Star Wars Board Games | 5 Real Picks and the Rules That Decide Them

I’m Spector, a dad to Alex, 7, and Emma, 10. This page used to promise a definitive guide to a game called “Board Games Star Wars: Galactic Empire,” which does not exist, and I have to say that before anything else. There is no such product. Fantasy Flight Games publishes Star Wars: Rebellion, Star Wars: Armada, Star Wars: Legion, Star Wars: Imperial Assault and Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion. Those are the five worth your table, and this page covers all five with the rules read out of the official books.

The Five Mechanics In This Brief Do Not Exist

I want to be direct about this, because you may have read them somewhere and you will lose money buying on the strength of them.

There is no action cube in Star Wars: Rebellion. There is no pool of cubes to draw from and no action economy built on them. The economy in this game is leaders, and the rule that matters is that a leader with no tactic values cannot activate a system. I read both official Fantasy Flight books in full, the Learn to Play booklet and the Rules Reference, and the word “cube” appears in neither of them.

There is no taxation phase and no invasion phase. The Imperial economic weapon is called subjugation, and I explain it properly below, because it is the most important thing on this page and almost nobody writes it down.

There is no galactic war phase and no final scoring phase. Both factions win the instant a condition is met on the board. Nothing is tallied at the end. If you were told this game is scored at the end, that is the fastest way to lose a four hour game to a misremembered rule.

Where do those terms come from? I could not trace them to any Star Wars game. Searches for the exact set turn up Twilight: 2000, which has a taxation phase, and Twilight Imperium, which has a status phase. Neither is Star Wars. Treat any page that gives you those four phase names as a page that has not read the rulebook.

The Three Phases of a Round, and Who Moves First

This is the whole turn structure, and it takes ten seconds to learn. What makes the game hard is the decisions inside it, not the phases.

1. Assignment Phase. The Rebel player assigns leaders to missions first, then the Imperial player. To assign, you take a mission card from your hand, place it face down near your faction sheet, and put one or two leaders on top of it. Each mission has a skill requirement printed in its upper left corner. Leaders you do not assign stay in your leader pool and can be used in the Command Phase to move units or to oppose an enemy mission.

2. Command Phase. Starting with the Rebel player, you alternate turns, and on your turn you do exactly one of two things.

• Activate a system. Take one leader from your leader pool and place it in any system. You may then move any of your ships from adjacent systems into it. You cannot move units out of a system that already contains one of your own faction’s leaders.
• Reveal a mission. Flip one of your assigned mission cards face up and resolve it.

You may pass at any time. Once you pass, your turn is skipped for the rest of the Command Phase, and you can still use leaders from your pool to oppose missions and to add them to combat. Any leaders still sitting on mission cards at the end of the Command Phase go back to your pool and the cards go back to your hand unrevealed. Passing early to keep a leader in reserve for a fight is a real tactic, not a forfeit.

3. Refresh Phase. Six steps, and this is where the game actually advances.

• Retrieve leaders off the board and back to your pool.
• The Rebel player draws one objective card.
• Advance the time marker one space along the track. If the new space has a recruit icon, each player draws two action cards, picks one leader from either card and adds him to the pool. If it has a build icon, both players build.
• Build. Each player places one unit on his build queue for each resource icon in his loyal and subjugated systems. The number printed next to the icon is the queue space the unit goes on. For a subjugated system you may use only the left-most icon.
• Deploy units. Starting with the Rebel player, each player slides all units one space down the build queue. Anything that slides off the board is ready, and you deploy it into a system where you have loyalty or subjugation, a maximum of two new units per system.

One thing to know before your first game, because the old version of this page never said it: the Rebel player places the Rebel base during setup, not the Imperial player. That single asymmetry is the game.

Setup, and the Rebel Base That Decides It

Setup runs in six steps. Each player takes his faction’s miniatures, leaders, loyalty markers, faction sheet, mission cards and action cards. Then each player takes his four leaders with no recruit icon into the Leader Pool box on his faction sheet, and leaders with a recruit icon start beside the board and cannot be used until recruited later. Then the two board halves go in the middle of the table with the time marker on space 1 and the reputation marker on space 14. Then the objective cards are sorted into three piles by the number on the card back, shuffled separately, and stacked III, II, I so the Rebel player draws from the easiest pile. Then the action cards with recruit icons are shuffled into an action deck and the rest go back in the box for now. Then starting units are deployed, Rebel first.

