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What’s In The Box?
Sabotage Showdown comes in a small pack containing an additional mission type for Shatterpoint, consisting of multiple language versions of the mission card itself and 9 new struggle cards specific to that mission. The box also includes additional objective and damage tokens to supplement those in the core set. Whilst incidental to what it adds to the game itself, the pack’s cover is some excellent artwork of everyone’s favourite piratical scallywag Hondo Ohnaka in the near-comic book Shatterpoint style as he escapes the advancing General Grievous and his droid forces, carrying a crate of loot he’s presumably just ‘acquired’ from them. Despite there being no need to have the usual QR code link to an assembly guide, Atomic Mass Games have still included an insert with the cover art inside the pack, which is a nice touch for collectors and those players who like to keep that artwork for display.
What Does This Set Add To The Game?
One of the primary criticisms of Shatterpoint to date has been that the single mission included in the core set, whilst it has a lot of potential configurations in of itself, doesn’t necessarily offer a great deal of variety as a gameplay experience. AMG have previously addressed the concern and stated that they wanted to give players a chance to get a handle on the mechanics of the core game before introducing new mission types (but that new missions would be coming in the future). That future has arrived in the form of the Sabotage Showdown pack. This particular mission incorporates a lot of the existing mechanics of the core set’s Shifting Priorities; namely the Priority Objective moving at the start of each player turn during the second and third Struggles. The core mission experience will be relatively familiar and this feels (intentionally) very much like building upon what is already present in players’ understanding of Shatterpoint rather than a drastic departure that would need a re-evaluation of how to play the game.
What Sabotage Showdown does do, is to change the shape of the game, in the sense that objectives are no longer on a 3x3 grid pattern but instead in a hexagonal ‘ring’ with another in the centre of the board. The most obvious result of this is that there are only 7 potential objectives involved in the mission (as opposed to 9 previously), and the configuration in which they are active has shifted. The central marker, for instance, is never in play during the first Struggle but becomes prominent during the second and third. This change in layout means that players will have to adapt their tactics as there won’t be any objectives in the ‘corners’ of the table, making it harder for units to sit on scoring areas for extended period as the active points are more condensed towards the central areas of the board. The objectives in play during the second encounter especially, are often active in a line, narrowing the areas where action plays out, before broadening again for the third Struggle (representing the characters escaping or regrouping outside of a target area). It makes for subtle alterations in how a game plays out, without drastically altering the significance on any particular unit or ability. Shatterpoint is a game of dynamic shifts in targets and having a change-up in mission state coming from the objective layout, as opposed to the overarching goal, is a typical broadening of the game’s design.
Where the Sabotage Showdown adds a more direct wrinkle into games is in the additional special rules for activating units using the Shatterpoint cards. Each objective card adds an extra ability to be activated when a unit card is drawn; these are consistent throughout the struggles and are either a free dash move, a free heal of two damage or a removal of a condition, or a refresh of a force point. These are relatively small, incremental bonuses (and at least two of them are readily available elsewhere) but, like the usage of the Shatterpoint card itself, could be significant if timed correctly. Allowing for the removal of a Pinned condition for example could allow the unit to move to an objective that would otherwise be out of reach. An extra force point is never a bad thing. As with the change in objective layout, this doesn’t substantially change the game structure but in this case it is certainly an addition rather than an alternative, albeit one that doesn’t increase the complexity factor.
Conclusions
Sabotage Showdown is a welcome addition to the Shatterpoint game as it (some would say finally) offers something new to the more macro understating of the game and allows for a more involved choice when it comes to selecting squads as they may have to be more versatile now that there’s potential for different objective layouts. Any meta-changes it presents are going to be subtle; an ability or unit that was generally powerful before, would still be so under this mission-set; anything that is situational won’t be invalidated and, personally, I can’t think of anything in the game currently that is going to gain or suffer dramatically enough for it to problematic. Units that are particularly strong up close or benefit from being Engaged might get a slightly more significant role in this setup as the objectives are more condensed towards the centre of the table. Conversely, units that would be happy to sit on ‘corner’ objectives and add in ranged fire when playing Shifting Priorities may have to be utilized differently and more aggressively in Sabotage Showdown.
I’d recommend this set, to the point of considering it an essential purchase for anyone especially invested in Shatterpoint; it adds some much needed variety to the core mission choice (as in, now there is actually a choice…) and, if not necessarily a dramatic overhaul of how the game plays, offers more than enough to justify its existence. Future Shatterpoint missions are likely to also be subtle variations on the same core, objective control, theme and it’s the kind of subtle shift presented with this pack that will allow for some tactical planning and keep the game fresh, without compromising its identity.