Star Wars: Rebellion

Should I add Rise of the Empire on my first play or is it better to enjoy the core and add it later?

Add it. The combat in both base game and expansion is the least fun part of the game, but it’s much better in Rise. There really are not any other significant rule changes otherwise. Either mission deck setup will be fine.

i'll second that. Rise doesn't change much to the core gameplay. it adds some characters and missions, but unless you really hate Rogue One, they all fit in nicely. The big change is combat, which is just better with the expansion.

Just out of curiosity (I loooove War of the Ring, but have little room for a similar 2-player wargame on the shelf right now), can someone give some detail on the combat improvements made by the expansion? I'm always interested in obvious design corrections. Thanks.

The base game used a shared deck of combat cards. You had to draw a number at the start of a battle based on your leader’s space or ground stat. You’d each pick cards and reveal them simultaneously and the results were pretty lame and inconsequential.

The new rule is that you have your own deck for each space and ground units. You can pick any card but can’t use it again until you run through the deck. Each card has 2 effects, one generic and one that goes off if a certain unit is in the battle. Leader stats are now used as re-rolls.

The combat is still terrible because it’s slow, disruptive to the pace, and still involves a lot of looking at your dice and asking what color armor does this unit have. Why we can’t just use standard 6 sided dice and hit target numbers is beyond me.

Josh Look wrote: The base game used a shared deck of combat cards. You had to draw a number at the start of a battle based on your leader’s space or ground stat. You’d each pick cards and reveal them simultaneously and the results were pretty lame and inconsequential.

The new rule is that you have your own deck for each space and ground units. You can pick any card but can’t use it again until you run through the deck. Each card has 2 effects, one generic and one that goes off if a certain unit is in the battle. Leader stats are now used as re-rolls.

The combat is still terrible because it’s slow, disruptive to the pace, and still involves a lot of looking at your dice and asking what color armor does this unit have. Why we can’t just use standard 6 sided dice and hit target numbers is beyond me.

That's an unforced design error. I still have my copy of Freedom in the Galaxy, which was the unlicensed '70s version of Star Wars: Rebellion. It was a clunky design that was somewhat similar to the original version of War of the Ring (Howard Barasch helped design both games), but the combat resolution was relatively normal for a wargame of that time.

Yeah, I kind of just wanted a basic dice-based approach, which is really what the rest of the design of the game seems to beg for, in terms of pace and weight--something like a d10 or d12 with varying to-hit numbers or dice of different sizes and the same basic to-hit number.