Set-up takes about thirty minutes. Plan for it.

How the base works. While it is hidden, the Rebel player can deploy units into the Rebel Base space on the board, which is a specific printed space and not the same thing as the system where the base actually sits. The base is revealed immediately if the Imperial player has loyalty or ground units in the same system, and when Imperial ground units walk in, the base is revealed before any combat resolves. On reveal, the probe card flips face up onto the Rebel Base space, and everything sitting in that space moves into the system named on the card. From then on the Rebel player cannot deploy into or move to the Rebel Base space, and the Imperial player’s job is simply to clear every Rebel unit out of that system. When the last one goes, the game ends.

Subjugation, the Imperial Tax System That Is Actually Named Something Else

This is the rule the old page missed and it is the reason the Empire is scary. Loyalty in Rebellion is not a score. It is a production licence.

• Every populous system is loyal to the Rebels, loyal to the Empire, or neutral. No marker means neutral. Coruscant is always loyal to the Imperial player and can never change hands.
• Gaining loyalty in a neutral system places your marker. Gaining loyalty in a system loyal to your opponent removes theirs, and the system becomes neutral.
• Subjugation happens the moment there is at least one Imperial ground unit in a system without Imperial loyalty. A subjugation marker goes into that system’s loyalty space. If the system was Rebel-loyal, the subjugation marker goes directly on top of the Rebel marker, which is the printed way of saying the population is being compelled to work for the Empire.
• A subjugated system builds for the Empire using its left-most resource icon only. The Rebel player cannot build or deploy units in a subjugated system, even with a Rebel marker sitting underneath the subjugation marker.
• If the Imperial ground units leave, the subjugation marker is discarded and the system’s loyalty returns to the Rebels, or to neutral if there was no Rebel marker underneath.

So a single Stormtrooper walking into a Rebel shipyard can halve what the Rebels can produce there. That is the whole Imperial economic game, and it is why the Empire can win on manufacturing rather than on conquest.

What Each Side Actually Sends Into the Fight

The miniatures are the simplest fact on this page and the old page never counted them. The box contains 153 plastic miniatures, and the Rules Reference lists every one.

Imperial, 89 miniatures. 24 TIE Fighters, 8 Assault Carriers, 8 Star Destroyers, 2 Super Star Destroyers, 2 Death Stars, 1 Death Star Under Construction, 30 Stormtroopers, 10 AT-STs, 4 AT-ATs. Note what the old page called the Executor. The miniature is the Super Star Destroyer and that is what the faction sheet calls it. There is no Executor in this game.

Rebel, 64 miniatures. 8 X-wings, 12 Y-wings, 4 Corellian Corvettes, 4 Rebel Transports, 3 Mon Cala Cruisers, 21 Rebel Troopers, 6 Airspeeders, 3 Shield Generators, 3 Ion Cannons.

The count gap is the theme. The Rebels have 64 figures to the Empire’s 89 and they are not going to win a straight fight, which is exactly why they build a base and a reputation instead. Separately, there are 25 leader miniatures with plastic stands, 12 Imperial and 13 Rebel, and a 153-miniature box is a real hobby commitment before a single rule is learned.

Health values, and the one that trips people. Every unit has a health value printed in a circle on the faction sheet, and that is the minimum damage needed to destroy it. A red health value means a capital ship. A black health value means a fighter. Ground units and structures are the other colour. So when you roll hits, a black hit can only be assigned to a black-health unit, and a direct hit can be assigned to any health. The Death Star has no health value at all and cannot be assigned or dealt damage by any means.

The Death Star. It follows all the normal ship rules except three. It has no health value. The Imperial player cannot retreat any units from a combat it is in. And it can be destroyed only by the Death Star Plans objective card. It also destroys entire systems, using the Research and Development mission to draw a Superlaser Online card, and if it destroys the system holding the Rebel base the Imperial player wins on the spot.

Combat, the Two Theatres, and How Damage Actually Lands

Two things make this combat system unlike most war games. First, there are two theatres, space and ground, and you cannot deal damage across them. Resolving the space battle does nothing to the Stormtroopers standing in the same system.

