A Fresh Start

The Rebels & Empire Reinforcements expansion for Star Wars™: The Deckbuilding Game was originally conceived as a campaign box, but it grew into so much more. In a campaign game, players would complete missions to unlock new units and capital ships, then use those cards to customize the galaxy deck before the next match. Upgraded starter cards were created as a way for players to enhance their starter decks between games as well.

When a player completes a mission, it is placed in their victory pile along with any enemy bases they have destroyed. At the end of games 1 through 4 in a campaign, each player adds the number of enemy bases and missions in their victory pile to determine how many points they scored. Then, each player can spend those points on their faction’s upgraded starter cards.

Upgraded starter cards are used to replace your faction’s original starter cards with more powerful ones. When you purchase an upgraded starter card, you remove a card from your starter deck and add the new upgraded card in its place. That means your starting deck is always 10 cards, but those 10 cards get stronger as you advance through the campaign.

Each faction has 5 different upgraded starter cards to choose from and 2 copies of each. They range in cost from 1 to 5. To keep the game balanced, the options are mechanically the same for each faction, but that doesn’t mean players will always choose the same ones. Some players prefer to spend all their points on a single 5-cost capital ship to add valuable defense to their deck, while others prefer to enhance their deck with multiple 1- and 2-cost units, allowing them to replace more of their original starter cards.

One thing that everyone who playtested campaign mode agreed on was that upgraded starter cards were a lot more fun than the cards found in each faction’s original starter deck, and partway through our process the testers began asking for a way to use them outside of campaign mode.

By that time, the expansion had already evolved beyond a campaign box. Even though players were enjoying campaign mode, many still preferred to play a standard, one-off game using missions as well. Therefore, playing 1v1 with missions became the primary focus of the expansion. Once that happened, it was natural to ask: “Why can’t we just swap our old starter decks for these upgraded ones when playing with missions?”

This did not occur to me at first because the upgrades were intimately linked with campaign mode in my mind, but when testers started asking, I thought: “Why not?” Another game mode would be added value to the product, and it only required that I edit the ability of the 2-cost Trooper unit on each side. That unit originally had a much different ability, but I altered it to gain Force when you complete a mission because each side would be losing the one card in their original starter deck that could give them Force.

After I made that update, testers started playing the first iteration of what became “upgraded starter mode.” At that time, each side still used their original starting base with only 8 hit points. We quickly realized that was not sufficient with how much more powerful these upgraded starter decks were, so the next evolution of this game mode was to replace each player’s starting base with one of the new bases from the reinforcements expansion.

These bases have 14 hit points and an ability that triggers off completing missions. This worked great with the upgraded starter cards because their abilities were all mission-centric. Once we made this last change, everything clicked into place, and upgraded starter mode became an exciting new way to play the game!

Many testers described their first few turns in this mode as feeling like they were starting in the middle of a regular game because of how strong their deck felt right out of the gate. In fact, we considered calling this variant “aggressive mode” because of how hard the upgraded starter decks can hit on their own. It was for that reason we didn’t make upgraded starter mode the default experience for this expansion, because some players started to miss the relaxing, slow build of the first few turns of regular play. But for players who want to hit the ground running and experience a more aggressive version of Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game, upgraded starter mode is a fantastic way to play. We hope you enjoy it!

Written by Caleb Grace