Star Wars Shatterpoint

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Star Wars Shatterpoint
Jan 18, 202422min Read

Star Wars Shatterpoint

Shatterpoint 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.


Core Set

Fighting is about Maiming, Not Killing

The 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?

Shatterpoint in 3D

Yes, 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.

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