I've a Bad Feeling About This

Oh dear, I've been a little rash.

I have a group of friends who aren't ordinarily gamers, at least so I thought, but are huge Star Wars fans; I proposed the idea of playing a Star Wars related game at some stage with them.  A bit of a punt, and one that many gamers have experienced at one stage or other, but most of them turned out to be pretty keen.  But then I wavered and life intervened for a while.

Subsequently, on a night out with this group of friends, after a fair amount of lubrication, they got to talking about how they'd hammered one another at Necromunda back in the day, and one of them latterly talked about having tried board games in the past based on his other favourite theme - Zombies.  So it turned out the idea probably wasnt a bad one after all.

So queue me standing in my FLGS, umm'ing and ahh'ing over the various Star Wars Games, I found at least four, not counting Role-playing games.  Do we go for epic fleet battles, or iconic starfighter combat, or card based strategy...  No, ultimately I went with my gut and picked up practically the most expensive thing I could find:

That's too big to be a space station
 

 Imperial Assault; broadly speaking a Heroquest-esque dungeon crawler set in the Star Wars universe.  I don't doubt my description is doing it a great disservice.  Fantasy Flight hold the Star Wars franchise, and are known for super-high production values, so the foot-square, several inch deep box is full of stuff:

 

Not least of which are the rulebooks for two different styles of play, multiplayer narrative adventuring or one-on-one skirmish battles.  Also there are full colour map components (not yet punched out), many, many cards; and of course over thirty miniatures.

One each of the Imperial figures

There are 6 player characters (Heroes) and a bunch of imperial troops.  You also get a couple of supposedly 'exclusive' Ally figures (though I can't imagine them ever selling the basic set without them) - For Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

The models themselves are hefty, heroic 32mm miniatures; as you can see from the picture below, the most upright of the figures stands more or less head and shoulders above a 28mm figure.

 

The detail is pretty good, but it's a shame that the poses are the same for duplicate models.  For example, you get nine Stormtroopers, all in the same firing pose; which is probably required if they are to stand any chance as a group of hitting anyone.  But the set piece models such as the AT-ST and Darth Vader are really cracking.

With a substantial loyalty card discount I bagged this for about 15% off, but having got it home and investigated it I'm happy with the price I've paid regardless.  I'm yet to decide on whether to paint the models, but hopefully I can get a game arranged first!  That will be the real test.