Now Star Wars: Unlimited is around the corner: the new collectible card game from Fantasy Flight Games, Asmodee and Lucasfilm will be released in Italy on March 8th. In a couple of weeks, the two Starter Decks dedicated to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will arrive in stores, together with the first expansion of the cardgame, entitled “Spark of Rebellion” and strongly inspired by the original Star Wars trilogy.
In addition to our preview of Star Wars: Unlimited, we interviewed Danny Schaefer, the Lead Game Designer of Fantasy Flight Games' latest effort, and Brian Schomburg, the Visual Creative Director of Star Wars: Unlimited, who revealed all the behind-the-scenes details to us about the game set in the Galaxy Far, Far Away.
A card game with two great new features
But let's start from the basics: what exactly is Star Wars: Unlimited? We have already told you about the game mechanics in the past, but Schaefer wanted to explain to us in a few words the idea behind the production: “We thought of Star Wars: Unlimited as a card game that is quick and easy to learn, but still With deep strategic possibilities, the fundamentals will be familiar to those who play other card games, but we've also focused on some unique mechanics that add new layers of tactics to the formula.
Among these, for example, we have the “call and response” action system and the division between space and land combat arenas, but also a Leader who constitutes the fulcrum of the composition of the deck and a very fluid system of resources, which presents strategic dilemmas”.
In fact, the biggest novelty of Star Wars: Unlimited is precisely the fact that the traditional game turns are put aside in favor of a system based on Rounds and Phases, thanks to which the players' moves alternate almost without resolution continuity. “We thought of this structure because we wanted to keep the action always dynamic, keeping the players constantly engaged”, the Lead Game Designer of Fantasy Flight Games tells us: “in other TCGs, each player's turn can include several phases. The problem is that the opponent has nothing to do while we take our turn. In Unlimited, however, each player only makes one move at a time. The pace is fast-paced and the game atmosphere makes the game more fun.”
The beating heart of the game lies in the “Action Phase”, during which the two challengers alternate one action each (playing a card, attacking, activating an effect and so on). Only when the Action Phase ends, we move on to the Reorganization Phase: players gather their troops and prepare for the next Round. “The Action Phase was designed with the aim of creating an interactive game with greater opportunities to react to the opponent, limiting the ability to chain combos without ever being interrupted. The fact of having to plan your moves in sequence to maximize the power of the cards and, at the same time, having to try to predict what the opponent might do is one of the elements that will test Star Wars: Unlimited players the most.”
Speaking of challenges: together with the arrival in stores of “Spark of Rebellion”, the competitive game of Star Wars: Unlimited will also begin immediately. The creators of the game, in fact, take particular care of this aspect. For this reason, the ranked game will immediately be divided into three formats: Constructed, Sealed and Draft, each with its own specificities. “In Constructed you will be able to compose your deck using all the cards in your collection, updating or modifying it over time as you open new packs and make trades. In the Limited format – which includes Sealed and Draft – you will instead have to compose a deck on the spot , starting with a limited selection of cards. From the beginning, we designed the game to be enjoyable in all of these formats. Every decision was made by evaluating the effects in each format, to ensure we create the best gaming experience possible”, concludes Schaefer.
The art of the Galaxy Far, Far Away
But let's talk now about the TCG cards coming in March. As always, in fact, it is the illustrations and design that attract the attention of collectors. In the case of Star Wars Unlimited, which carries on its shoulders all the weight of an iconic brand like that of Star Wars, the creation of the artwork was a delicate and complex process.
Brian Schomburg, in fact, tells us that “our goal was to create a new and exciting look, different from all previous Star Wars themed card games. We wanted to have a unique identity and our own personality, while respecting the IP of The challenge, then, also consisted of living up to the name 'Unlimited': the artistic sector had to find solutions to merge characters from all the media into which Star Wars has been transposed, from cinema to comics , from animation to TV. The styles of these productions are very different from each other: our task was to create a cohesive middle earth, fusing the images of the saga from 1977 to the present day. We wanted colorful, imaginative illustrations that convey dynamic actions and cinematic atmospheres in line with the game's gameplay.”
Precisely for this reason, the designers of Fantasy Flight Games confirmed that they had never thought of using shots from films and TV series for their illustrations: “we have been producing Star Wars games since 2012, but only one has used film frames. Among the Our artistic goals are to show fans something they have never seen before: even when we represent events taken from films or other media, we try to move the view away from the camera to bring something new to the scene.”
