingThe most miniatures that I’ve seen actually get removed from the board, during a complete game of Shatterpoint, is two. Everyone in this game has at least two “lives” and most of the primary characters have three. Not only that, but even when you reach the wound threshold of any life a character won’t leave the battlefield until after they get one last “death” activation, no matter what. “That seems kind of silly” I thought at first, “how do you keep things interesting if neither player is very capable of affecting the balance of offensive power and activations?Wounded (meaning, they have enough wounds to meet their threshold) characters don’t contest objectives or engage characters in melee, and move on to the next “life” until they activate again, which can be quite a while in this game. While they wait to do so, they can still use abilities and move around the field using reactions which ends up being kinda huge. After they recover from their wounds on their next activation, they need to pay more for their abilities for the rest of the game, which can be crippling for some abilities which could go from draining a third of your force pool all the way to a majority of your pool in the worst caseShatterpoint in 3DYes, obviously Legion is three-dimensional, but in Shatterpoint the concept of height is much more palpable. Rather than just being a way to get cover or protection from melee units, height has a significant effect on the dynamics of how characters move and how they can move each other in Shatterpoint. If a battle droid is pushed into a building from an attack they will stop there, but if they are pushed off a building or walkway then they will fall to the ground and slide the full horizontal distance as well (they don’t take falling damage though, which is probably good for balance). Additionally, while you can contest an objective at a different height from the actual objective token, a character at the same height will always have the priority in determining control. In other words, a single battle droid model would “control” a point he’s chilling with alone on a gantry even when there’s any number of characters directly below him. When you put these things together with the substantial amount of terrain included with the core set and easy options to expand from there, you get a game that squeezes more out of that third dimension than any other I’ve played before.
