Star Wars: Rivals Review

Star Wars rivals is a 2 player card based game using miniature models of characters to battle for influence over location cards.

My son and I have played this game a lot! He loves it and asks to play on a daily basis (probably because he beats me more often than not). I’ve actually become a little sick of Ozzy’s impression of Vaders: “your powers are weak old man” as he grins at me discarding my hand and taking damage to numerous characters.

It’s very quick to learn how to play: place your character on the three locations in turn. Roll the dice to see which will be scored. Choose a card to change the outcomes of locations and try to maximise your score. That’s pretty much it. It took us both only one game to be able to play without any reference to the instructions.

Buying blind boosters is pretty much a must. The core box comes with 4 “proper” characters (Luke Skywalker and Cody for the light side and Darth Vader and Asajj Ventress for the dark side) and 2 basic tokens to make up the team. This is worth it however as each new character brings new cards, abilities, locations and ways to play the game. Different characters combine well to help your strategy.

This can be dangerous with a 7 year old such as mine who already has a Pokemon card problem. He wants them all and with them being blind the last ones will be hard to find leading to doubles.

Having said that it’s great for developing his forward thinking, some basic numeracy and, most importantly for his education: Star Wars quote reciting.

The quality of the models are good. Ozzy will often play with them once he’s finished telling me “army or not, you must realise, you are doomed”. They show no sign of this ware and tear. If you like sleeving your cards then you’ll hate the shape of them but again the sabacc shape is very cool and thematic.

If you’re looking for a quick, fun, Star Wars themed game then Star Wars Rivals is for you. If you’re looking for a long drawn out game with deep strategy then you might want to look elsewhere.

Ozzy’s final thoughts: “I like it because it’s fun and you can damage the people and you have to be smart with the cards.”