We played our first game Wednesday evening. Our group usually plays Edge of the Empire/Age of Rebellion on Wednesdays, but with Christmas and New Years, I did not have time to come up with much of a scenario and IA arrived on Tuesday.

We totally love this game. It still captures the spirit of our combat from Edge/Age and the players and I had a blast.

I am sure we made a crap-ton of mistakes, while playing the tutorial and Aftermath. But, It was fairly easy to pick up still.

It really seems you need to have 4 heroes playing to make it through.

My thought is to have all 6 heroes available to the group as a team. The group can pick up to 4 to play for each mission as long as there is a defined break where it would still be thematic. I will read them the mission briefing and they select the strike team with the other two "remaining on the ship."

Should we have less players, do you recommend one or two players play 2 heroes each?

I had a 4 player game with 3 rebels and the extra activation token. Worked really well.

I big thing I missed a couple times is that if you only have 3 heroes, they each get a "Heroic" reward card thing or whatever they're called.

With only two they get a Legendary one. This makes them much more powerful.

I would prefer 4 players though, since with 2 players they each get 2 activations and as such can really just blast around the map like crazy if they use all their actions on moving... :\

@Talisker55

I'm glad you got a chance to play! And even more glad that your group seems to love it.

I prefer four heroes on the board just by gut instinct. I haven't tried 2 heroes yet, but RogueLiutenant has a point about movement.

Your idea with having all 6 heroes available is interesting. My concern is for leveling up with xp. I suppose everybody levels up every mission?

Yeah I visited my buddy and we wanted to try the campaign, but it was just the two of us so he controlled two guys each with legendary rewards.

We did a mission where he had to investigate terminals. He ran to each terminal and just blew past my guys. I really couldn't keep up. I had barely scratched the rebels before they got to the last terminal. He won pretty easily. Being able to move so much, particularly in a mission where you don't care about fighting the bad guys, was really crazy.

@Talisker55

I'm glad you got a chance to play! And even more glad that your group seems to love it.

I prefer four heroes on the board just by gut instinct. I haven't tried 2 heroes yet, but RogueLiutenant has a point about movement.

Your idea with having all 6 heroes available is interesting. My concern is for leveling up with xp. I suppose everybody levels up every mission?

Was thinking of only the 4 heroes doing the mission would get experience. If I had to guess, the group would most likely just stick to the same heroes, but wanted to give them the option to change things around a bit. From what I have read so far there seems to be more combat oriented missions and some not so combat related so they could share the missions over all 6 heroes.

I'm running through two campaigns on two different days. Campaign 1 has four players, each with a "regular" rebel and campaign 2 has two players, each with a "Legendary" rebel. For whatever reason the rebels in the two player game are simply dominating the Imperials. I've only won a single mission and we've played six so far. On the other hand, in the four player game the breakdown is 50/50 between rebels and Imperials in four missions. Don't know if it's me, the players, or the mechanics. Both campaigns are awesome though and everyone is having fun!

I'm not surprised that the 2-hero campaign is dominated by the Rebels. When many of the missions are oriented around reaching objectives on the map (and with a time limit), it makes sense that a character that can move 4x will be more effective than 2 characters that can move 2x each.

Here's another way of looking at it: From a combat perspective, heroes often need to move once before they can make an attack. Therefore, in a 4-hero party, that's up to 4 actions per round spent on movement, and only 4 spent on attacking. [We're talking in generalities here, of course.] But if you only have 2 guys who need to move, then they've got 3 actions each for attacking (or resting!), which means a lot more damage output in ideal situations.

My boys and I are playing with 3 heroes, and I think it works really well. I think it's the best of both worlds, since they can give the Extra Activation token to whoever can use it best for that round.