It’s been a couple of weeks since our last review! We were busy with our Spring Cleaning Sale, and it took up all of our time! We’re back to writing reviews, and we have a great game today! Welcome to our Review of Fantasy Flight Games‘ Star Wars: Outer Rim.

So you are probably thinking, is this a new Star Wars game? No, actually, it was first released a while ago. They have a new expansion coming out later this year called Unfinished Business, so we thought it would be a good time to check this game out. If you love the Star Wars universe as much as we do, this game will allow you to enact all your smuggler, mercenary, and bounty hunter fantasies in this great game!

Game Overview – Star Wars: Outer Rim

This game is a bit unique. The overall goal is to gain ten fame across the Outer Rim.

Each player plays a character from Star Wars who gains fame in different ways. A player could be a smuggler such as Han Solo or Lando Calrissian, or they could be a bounty hunter like Boba Fett, for instance. Each of these characters has different strengths. By performing Jobs, Bounties, or delivering Cargo, a player can gain credits, reputation, and fame.

In Star Wars: Outer Rim, there are four competing factions (Rebels, Imperials, Syndicate, and the Hutts). Each sends out patrol ships and depending on how your reputation is with a specific faction (positive, neutral, or negative), you either can pass freely or are stopped, or even worse, you must fight them.

Here’s a quick dive into how this game plays. Each player takes a turn with their turn consisting of Planning, Action, and Encounter steps. A Player can choose to move, take 2000 galactic credits, or repair their character and ship during the planning step. The number of spaces a player moves is determined by their ship’s hyperdrive number. At the start of the game, each player starts with one of two starter ships with different hyperdrive and attack and hull numbers.

After the planning step, the player moves to their Action Step. The player can do as many actions as they want during this time. The player can trade with another player in their space. They can shop at the market, including picking up bounties, purchasing cargo, obtaining jobs, modding the ship, or even buying a new boat. Do you want Han to have the Millennium Falcon? Well, save up your 20000 galactic credits. Cards represent each item above in the market, and if a player wants one, they need to purchase it. Bounties and Jobs often cost 0 credits, but players must have an open slot on their personal board. You may even get to perform the Kessel Run with Han as a job.

In the case of bounties, you must locate the specific character on the board by encountering contact tokens (we’ll explain that in a sec) and defeating the character in combat. Once a player defeats them, you can do one of two things. A player can choose to eliminate them, which gains them galactic credits and fame. Or they can deliver them to a specific planet, which usually gets you more credits and possibly more fame. The downside is that it takes time to deliver a bounty.

In the case of a job, you must go to the location on the job and perform the encounter (which we’ll explain in a sec). These cards are often multistep skill tests that if you pass all the tests, you gain the reward, which is often credits and fame as well. Along with delivering cargo, these two are how a player predominantly gains credits in the game.

Finally, the round ends with the Encounter Step. Suppose a player is in a space with a ship patrol from one of the factions, AND they have a negative reputation with the faction. In that case, they must choose to encounter the patrol and perform combat. Otherwise, a player may choose to encounter their planet, a nav point, or a specific contact token on the planet. The planets and nav points have separate decks of encounters.

When a player encounters a contact on a planet, some of the databank cards will allow you to bring that character into your crew. They give you different skills and special rules to help you get more fame.

As mentioned above, a player can also perform actions listed on their job or bounty cards during the encounter step. These, along with encountering contacts, require a player to search for the correct numbered card in the Databank deck. Then follow the instructions on the card, which include story beats explaining what a player is doing with the character.

These often require a skill test that has a player rolling two dice. If a player’s character card or any of their crew does not have the skill listed on the card, the test is unskilled, and the player needs to roll a critical hit to pass…not easy. If they have the skill listed, they need to roll either a hit or a critical hit… a bit easier. Finally, if they have the skill listed more than once, they are highly skilled and a critical hit, hit, or focus icon.

Game Components

Star Wars: Outer Rim has many components and a unique board. To start, the board is not a traditional rectangular or square board. It is a narrow circular arc of a board to represent the galaxy’s outer rim. The board contains 11 planets, each with two spaces for contacts and routes running between them all. At first, we thought this was an abnormally small board as it comes in 6 modular pieces. But when put it together, the board is about three feet wide. The detail of the planets is fantastic, and we love the fact the game encourages you to randomly lay out the tiles for a different configuration to keep the board fresh.

Each player starts the game by taking a player board, a starter ship, a character standee, a character card, and any starting databank cards. The player board is exciting. It has slots where the character card goes, two job/bounty slots, and two gear slots. The boards are double thick because the fame tracker has inset holes for the peg tracker. There are also four vertical tracks for each of the four factions. Each column has a positive, negative, and neutral area. As you gain/lose reputation with each faction, you slide the appropriate marker up and down its track. We liked the way Fantasy Flight Games laid out the player board. Our only complaint is that there is a notch in the player board for the ship. The ship card is large as well but made of standard card stock. We wish it was thicker and made of the game board material.

Besides these player-specific items, the game also comes with approximately 200 cards split into various decks. Each with different iconography on its back and are color coded so you can easily recognize what they represent. The graphics are right on theme, and the illustrations on the cards evoke the Star Wars aesthetic. The standees and character cards have excellent imagery, which extends to all the tokens as well.

Finally, the game uses custom dice. The dice have hit, critical hit, and focus icons, and each has different game uses.

Gameplay

We’ve described a lot about the gameplay in the overview. We know a lot is going on in this game. Each player has several different paths they can take to gain the fame they need to win the game. It comes down to doing bounties, cargo deliveries, and jobs to earn galactic credits, which you then spend to upgrade your ship and gain the fame you need.

The game is not easy, and you can get carried away trying to do something different from what the character you play did in the movies. I, for instance, tried to play Han. I wanted the Falcon, so I tried to do a bunch of bounties, but Han is much more suited to cargo delivery, and I should have focused on that to gain money and fame. In our second game, I decided to be more tactical and play Boba Fett and specifically go after bounties. Well, I did screw this up, too, unfortunately. Boba Fett can (as a unique action) look at one contact on their current planet without “encountering it” – trying to find a specific character as a bounty. My problem is I didn’t realize that the green color of the bounty card did not represent the color of the contact token I should be looking for. I got all the way around the board and had looked at every green contact, only to realize that the border around the contact’s image on my bounty card was white and not green. I should have been checking the white contacts and not the green. Green is the general color of the bounty. Unfortunately, this event set me back in the game by quite a lot.

Overall Impressions

Besides those minor hiccups, we enjoyed Star Wars: Outer Rim and would highly recommend it to any Star Wars fan. This game, similar to Star Wars: Rebellion, is very thematic and, dare we say, Cinematic in its presentation. The cards’ content makes you feel like your character is completing jobs in the universe. 

The only downside of this game is that it’s a bit slow to get going. The first couple of rounds skews toward gathering bounties, jobs, and cargo from the marketplace. Then you are off performing those jobs. The game does have a decent learning curve, but it comes with a handy Learn to Play Guide. 

 If you are interested in getting this game for yourself, we have it available in our store.

We can’t wait to see what is coming in the Unfinished Business expansion.