Star Wars: Outer Rim - First Play

17th February 2022

​It's a Thursday night and we're round Simon's for some gaming goodness.

The game of the night was Star Wars: Outer Rim.
Turns out that playing a scoundrel in an open world Star Wars game ain't like dusting crops.

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What's in a game?

• Gameboard: Star Wars: Outer Rim's gameboard is segmented into 6 parts and put together like some sort of jigsaw puzzle. When made, it looks like a semi-circle or perhaps... a rim or an... Outer Rim,! Geddit? Sigh.
  The board contains a galactic map that shows different routes to and from various planets and 'stops' between planets known as Navpoints. Close to each planet are 2 spaces for contact tokens apiece who will be on that planet.
  ​Each segment of the board will contain 2 planets with 2 contact spaces each (Except for 1 segment which only has 1 - Kessel.).
  Finally, there are 2 pieces that go at each end of the rim which also each contain 2 spaces for stacks of patrol tokens.
• Player board: This board has an unusual shape to accommodate a character card.
  5 tracks are displayed on the board, 4 for different types of reputation and 1 that tracks fame.
  There are spaces around the edge of the board to place/slot gear cards and mission cards.
• Ship board: These largish boards feature illustrations of more-or-less recognisable spaceships from the Star Wars setting. They come in 2 types (Starter and standard.) and share the same set of 3 numeric stats; Hyperdrive, Ship Combat Value and Hull. Each will also have spaces/slots around the edge to place, crew, cargo or mod cards.
  Starter ships: These identical boards are double-sided and each side has a slightly different starter ship.
  Standard ships: During the game, players will have the opportunity to purchase other ships. Their stats will have different values and different amount/type of slots. additionally, these ships each have a ship objective of some sort. When the objective is completed, the ship may be flipped over to the other side to a better version of the ship with improved stats. Levelling up if you will.
• Character cards: These are the 8 characters that the player will take the role of. As with the ship cards, there are a variety of characters here ranging from easily recognisable to lesser-known and each is double-sided and illustrated with the relevant character.
  Each character has 2 numeric stats, Ground Combat Value and Health and each character also has a special ability of some sort.
  Each character also has a personal goal, which when met, allows the controlling player to flip the character to the other side, levelling them up as they would with a ship.
  There will also be rules for setup at the start and finally, at the bottom will be several tags or words such as Piloting, Stealth, Strength etc. These come into play during skill rolls.
• Cards: As well as character cards, Star Wars: Outer Rim comes with a whole bunch of decks that power the gameplay.
  Databank cards: This deck is numbered and interestingly, they are not shuffled but always kept in numerical order for easy reference.
  Encounter cards: These cards will be split into 7 decks, 6 of which correspond to a segment of the board, the 7th deck corresponds to navpoints.
  Market cards: These cards can be bought by players and represent everything from ships to crew to bounties and are split by type into a mere 6 decks!
• Tokens: Star Wars: Outer Rim has numerous tokens.
  Patrol tokens: There are 4 of these card patrol tokens of escalating strength for each of the game's 4 factions, thus 16 in total.
  Contact tokens: There are 22 of these sort of rounded oblong shaped tokens and each one represents a character out of Star Wars,  on one side of each is a picture of the pertinent character. Every token also has a difficulty and which is represented by a green, yellow or red colour which is shown on both sides of the token - thus giving players an idea of what they'll be up against before revealing it.
  Credits: The game's currency is represented by these rectangular card tokens, I guess cash in the Star Wars galaxy is very square?
  Goal tokens: Fairly nondescript round card tokens.
  Damage tokens: These are hexagonal card tokens that display a 'hit' icon. They are placed on to a character or ship when they are damaged.
  Reputation tokens: These come in 4 types - 1 for each factions and are used on the player boards to track every player's standing with the aforementioned factions.
• Standees: Each character has their own illustrated standee.
• Dice: The game comes with 6 plastic dice. Unusually, especially for a high-profile licensed game, these are eight-sided! Furthermore, in place of numbers are symbols; 3 for Hit, 1 for Critical Hit and 2 Focus symbols, the remaining 2 faces are blank.

I've got no complaints about any of the game's components, they're made to the usual high standard that've come to be expected from modern games. There are no standout components but neither are there any bad ones.