The order, per the Learn to Play and the Rules Reference:

• Add a leader. If you have no leader with tactic values in the system, you may take one from the pool and place it there.
• Draw tactic cards. You draw space cards equal to your leader’s space tactic value and ground cards equal to the ground tactic value. If you have several leaders in the system, you use only the highest for each value, not a sum. Tactic cards stay hidden from your opponent until played, and every discarded card is reshuffled back into its deck at the end of the combat.
• Combat round. Each unit attacks once. The current player resolves one attack with all his ships, then the opponent does the same, and then the same happens on the ground.
• An attack is: roll dice limited to five black and five red, then take any number of combat actions, either playing a tactic card or discarding a resource result to draw one.
• Assign damage. A hit must match the die’s colour to the target’s health colour. A direct hit can go anywhere.
• Block damage. Your opponent can play tactic cards to cancel damage assigned to his units. Blocked damage never happened.
• Destroy units. A unit is destroyed when its assigned damage equals or exceeds its health. Damage that does not destroy is tracked with markers and stays on until the end of the whole combat, so damage carries between combat rounds inside the same fight.

One rule worth internalising before your first game: you cannot destroy a unit with damage assigned until the end of the step in which it attacks, unless it has already attacked. That is why a ship can be sitting under lethal damage and still get its shot off.

The Two Win Conditions, and Why There Is No Scoring Phase

This is the section that costs people an evening when they get it wrong, so it gets its own heading.

Imperial wins immediately when there are Imperial units in the Rebel base’s system and there are no Rebel units in the system. The Rules Reference adds a hard constraint: the Imperial player can only win this way if the Rebel base is revealed.

Rebel wins immediately when the reputation marker is in the same space as the time marker on the time track. The time marker starts on 1 and creeps forward one space at the end of every round. The reputation marker starts on 14. The Rebel player closes the gap by playing objective cards, which each move the reputation marker a number of spaces toward the time marker, and by gaining Rebel loyalty through diplomacy missions. The Rules Reference says outright that the most common way the Rebels gain reputation is from objective cards.

That is the whole game. Two conditions on a board, both checked constantly, neither of them a final tally. The board is 32 systems in 8 regions of 4 systems each, split into two halves, and the outer edge of the map matters because you can be squeezed.

Four Players Is Real, and the Team Rules Are the Part Nobody Writes Down

The old FAQ on this page told you the definitive experience was two players and treated anything else as a compromise. The official rules say something more useful: at 3 or 4 players, up to two players control each team, split into an Admiral and a General.

• Both players on a team use the Team Game side of the faction sheet, which has separate leader pools for each of them.
• In the Command Phase, players take turns following the initiative number in their leader pool, #1 then #2.
• In a 3-player game, the single Rebel player uses the Team Game side and controls both the Admiral and the General roles. He has two turns in each Command Phase and must use his orange and blue leaders separately, and he passes for the Admiral and the General separately.
• Players on a team can share as much as they like, including showing cards to each other, but all discussion happens openly in front of their opponents. No private conversations, no leaving the room.
• The Imperial General handles the probe cards in a team game.
• One Imperial player is supplied with only a single captured leader ring, so capturing a second leader rescues the first.

What this means at the table: Rebellion at 4 players is a social game with a hidden-information problem, not a strategy game with more people. Our honest advice is two players, and four only if all four of you enjoy arguing in the open about whether a system is worth three cards.

The One Table That Answers the Real Buying Question

This is the table I wish I had before we spent three years buying the wrong boxes. The five games are not variations on a theme, they are five different hobbies with five different time commitments, and the honest comparison is hours per play and what you have to assemble.

Read the last row carefully before you dismiss it, because the single most useful thing anyone in the top ten results says about Star Wars games is that Empire vs. Rebellion gives you one of the best bang-for-buck values in the genre despite the Star Wars theme barely showing up in the gameplay. It is two players, it is card driven, and the first player to 7 victory points wins. If your objection to this genre is that every box is a four hour commitment, this is the honest answer and it is the one I would hand a friend.

There is also a sixth option worth a sentence. X-Wing is the fastest of the FFG miniatures games and the cheapest place to start a Star Wars hobby, and our X-Wing guide covers why it stays the genre standard. If the reason you are here is that your kid likes spaceships and not spreadsheets, that is the game, not this one.

Our House Strategy, Not Official Rules

Everything above is the published game, read out of the two official books. The rest is what we do at our table.

