Hi all.

This will be the first boardgame I buy for a while now, I played simliar games in the past and ther are som questions I have.

1:It seems like there are 6 different heroes in the game but the missions are only designed to use 4 of them at the time.

Why is that, when you have the diffrent heroes, why not use them all?

2: If I play with my friends we are going to alternate using the Empire, is that possible?

That also means that the character we use will miss some games, will this affect its progress (miss exp and credist?)

Is there some sort of progress for the Imperial player that the hero you use can take advantage of or is it a nonissue due to other mechanics?

It is also always fun as the bad guy to have something real to fight for, some sort of long term goal.

Hope somebody has some thoughts on this.

Have fun

landoro

1. More heroes means more options, even if the game isn't set up specifically to handle all the heroes at once. Likewise, there'll likely be more heroes released down the line - but just because there could be more than 10 heroes available, doesn't mean you can play them all at once. You could probably think of a way of buffing up the Empire player to try and balance the game out for 5 or 6 Rebel players - but the game is specifically designed for 2-4, so you may run into issues.

2. The game is made specifically so that in a campaign, everyone sticks to their roles. So the person starting as Empire plays through to the end, all players who start as each of their Rebel heroes, sticks to that specific hero. This is for a few reasons, like players picking and choosing things to progress their own characters through their XP and credits, as well as bonuses applied specifically to certain characters (some characters have their own personal sidequests); and the same goes for the Empire player. So constantly swapping characters in and out or trading who plays the Empire can cause a lot of issues since you'll have things set up for specific play types and styles that another person may not use.

Basically, the game is meant to be 1 player (Empire) vs. a group of players (Rebels), each doing their best to win each of the missions and get as well-equipped as they can for the final mission in the campaign - the winner of that mission is determined as the winner of the campaign. So I guess if nobody in your group really cares about the overall campaign winner, then you could probably get away with swapping around; you'd just need to try and keep all characters at comparable XP and credits/equipment - which could be more than a bit of a hassle.

There's some basic instructions on the campaign (they didn't post up the actual book with each mission and its instructions though) on the Imperial Assault site, it should give you better understanding of the campaign mode.

If I was playing a campaign with my local gaming buddies (and I will), I'm sure we'd find a way to allow for role-swapping. I don't think it would actually be all that hard. We would just all agree together on what characters we'd use for the campaign. Then, each night we'd decide together who would be the Imperial player for that night, and the rest of the guys would choose which of the in-play heroes they'll use that night. We'd all agree not to look in the campaign book past the mission that we're working at the time. I imagine that the Imperial role would likely keep swapping between me and another guy, while the other 2 guys would probably just play the same 2 heroes the entire time. Therefore he and I would just agree together on which hero looked best to the both of us, and go with that. We're not into the hyper-competitive cut-throat stuff when it comes to games like this, so I don't think it would matter that the whole campaign is leading toward a winner/loser final result.

So yeah, I really don't think it would be a problem to swap the Imperial and Rebel players, as long as they can agree on some things from the start.

I mentioned this somewhere else, but if you have more than 5 players, but no more than 7, you could rotate characters in an out each session pretty easily as long as you never had more than 5 each session.

Give equal xp to all characters (if not on this mission, they were doing something for the Rebellion). This way, they all progress equally and no one falls behind.

It would make each mission a little more dynamic as you would be rotating characters in an out and adapting your playstyle to fit that group of characters.

I think this would be more interesting, and could make for some interesting scenarios (doing a side quest for someone not currently in the group).

The game is designed to have 1 imperial player for the entire campaign, but I doubt anything would be lost (other than continuity) by rotating players between that role and a character as long as the current Imp controller didn't look ahead.

I'd think I'd prefer to run with 1 IP, and then if someone else wants a turn, rotate for the next campaign. A new IP, with a new Imp deck would certainly help with the replayability.