Regardless of whether it's practical or not, the semi-circular board looks like eye-catching.
From an art perspective, it's clear that they've used some photo-referencing from the films for some of the illustrations and I think that's fine, it still looks like good artwork and means the game wisely eschews using actual photos anywhere. The quality of the art is good.

Star Wars: Outer Rim uses quite a lot of iconography, for stats, for factions, on the dice etc. Fortunately, much of it is pretty clear and self-explanatory, it requires little referencing to the rulebook. This is helped by the use of tags which is easily understood.

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How's it play?
​Setup

• Board: Put together the board along with the end pieces.
  Patrol tokens: Sort the patrol tokens into their 4 factions, then create a stack for each with the highest value at the bottom and lowest at the top. Then place each stack on its allotted starting space.
  Contact tokens: Randomise the tokens face-down and place them face-down on their allotted contact spaces on the board according to the difficulty of each contact.
• Databank deck: Ensure these cards are kept in numerical order.
• Encounter cards: Sort the encounter cards into their 7 types and shuffle them into 7 face-down decks. It's probably a good idea to place the 6 planetary encounter decks close to the planets they represent.
• Market cards: Sort the market cards into their 6 types and shuffle them into 6 face-down decks. Then draw 1 card from each deck and place it face-up on top of its respective deck. When the displayed cards are bought from these decks, new cards a revealed and placed on top of their respective deck.
• Players: Give each player a player board:
  Characters: Players should choose or be assigned characters. They should take the character card and its standee. The character card should be placed on it's 'basic' side.
  Starter ship: Give each player a starting ship, the player can choose which one of the start ships to use.
  Setup: Every character has its own setup, which will tell them which databank card to take, what equipment they start with, what their standing will be with each faction and finally, where to place their standee at the game start.
• First player: Determine a first player, then give players credits according to their position in the turn order.

On to play
In Star Wars: Outer Rim players take on the role of outlaws, bounty hunters and scoundrels, the general scum and villainy of the galaxy I guess and the objective in Star Wars: Outer Rim is to acquire fame.
​There are varied paths to achieve this. collecting on bounties, delivering goods and other tasks or jobs that will occur during the game.
In their turn, the active player will perform actions in 3 phases before play moves on clockwise. These phases are Planning, Actions and Encounter.

• Planning: The active player may carry out 1 of the following actions.
  Movement: This will probably be the most common action in this phase and allows the player to move their standee/ship along as many planets/navpoints as their ship's hyperdrive stat. There are a couple of caveats here though.
  If a ship enters the maelstrom that surrounds Kessel, it must stop.
  If the player's ship enters the same space as patrol for a faction the player does not have good standing with (Positive reputation.), the player's ship must stop.
  Recover: If a player chooses not to move, they may remover all damage done to both their character and ship. If the active player had been defeated in their previous turn, then the active player must choose the recover action during planning.
  Do nothing: Not strictly true, if the active player chooses this action they perform  some figuratively nondescript work or task and earn 2,000 credits. I guess in the deeps of space around a navpoint someone does want their crops dusted or moisture farmed.
• Action: This second phase is pretty broad and the active player can perform as many actions as they are capable of.
  This involve buying cards from the market decks (And selling.), delivering goods/bounties and even trading with other players in the same space.
  Cards/missions that have the action tag have their action (Usually a skill roll.) completed during this phase.
  Actions can be very contextual, depending on location or other requirements.
  Curiously, buying market card is what determines if the patrol tokens move.
• Encounter: The kind of encounter the player has in the 3rd and final phase of a turn will depend on the location they ended their movement. A player only has 1 encounter per turn.
  Planet/navpoint: If a player ended on a planet, draw card from that planet's encounter deck and resolve it. If they stopped on a navpoint, do the same with the navpoint deck.
  Contact: If the active player ended their movement on a planet, they may choose to encounter a contact there. This involves flipping the contact token face-up and revealing it. Each contact will have a databank card that will need to be resolved, this could be any of a number of tasks . It may involve skill rolls, completing a delivery bounty etc. Often when the task is completed, the contact will join the player's crew.
  Patrol: How an encounter with a patrol will go depends on the players reputation with that patrol's faction.
  If the player has positive reputation, nothing will happen.
  If the player has a neutral reputation with that faction, they may choose to fight the patrol. More on combat below.
  If the player has a negative reputation with the patrol's faction, they must fight it.
• End turn: Once the active player has resolved their encounter, play moves to the player on the left.
• Other rules: There are numerous aspects to the game I've not mentioned yet.
  Skill rolls: Actions or jobs may require the player to make skill rolls. Each skill roll  has a tag associated with it and there are 3 levels related to that.
  E.G., if a action has the tag Piloting and the player has no cards in their playing area with that that tag, it is considered an unskilled roll. If they have 1 card with a matching tag it a skilled roll and they have at least 2 cards with matching tags, it's a highly skilled roll.
  When making a skill roll, the active player always rolls 2 dice:
  If it's unskilled, for the roll to be a success, there must be at least 1 critical hit results showing on the result.
  For a skilled roll, there must be at least 1 hit or critical hit result showing.
  ​Finally, for a highly skilled roll, if at least any 1 of any of the hit, critical hit or focus icons is showing on the result, then it's a success.
  Combat: The rules for combat are quite different to skill rolls and furthermore, the game does not differentiate mechanically between ship or ground combat.
  When a player enters combat they are considered they attacker and who or whatever they are fighting is considered the defender. 
  The attacker rolls a number of dice equal to the combat value they are using; ​ focus result may trigger special effects depending upon circumstance but otherwise, each hit counts a 1, each critical hit counts are 2, the result is tallied up and this is the damage done.
  The defender does the same.
  Whoever dealt the higher damage wins the encounter, ties favour the attacker.
  Finally, damage is applied. In some cases, each combatant deals their damage to their opponent in the form of damage tokens put on the ship's hull for ship combat or character's health for ground combat. Although some opponents such as patrol tokens either win or are defeated.
  Regardless of who wins or loses a combat encounter, if at any time, the damage tokens put on the hull or health of a player's ship or character exceeds that value, then the player is defeated.
  Secrets: Most of the time, cards a put into a player's area face-up, they do not have a hand of cards in the usual sense. Some cards will however instruct the player to keep them secret. The player can simply place these in their area face-down.

