This weekend my long suffering gaming partner, Dave and I managed to find some time to wage galactic warfare in a galaxy far far away.
That’s right we played Rebellion. It was our second ever game and I approached it in much the same way as my first game, that was I planned to scout as many planets as possible to narrow down the avenues of escape for the Rebel Alliance. I also planned to generate loyalty from my subjugated planets having learnt from our previous game that loyal planet produce more troops than ones that are still fighting back!
My friend however had other ideas, he wanted to speed the game up by completing objectives. This was working directly against my strategy. I needed time to paint the rebels into a corner before crushing them like a bug, however, every time the rebels won a mission they took away a turn of my time.
Early on I let too many of Mon Mothma’s diplomatic missions proceed, occupied as I was with spreading glory and benevolence to the desperate and lost, by crushing them under the white plastoid composite boots of my stormtroopers.
Midgame I launched a surprise attack using Vader to crush a rebel uprising on Nal Hutta. It was a stroke of brilliance, giving me a staging outpost in the heart of rebel space… or it would have been, had I not already eliminated Nal Hutta from my list of potential rebel bases. However the surprising nature of my attack perhaps put the rebel alliance on the back foot and teamed up with my awesome display of firepower, when I annihilated Alderaan using the Death Star and turned Cato Neimoidia to serve the emperor, they fled to Mon Calimari, hoping to produce warships to counter my own technological advancements. Determined to not allow this rebel scum to gain even a glimpse of the upper hand I followed, with a single unit of stormtroopers… As long as they remained on the planet the rebels would be unable to build their mon cal cruisers.
However, to my surprise what should we discover but the rebel base itself! The rebels had lead us right to their door! Unfortunately before we could mobilise the rest of the imperial army, General Dodonna order a cowardly retreat into hyperspace. My glorious empire was back at square one and worse still I had to endure the wrath of Darth Sidious.
As we continued with our hunt for the rebel scum we launched several new technological initiatives, a second death star orbiting Tatooine, a super star destroyer in the shipyards of Corellia. However time was running out, we simply could not wait any longer. I had the base narrowed down to five possible places and had two turns left to crush the Rebellion.
I launched scouting missions to the three I could reach, Felucia, Sullust and Ilum, with the Emperor himself leading that mission. I was fairly sure they would not have retreated to Tatooine, not with a second death star orbiting the desert world, which left just one possible planet… Utapau.
Certain now that I knew where the base was located I began to plot how to close the jaws of my trap but it was all for nought. The rebels revealed their final objective, spreading a message of hope across the galaxy and winning the game… by diplomacy!!!
Embarrassed by his defeat Lord Vader committed hari-kari with his own lightsaber while the Emperor disappeared from Coruscant, presumably to train a new emo-teen to bring balance to the force. All was lost but I learnt a valuable lesson and that lesson is that to play Rebellion well you need to know what objectives the Rebel player has in their deck, because you need to stop them or at least not allow them to score them easily. The Empire needs time in order to find and crush the rebellion and each completed objective shortens that time.
Next time we play we intend to swap sides so that we both get the chance to see what is in the other players deck and perhaps use our knowledge from having played on the opposite side of the table to our advantage. Until next time, may the force be with you.