We have arrived to the Top 10, the length of list most people would generally make for their favorite games. It is definitely been great to have the ability to play tons of great games. The first game in the Top 10 is Imperial Assault, a game closely related to a game we recently talked about - Descent. When you upgrade my favorite dungeon crawler with a few mechanic tweaks and a Star Wars theme I knew I was going to be a fan before it even got released!
Some of the updates to the original system they made were to alter the order of play and add some more features to the dice. In Descent all of the heroes take their turn and then all of the bad guys take their steps. This can be very overpowering very quickly and not give players too much of an opportunity to react. Now in Imperial Assault it is more of a back and forth with one player activating and then one enemy group activating. Giving both parties more chances to react to the others movements.
For the dice the ability to completely miss on an attack left the attack dice and is now on the defense dice, and only one of them at that. So if you are one of the special characters that rolls a white die for defense you have a chance to dodge an attack entirely. This also means that the attacker will never cause their own attack to fail (unless they are too far away). Fantasy Flight also added a surge blocker to the defense dice so there is a chance that the defender can take away the ability to use some damaging abilities that can be very painful!
Lastly, the Star Wars them is really what made the game a strong appeal for us. While we do enjoy the fantasy setting of Terrinoth as well we have less connection to the setting and the world. With no firm idea of the world we are playing on the story is less consequential. Playing the Star Wars universe with tons of games, movies, and books to remember makes the campaign story much more deep to us. While you never get to play as the main characters sometimes they do make a cameo in your campaign!
Imperial Assault is in the end just a better game mechanically than Descent, so with or without the theme change this game would have been higher on the list. There is also a skirmish mode that they put in Imperial Assault that a lot of people tend to really enjoy. We just haven’t given it a try ourselves as we love the campaign setting. It takes a while to learn all the mechanics and their intricacies but if you are a fan of Star Wars or sci-fi dungeon crawlers you owe it to yourself to give our #10, Imperial Assault, a play or two!