1. Imperial: conquer for production, not for territory. Subjugating a system you cannot hold is a waste of a Stormtrooper. Conquer what sits on a build icon and keep it, because a subjugated core world pays you every Refresh Phase.
2. Imperial: probe early and probe wide. Two probe cards a round is not many, and a base found in round four leaves you three hours of Empire. Spending an Intel mission to stack the probe hand is the highest leverage card play in the game.
3. Imperial: do not move the Death Star until you are ready to end it. It is nearly unkillable early and it stops you retreating from any combat it is in, which is a real cost if a Rebel player baits it into a fight.
4. Rebel: play objective cards early and unheroically. Reputation is the win condition, not a consolation prize. A card that gains one reputation the turn you could have chased a fleet is usually correct.
5. Rebel: the Rebel Base space is a trap you get to choose. Everything you stage there moves with you the moment the base is revealed, which means it is exactly as vulnerable as the system you reveal in.
6. Give the kids a job that is not the game. Emma counts dice for me and calls out health values, which is real arithmetic and a real job. Alex tried once, correctly concluded that nothing happens for a long time and then everything happens at once, and asked to go and play Sushi Go. Both answers are the honest answer to whether this suits a 7 year old, which is why our Sushi Go strategy guide is the page I actually send people to.

• Similarities: Both are asymmetric games where two factions play by different rules and the underdog wins by not being found.
• Differences: Rebellion hides a location and counts reputation on a track. Root is a shared map with escalating creatures and no hidden information.
• Why this game fans will enjoy it: If what you like about Rebellion is that the two sides are genuinely different games, Root delivers that in 90 minutes instead of four hours.

Is Star Wars: Rebellion a Family Game?

Honestly, at our table, no. Our family game nights are Catan and Sushi Go, and if you want the honest answer to which shelf a 7 and a 10 year old can actually play, our guide to games for kids who dislike complex rules is that shelf. Rebellion asks for three to four hours, a dining table cleared of homework, and the ability to lose a game of hundreds of decisions and want to play it again.

That said, three things are genuinely true about it as a family hobby. It teaches the same thing our dice and randomness guide talks about, which is that a bad roll in a good position is still a good position. It is a two player game, so a parent and a determined teenager can play it while the rest of the house does something else. And the asymmetry is the best teaching device in the franchise: Emma can play the Rebel Alliance with almost no rules explanation and still have a real shot, because the Rebel turn is simpler than the Imperial turn.

If you want the same war, the same asymmetry and a real shot at an evening, our Root review is the answer. If you want a sci-fi economy war that plays in an hour and a half, the Dune Imperium rules are the better family fit, and our other Dune guide covers the older box. If the draw is grim military sci-fi rather than Star Wars at all, our Warhammer 40,000 rules guide is the same kind of two hour, two player, build-then-play commitment. And if you want a game where a crew of players lies to your face in real time, Nemesis does the thing Rebellion’s hidden base only gestures at. Finally, if you want the Star Wars card game shelf rather than the war shelf, Dominion is the deckbuilder the Star Wars card line is built on.

What The Faction Fans Should Buy

• Choose Rebellion for the galaxy-spanning strategic war, and accept the four hours.
• Choose Armada for capital ship duels, where a maneuver tool at the bow of a Star Destroyer makes turning feel like turning, and where two command dials decide more than the shooting does.
• Choose Legion for ground warfare and a real army painting project, and note that the battlefield is 3 by 6 feet, which is a real table commitment. Our Ark Nova strategy guide is the other game on our shelf built around an action economy you spend each turn, which is the closest thing to what this brief wrongly called an action cube in a Star Wars game.
• Choose Imperial Assault for the only one of the five that runs in an evening, and the only one that scales to 5 players.
• Choose Empire vs. Rebellion for 20 minutes and two players, and do not expect the Death Star to feature.
• Choose Puerto Rico for none of the above, if what you actually wanted was a two hour economic war with good production. It is the best 90 minute game on our shelf and our space and sci-fi guide covers the rest of that shelf.

Star Wars Board Games FAQ

How many players does Star Wars: Rebellion need?

How long does a Star Wars: Rebellion game take?

What is the minimum age for Star Wars: Rebellion?

How do you win a game of Star Wars: Rebellion?

Does Star Wars: Rebellion have an action cube or a final scoring phase?

What is subjugation in Star Wars: Rebellion?

Which Star Wars board game is best for a family?

Do you have to assemble and paint the miniatures to play?

My Star Wars: Rebellion Verdict