I'll throw in my hat for co-op as well.

1) I like that there will be another co-op game.

2) I think CoC and GoT work so well as PvP style games because of all the different factions, where LoTR and SW really are kinda just two-sided.

I'm pretty excited about the announcement in general. Five LCGs, maybe I can get a bailout from the Feds? I'll tell them I'm too big to fail or something.

Tobogan said:

Yes Imperial!

But instead of subjugating worlds and promoting tyranny, you're fighting the Empire in the name of restoring freedom! And really, isn't that better for the Galaxy in the end?

I am seriously disappointed about this. LotR was a major let down and now this. I love Star Wars but this game looks very similar to LotR and that game got old very fast. I bought the core set and will probably not buy anything else for it ever. This one even copies the four spheres concept that LotR uses. Hopefully FFG will surprise me but co-op game with set amount of missions gets stagnant very quickly and therefore boring and not worth buying anymore. Too bad as I love Star WArs and my nephew is huge star wars fanatic so would have been cool to play cards with him.

Absolutely perfect.  I'm digging the Lord of the Rings, but the source material seems to be off-putting to my...how shall I say...friends who just aren't interested in high fantasy.  It might have been easier to get them into Death Angel, but to the unwashed ignorant, it apparently comes off as a "cheesy Aliens clone".  (I know!  But if I tried explaining why it isn't, I'd have to convince them to swallow centuries of Warhammer 40k Lore.  Yeesh.)  But Star Wars?  I can get them to play Star Wars!

And once again, even if I can't or they've all moved on, I don't end up with a closet full of useless pretty picture cards.  (Ooo, like those boxes of Decipher CCG that got sacrificed to eBay for pennies on the dollar when the company got shafted by Hasbro.)  I rather like games that don't end up like broken toys when no one else wants to play them.

Toqtamish said:

I'm not asking this to challenge your skepticism, because I care as much as you about this game's success. I'm just curious because I've not played LotR yet. If new scenarios and cards are released every month, how does the game still become stagnant? You say you've only played the Core Set, but are you sure that your experience would not change if you collected a Chapter Pack here and there?

Many cooperative games are sustainable indefinitely using only what's in the box, and I would hope that FFG would strive to make that happen with their products whenever possible. But still, expanding your game can only add to the fun, right?

I'm really curious to see some of the Imperial cards we'll be going up against, and how FFG intends to try to keep everything fresh.  I know that we've already seen a named Star Destroyer, the "Devastator" card, and I think capital ships would be easy enough to just give unique names, but I wonder if we'll see something like "Stormtrooper 102387XYK," for troops, or "Frenzied Stormtroopers" and "Elite Stormtroopers."  Same thing for TIE Fighters, etc.

So many questions, so little information on the first day!  I wonder if there will be a playable demo at Gen Con.

Lightdarker said:

Hmm. I wouldn't rule it out, but as the game is not scheduled to come out until 2012, it doesn't seem very likely.

Tobogan said:

Maybe a future expansion? ...because I agree that playing as Imperials would be fun!

I could see them doing a version of the game for the Imperial side. But you'd probably need different icons for the four strategies. A Millennium Falcon icon would just look wrong on Boba Fett, for example.

It really seems like they could have made both co-op and head-to-head play possible with the same components. There are lots of games that basically have two decks (intermixed or not) where one deck is just missions/baddies for your opponent's good guys to fight. This would also be a type of game that isn't represented in FFG's current stable of LCGs, so it seems like it would have been a good fit. 

Anything with the SW logo is going to move plenty of cardboard, but I really wonder if they didn't pass up a major cash cow by not including a competitive play option. Decipher's SWCCG was HORRIBLE for the first several years of its existence, and there were tons of players and tournaments to be found. 

Narsil0420 said:

Narsil0420 said:

Narsil0420 said:

There's gotta be room for both!  As long as they stay on the stick with getting expansions out and have a somewhat innovative way to present the turn structure and resource generation, I'm sold.

Edit.... OK, how about I post the crap out of that quote....

Most of the really cool/interesting characters are Dark Side.

I mean, who DOESN'T want to run a deck full of bounty hunters?
 

Xenu's Paradox said:

In the movies, anyway. In the expanded universe, the Light Side has got heavy-hitters of its own!

MarthWMaster said:

The scenarios lack replayability the way the game is designed. One new scenario a month at 15 bucks a pack is not enough to keep my interest. I have beat all the core set scenarios a few times each. After that the excitement is gone from them. This game looks like it just reusing the same mechanics so will have the exact same problem. I would rather this be competitive like AGoT which I love to death.

I think people are jumping to conclusions by saying it is a LotR clone.  It's a co-op LCG.  Not every competitive LCG is a clone of the other.  The four different zones of play alone should be enough to alert the skeptic that this is not the same game with a different coat of paint, and we know nothing of how the AI works, how missions are completed, how combat works, or what kind of resource system the game uses.  It also seems to take a cue from Death Angel with event cards that one player must resolve without discussion.  A thorough read of the description page did a lot to shake away my doubts.

It sounds like this game may have a more involved system, and it has the better universe, so I am pretty excited and hope to replace Lord of the Rings with Star Wars.  I wouldn't object to a single-deck or deck-building Star Wars game for competitive play, but this is a great start.  And who knows, with luck they could pull a Ghost Stories and make an expansion that adds an Imperial Player to make the missions harder, though in my experience, there's no such thing as luck.