Surely for there must better way of doing without the counting, it's just the designers has been using that as their solution for most of their game. Not a bad thing, I have a lot of fun with them. But I must say I find the idea of the best experience involving a lot of counter disappointing. After all the effort with the redesign I was hoping for a more elegant system, not more token than ever.

I am still not sure if I'll get the game. If I do though, I'll design and print  a few numbered cards (+1 +2…) with different colors to replace all those tokens. I am not sure how if it will work and it's still a lot of bean counting but at least it'll feel like I am playing a card game. I have tried using a dice before but it didn't really work.

My biggest gripe is probably the # of tokens.  But, after playing, it wasn't horrible.  The Death Star counter won't probably be a token, and not that many cards have shields.  Many cards won't have a wound on them for much of the game either.  Maybe too many rules for a starter set, but overall I rarely thought 'too many tokens'.  *shrug*

Look at the Decipher game - your deck was your life (which I LOVE as a mechanic) so that was cool…but by the 2nd or 3rd set people had 12 cards on the table before the game started.  There are different ways to clutter up the table, and I would rather have tokens than a huge amount of cards that you have to remember at all times. 

Talk about tokens… let's say, an old classic game called Vampire: The Eternal Strugle. Lot's of tokens everywhere…

Talk about a new classic game called Android: Netrunner. Lot's of tokens and most of them distinct.

So no. This game doesn't have too many tokens. :)

rings said:

Let's be fair… it wasn't until the 6th set that you could start more than 1 card on table at all, and that only gave you one extra card.

I don't mind tokens in card games - Dune CCG has piles of tokens, sometimes more than 10 on several individual cards. The four types of tokens are: favour, deferment, spice & solaris.

I find using 4 colours of the FFG gaming tokens work quite well. Alternatively you can use the dials made by companies like Litko that can count from 0-100 or 0-10. As mentioned dice can also work, especially oversized dice, or pen & paper.

My preference is to use tokens.

I've been using the same tokens that FFG was using in the demo videos (they sell them through their online store) to play my homemade demo decks and I really like them. These nice plastic counters are easy to pick up and move and don't hinder or delay play. In fact, they become rather intuitive.

That said, the tokens will be nice cardboard when the actual game comes out, like all of FFG's other games, as indicated by the pictures in that first preview, which I also don't really have a problem with in playing other LCGs like Lord of the Rings. But I might just keep using the plastic counters if the colors will still sync up good.

I do sort of wish, though, that the Focus tokens were a color other than red, the ubiquitous "wound token" color.

MarthWMaster said:

Agreed. That was my first thought as well when I saw that.

MarthWMaster said:

Maybe the wound tokens will be textured in Counter-Intuitive Green?

cleardave said:

Regardless of color, since the focus token looks like the tactics icons on the unit cards, I wouldn't be surprised if the wound tokens show the pistol symbol from unit cards.

Budgernaut said:

I think you can make them out on the FFG homepage scrolly thing. There's the focus token, a blue circle token (probably the shield tokens), and what looks to be hex shaped tokens with red values of 1 and 3 on them (maybe the damage tokens). A bit annoying that 2 different tokens are using red, but they are different shapes.

Also, as a side note, you can also see Boba Fett's card on that scrolly thing. His faction card color is green and the picture looks sweet. ^_^

Mattr0polis said:

Yeah! I tried desperately to read that, but to no avail. It just isn't a high enough resolution. I'm super excited for the bounty hunters and the scum and villainy faction.

Mattr0polis said:

Oh my good god, how on earth did I miss this?! Thanks for pointing this one out!!!

I think now that the game is out, we can definitively say: YES! There are too many tokens. It isn't a card game if you need more than one counter to keep track of everything. It's not a board game either. It's a Coard Game. I knew this, but I'm actually shocked by how many tokens there are.