Endgame
Play continues until the any player reaches 10 fame, the game then immediately ends and they are considered the winner.

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Overall
I haven't covered the entirety of the rules here but even so, from the perspective of complexity, Star Wars: Outer Rim isn't too bad or that complicated. You move a few spaces, perform actions, have an encounter and that's it.
There are a number of situational exceptions (Mostly coming from cards that are drawn.) that need remembering though, players will want to pay close attention to their playing area to know what they'll be good at, paying attention to their tags in particular.
The game also possesses some RPG aspiration here and makes use of very light RPG system, there's no XP as such but characters and ships can be levelled up after completing their goals.

Having said that, the rules will probably be a little too convulsed for non-gamer types.
I don't think that this is a game for Star Wars fans wanting a board game to play. It feels more like a board gamers who want a Star Wars game to play, which is not a thing necessarily bad and honestly, there's going to be a bit of crossover between the 2 groups.

Because of the fairly open nature of the game, it's quite hard to describe what players will expect and strategies they might employ.
Players will likely acquire jobs, encounters, bounties etc randomly to some extent, this will require them to adapt their strategies.
Optimisation, picking up and completing jobs while working towards other jobs is vital here, as this finding the most efficient route across the map, The board's unusual shape essentially funnels travel along 2 or 3 routes. All of this is provided of course, that all the pieces fall in the right place. This would include watching how patrols move and the reputation players have with their respective factions. There are also other paths to accruing fame points such as fighting patrols.
Players will also look to gain crew, improved ship and mods.

Additionally, there's nothing to stop players fighting other players, in fact, the game may sort of encourage this as circumstances ay put one player's bounty aboard another player's ship.

I'm not sure how I feel about Star Wars: Outer Rim.
One aspect that irks me is the entirely different set of mechanics used for skill tests and combat. 
Another is the shape of the board. For an open world game players are in essence limited to the choice of going one way or the other, clockwise or anticlockwise.
Yes. the board looks good and perhaps it makes sense within the context of the Star Wars setting but ,t feels like it's been done to nudge players to undertake tasks in a certain order, all in the name of game balancing or game play.

I also found the game a little unengaging. I think this was down to a mixture of what felt like a long downtime between turns and frequently slightly unexciting turns.

And as with a lot of open world games that sort try to implement a go-anywhere-do-anything theme. It feels like a bit more of an effort than it's worth. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to get a player to gamemaster an actual table top RPG instead.