Schomburg assured that Unlimited will also take inspiration from the Expanded Universe, with its multitude of characters and planets that are not touched upon except briefly in the film saga. In particular, the Creative Director of the cardgame explained to us that “the title of our game is 'Unlimited', so we want all the content to be faithful to this name. The Star Wars universe is vast and has a long and rich history “I can't talk about plans for the future, but there are many surprises coming for the fans. We will continue to draw on characters and situations from all corners of the Galaxy, while the art will remain faithful to what was established with the first set, ” Spark of Rebellion'”.
Here's Leia Showcase on the Unity side…
… and on the Commander side!
The real “stars” of the expansion will however be the rare cards with Showcase treatment: Fantasy Flight Games has declared that each Leader unit of “Spark of Rebellion” will have a variant of this type, which means that in the first Star Wars set : Unlimited there will be 18 cards with alternative illustrations.
“Because the leader cards are visually central to the play area, they were the perfect candidates for creating eye-catching variants. We wanted something more interesting than just an alternate art, so the art team kept the text boxes to a minimum to make them still more engaging,” Schomburg added.
Unlimited strategic possibilities
Leaders are the most important cards in Star Wars: Unlimited. In fact, both the deckbuilding process and most of the strategies revolve around them. On this type of card, Schaefer specified that “Leaders are the main cards of the game, since they give shape to entire archetypes and are a constant presence in every game.
In the first set there are 18 Leaders: our goal is to favor a variety of decks capable of exploiting them. Some have generally useful capabilities, so they can support a variety of decks; others have more targeted (and powerful) effects, requiring the composition of a specific deck that revolves around them. Furthermore, we made an effort to present Leaders who demonstrate different play styles: we have very aggressive characters, such as Sabine Wren, and others designed for longer and control games, such as Emperor Palpatine”. Then, to our microphones, it was confirmed that many characters included in the first set will also return in the future in completely new versions, both in terms of illustration and effect: “Star Wars: Unlimited will be a huge game, with an immense amount of cards. Fans can expect to see different variations of the most important characters during the first sets, including their Unit and Leader versions”. This, therefore, seems to confirm that some well-known faces from the world of Star Wars who in “Spark of Rebellion” are Simple sync pairs will have their moment of glory later, perhaps with the second or third expansion.
As we anticipated, the deckbuilding of Star Wars: Unlimited revolves around the Leaders, but not only. Schaefer, in fact, gave us some suggestions for building our first deck, telling us that “there are many starting points: my most important advice is to look for a Leader, a combination of cards or an archetype that excites you and start from that. Leaders are certainly the simplest basis to start from, but certainly not the only one. Observe their Aspects and their abilities and try to find cards capable of maximizing their power. But there are also other systems: often I found myself building decks around 2-3 non-Leader cards that work particularly well together, and then working backwards to find a Leader that fit well into my deck.”
Another possibility, obviously, is to choose cards based on their peculiar combination of Aspects: “each Aspect has its own focus in terms of mechanics and its own style, so choosing which ones to include in your cardlist can really make the difference. To give a quick summary, Vigilance (Blue) is a defensive Aspect with healing and protective abilities; Authority (Green) focuses on strengthening and coordinating Units; Offensive (Red) likes to directly attack the opponent's Base and inflict a lot of damage on her; Cunning (Yellow) prefers insidious strategies and surprise effects from the hand. Then there are Heroism and Evil, which vary depending on the basic theme but which in general distinguish between characters more oriented towards collaboration and more destructive figures However, each Aspect has many layers and nuances, as well as archetypes that can develop around it.”
The latest, great new feature of Star Wars: Unlimited is the division of the battlefield into two arenas: players will be able to clash both in deep space and on the terrain of one of the many planets that make up the Galaxy. “The division between ground and space units was dictated by both the Star Wars story and gameplay. Many films in the franchise culminate with epic parallel battles both in space and on the ground – our goal was to capture these suggestions.
Furthermore, even from a logical point of view, it makes sense that an Ewok cannot attack a Star Destroyer and vice versa. From a gameplay point of view, however, having two combat arenas leads to strategic and tactical decisions on the part of the players, with deckbuilding requiring you to balance land and space units in each deck. During the match, then, choosing the right moment to focus on one arena rather than the other can be crucial to achieving victory”, concludes Schaefer.