So I bought the two-player starter because it was so damned cheap, for the sole reason of reporting on it... then I forgot to report on it! But it's okay because I'm pretty sure it's all still the same! Here's the deal: combat reminds me somewhat of Fight City. Cards act in descending order of speed, no matter who controls them. Your strength is how many dice you get to roll, and for each die that comes up 4 or above, you deal a point of owies. Allan worried that this would make luck dominate, but it feels to me (without having played) that luck will just be the main factor you weigh to make your tactical decisions, like in Formula De. And really, when you're rolling six dice at a shot, your odds of rolling really bad for very long are pretty low. Also, the dice thing lets them have Critical Hits, which always make the kids scream in nearly sexual glee.

Anyway you're having these combats on three fronts: characters, ground units, and space units. Shades of The Queen's Gambit, and possibly the only way a Star Wars game should be designed from here forward. I love it when games tell us valuable things about other cultural artifacts. Games as criticism? Huh. There's a Force track of points that you get reissued every turn, and those get slurped up by card special abilities, mainly. Looks like a strong game, slightly less complex than the fundamentals of Magic without being at all Magic-like. Are CCGs back in the saddle?