Star Wars: Shatterpoint minis game lowers the FOMO, amps up the RNG

The world of tabletop games is full of miniatures. Tiny plastic heroes have helped build entire franchises. These miniatures also provide a lot of shelf space for local games stores and countless crowdfunding campaigns. But often the scale of a publisher’s ambition for a product line far outstrips consumers’ willingness to pay for it — much less to spend time painting it.

Star Wars: ShatterpointAtomic Mass Games has released a new offering called “Ambient Skirmish Games”. It aims to solve that conflict. It’s the most recent entry into a hot sector of the tabletop landscape known as miniature skirmish games: highly thematic games of tactical combat that only require a handful of miniatures to play. It’s a good idea to have a few miniatures, so it doesn’t take too much. ShatterpointCould share the same cinematic universe as Star Wars: Legion — one of Atomic Mass’ several Star Wars-themed miniatures games, and one that requires dozens and dozens of minis to play — the experience of buying, painting, and playing ShatterpointIt should not be the same thing.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

“Tactically, strategically, it’s a very different experience,” head of studio Will Shick told Polygon during a demo at this year’s AdeptiCon. “In Legion, what you’re doing is you’re building an army that is going to have synergies and tactics. You’re choosing your command cards. You’re choosing your units. You’re making a battle plan. Then, your goal is in Legion is to execute that plan as well as you can, while your opponent influences you by force.”

“Instead of it being on how your army works together and synergizes, and how you build the perfect Rube Goldberg machine,” Shick continued, “the focus [in Shatterpoint]It is all about the characters and the actions of the characters. And part of that is the fact that you have a lot less strategic control.”

ShatterpointEach player brings to the table approximately four to six miniatures, a Strike Force group. Each Strike Force has a primary unit — generally a named character, like Anakin Skywalker — that gives the group its personality. There’s a secondary unit, which is often a lesser hero like Clone Captain Rex. Finally, there’s a support unit — in this example, something like a pair of Clone Troopers fits the bill nicely. Each unit comes with a card of the tarot size, and all are shuffled together. The game moves on from here, as players pull cards from the shared deck and activate their units.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

An alternative to the traditional back-and forth turn order in a wargame is something like Star Wars: LegionOr Warhammer 40,000, each phase — called a Struggle — is therefore much more random. It is possible to be on the wrong side of the table in the Struggle 1 of a best-3 match. Then, the following Struggle 2 you will find yourself back on your feet and unable take another swing. Shick said that the central tension in the game is what you do with your limited choices each round.

“The game is going to ask you a lot of questions through its randomness,” Shick said. “How can you make the best of what fate has given you? And that’s the ‘shatterpoint.’ That’s the whole theme of the game.”

Atomic Mass gave its characters powerful abilities to allow them to achieve these inflection points. Shick, along with his team at Lucasfilm were able to give characters powerful abilities through close collaboration. Shatterpoint’s gameplay with unique Star Wars combat — including moments inspired by The Clone WarsAnimations. For instance, your Anakin miniature doesn’t just stick itself to the nearest Battle Droid and start rolling dice until one or the other falls down. Anakin slashes and parries with his lightsaber, leaps over the top of the droids with a flourish, and then Force pushes them right off the table — all during a single attack in a single turn. I find the combat interactions described more complicated, vigorous and more dynamic. Cinematic really than anything I’ve seen in a skirmish game to date.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

While other miniatures games might avoid these kinds of elaborate, flashy moves, Atomic Mass’ Shatterpoint leans in. Getting blown out in the first round of combat only to fight back to a stalemate in the penultimate round right before the climax might feel a bit swingy, but it’s great for storytelling.

“It’s chaotic,” Shick said. “It’s not very clean. There’s a lot of individual heroics or initiative. It’s the point where Obi-Wan’s like, Anakin! No! He runs away and goes on doing his own thing. […] It’s a little bit of crisis management, because you don’t have complete control, you don’t have perfect information. Instead, it’s up to you to figure out how to maximize the opportunities that you get out of your draw.”

The game’s modularity is also a key characteristic. To build the Strike Force they desire, players are encouraged to combine and match units. As a side effect, each of the units that players invest in — both monetarily, and with the time spent painting them — becomes more valuable. Shick explained that the game will allow fans to quickly mix, match, and trade primary, secondary and support units. This flexibility is actually what the June core set will offer. Both sides will have the option to choose from multiple characters or support units right out of box. This gives them plenty of choices as they play the game.

Grid View

The miniatures! They’re absolutely spectacular, with thin, lithe silhouettes and screen-accurate proportions. The characters are everywhere. Star Wars: LegionLook slightly stretched with larger heads and hands that show more detail ShatterpointThe minis look more like action figure-like figures. That’s because each multi-part, hard plastic miniature is rendered in 40-millimeter scale — far larger than the industry standard 28-millimeter scale found in most wargames. They are also easier to paint for beginners due to their larger dimensions.

“You want the miniatures to evoke the experience that you want the players to have,” Shick said. “For Star Wars: Shatterpoint, the idea always was to lean into that more heroic, that more — I want to say childhood-like — but the more serialized things that Flash Gordon did.”

It sounds just like the type of approach fans love. The Clone Wars, MandalorianPlease see the following: Boba Fett: The Book of Boba FettHave been waiting.

Star Wars: Shatterpoint The Core SetShipment includes 16 miniatures as well as an assortment of terrain plastics. All the necessary tokens, cards, dice, etc. You can pre-order the game online or at your local gaming store for just $164.99. Fans should expect even more hands-on demonstrations of gameplay soon as Atomic Mass heads to Star Wars Celebration ahead of the game’s June 2 launch date.