****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Tremendous Star Wars board game that sees a team of 2-4 players taking on 1 other player who controls the Imperial forces. In a similar vein of board games like Super Dungeon Explorer, Imperial Assault takes the foundations that Fantasy Flight put together with their X-Wing and Armada games and takes it to ground combat between the classic hero and villain units of the Star Wars Original Trilogy. One player takes on the role of the Empire: spawning enemy combatants and essentially fulfilling the Dungeon Master role as in D&D. The other four potential players pick up the role of the Rebel Alliance and have to brave a series of campaign missions against the Imperial player. The two teams compete throughout the campaign (which runs across a few main missions and some optional side missions) earning experience and in-game credits along the way that can be used to purchase item cards or added abilities for both teams. Players can also unlock "hero" and "villain" characters to use in the campaign such as named classics like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (who are included in the core game). Aside from the 5 player campaign, there is also a 2 player skirmish mode where the two players build a custom army not unlike in a Warhammer game and then compete to finish certain objectives before their opponent. Both modes of play are a blast and give great variety to the game.The core game is a beast and worth the asking price. It comes with a cluster of two sides map pieces that can be fit together like a giant puzzle in different combinations. Each mission for both the campaign and skirmish modes provide instructions on how to assemble the various maps. The game comes with a handy introduction booklet (good for getting started, but unfortunately vague on certain rules), a more in depth rule book, an introduction just to the skirmish, and a booklet that contains all of the campaign missions. You'll also get the core set of figures including the six starter player characters as well as the basic Imperial and Mercenary units: Stormtroopers, Probe Droids, E Web Gunners, Nexu creatures (from Episode 2), Imperial Officers, Royal Guards, Trandoshan Hunters, and the large AT-ST. Again, the core game now also includes Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker as well as their separate mission cards for use in the two game modes kept separately along with fold out papers that contain their campaign and skirmish mission instructions (think of these two as included expansions).Aside from the gorgeous miniatures, you'll have plenty of game tokens (red tokens for damage points, large red tokens for five damage points, blue tokens for strain points, markers for status effects like stun/bleed/focus, door tokens that can be set up on the maps, markers with corresponding stickers to attach to the various miniature groups to distinguish them from each other, and various other tokens to use for mission objectives). There are also numerous types of card decks that feature such things as in game items, character abilities, the missions you'll play in either campaign or skirmish, command cards that give you certain abilities in skirmish mode, as well as the deployment character cards for your individual units.Perhaps the best part of the game for me is the manner in which short one to two hour campaign missions can be strung together for a larger experience. Unlike, say, Super Dungeon Explorer which is a single game instance that can take from as quick as an hour to as long as three or four hours, Imperial Assault is designed so that you can get a few "quick" missions in at a time while keeping track of your larger campaign progress. Also, all players accumulate experience and rewards after a campaign mission so even if the Rebel players lose and the Imperial player wins (or vice versa) one team is not immediately at a major disadvantage in terms of loot and items. It is only during the final mission of the campaign where the winner takes all.The only real downside to the game is the developer's proliferation of expansion packs. There are currently four main expansions (Bespin Gambit, Twin Shadows, Return to Hoth, and the soon to be released Jabba's Realm) that add new map tiles, player characters, enemy types, and game rules into the experience. The deeper pool of player characters are only available in these four pricier expansions. All four have their perks and weaknesses, but most of them are worthwhile. The bigger money pit for fans of the game are the individual character packs. Numerous character units with corresponding miniatures, campaign and skirmish missions, and new cards have been released as single expansions. Some of these are better than others and a handful are rather rare and in-demand (Boba Fett, Imperial Guard Champion, IG-88, Han Solo). I would not recommend buying the rarer expansions through Amazon as they are only available through secondary vendors who have jacked up the prices (my choice of vendor is either Fantasy Flight themselves or Cool Stuff Inc).The biggest pain about the expansion characters is that there are a number of characters for the core game and each main expansion who are purposefully sectioned off so you have to buy them separately. These characters actually will show up in the campaign missions you already have, but will have to be played using mere tokens that come with game. An example is Han Solo and Chewbacca who both show up in the core game here but are not included as miniatures. If you actually wanted to play them in your campaign as anything other than flimsy cardboard then you'd need to hunt down the separate character packs (which then leads to you having duplicate deployment cards for the characters). Overall this isn't a make or break deal for me. Fans who love the game and want to collect all the models or support the developer will probably want to grab up certain character expansions anyway, but for those who might not want to spend any money past the core game you won't be forced to as the game does include those stand-in tokens for you to use in lieu of the miniatures. The only major drawback is that skirmish mode in the core game only comes with a single map that has two variants to play on it. Each one of the character expansion packs come with new skirmish map suggestions and instructions so if you want variety in that mode you need to shell out for those various packs.Overall the game is a blast and one of my favorite board games.
