Tried Spice Mission 3 times last night as rebels - lost badly all three times.

My heroes test (fist) pretty weak to begin with (Jyn: single blue; Diala: blue and green), so I'm pretty much set up favoring failure to start. I also included Skywalker, since I won him and wanted to use him.

Strategy - send Luke out ahead of everyone else so he can do some damage to help you get the key. If he dies, so be it, no big deal. Then bring everyone else out and finish the mission.

Reality - Luke adds 10 threat and an immediate optional deployment for the imps. That puts 2 Trandoshians and 1 probe droid on the field. So, Luke moves his 5 into the middle, and attacks (ranged) at a Trandoshian holding a token. He dies before the 4th Trandoshian even activates (because relentless is broken).

Consequence: I've just allowed the imps to place 3 figures that aren't even CLOSE in strength to Luke in play and now I've got to deal with them for the rest of the mission without my 10-cost ally.

Can't afford to hang back and dart out to deal damage, because I only have 6 rounds. With 2 heroes that suck at (fist) testing, I really only have Chewie to grab spice barrels.

Adjustment: Don't cast Luke and just start as normal - still running into the attribute test issue - not to mention wounded heroes can't test for the spice barrels. I also rolled at least 6 complete cancels with my white die during this last game and still timed out.

Anyone have a solid strategy for this one? When my wife played it against me, she had Fenn and Gaarkhan. Gaarkhan is an auto-win for testing. But I can't believe that if you don't run Gaarkhan, the answer is 'don't bother running this mission'.

I don't think a one die attribute is an autofail. We played a different mission on friday night and the Imperial player kept trying to force our Gaarkhan to roll awareness tests. One of them was after he was wounded, so he was focused, he passed; the other two were after he used his focus to attack, so he was rolling onr blue die and he passed both.

The only attribute die I would consider an automatic fail is the red die. It only has one surge, if I recall correctly.

Its harder with 2 heroes for sure, but Diala is decent enough, particularly if you have a way to get her focused. You will obviously want to setup Chewy to get 2-3 barrels.

I did this with my group of four and we managed to succeed with a little time to spare despite it looking bad early on. We had Fenn, Jyn, Diala, Gaarkhan, (and obviously Chewy). Focused on killing the card holders early on, we had to kill all three to get it. Chewy broke off when we were on the last one to start grabbing crates on the far side (the ones that were not behind the door). Once we had the key we had to circle around to the other door (since the Imp player blocked the closer one with troopers and we couldn't waste time killing them). Once we had the door open, we positioned Chewy to grab 2 on the last turn, Fenn grabbed two on Blue/Green with Diala providing re-rolls and Jyn picked up the last one with the same (she was focused) without needing the re-roll. Was close, but our Imperial player likes to swarm us and block halls. So in total Fenn picked up 2, Jyn 1, and Chewie grabbed 3. Our Gaarkhan picked up none, since he was first player to be wounded by our Imp player. He just did a lot of killing and trying to keep the Imps off our grabbers.

Maybe it's the 2-hero thing then. Perhaps I'll try it running 4 heroes.

I'm pretty sure the blue die has only 2 surge results out of 6. So, it's almost assured failure for me (I have bad luck worthy of record). And I did try 2 grabs with Diala (one focused) and still no joy. And I get bad luck doesn't define a game's balance.

I'm thinking you just gotta run Chewie like a bat out of heck to get to the first 2 barrels, then just try to murder-face all of the dudes carrying chits.

NOTE: Forgot to mention, I attacked/killed the baddie holding the key FIRST in every attempt. The ones I lost. Horribly.

Did I mention my horrendous bad luck?

What i ahve noticed is that, despite the differneces in teh two games, IA is like Descent in that a 2 hero game is Imperial biased, a 3 hero game is hero biased and a 4 hero game is goldilocks.

Try playing with two hero each. You won't get the legendary upgrade tokens, but you will get more action variety and attribnute variety too.

I don't think a one die attribute is an autofail. We played a different mission on friday night and the Imperial player kept trying to force our Gaarkhan to roll awareness tests. One of them was after he was wounded, so he was focused,

Garkaahn doesn't get focus from an attack when he get wounded. The ability of Garkaahn reads: After an attack resolves ....

So if he gets wounded, he is wounded when the timing frame for "After an attack resolves" and Garkaahn doesn't have the Focus ability on the wounded side.

At least that's how I read the timing structure.

I meant wounded as in "taking damage" not wounded as in "flipping the card over"

He gets focused if he takes 3 damage in one attack. IN all the missions we've palyed so far, that means gaarkhan is focused, almost every round after we encounter the first imperials.

I think he means Garkaahn had take three hits not that his card had been flipped to the wounded profile.

I have played this mission with the same characters as my second side mission, and won.

I had taken Diala's skill for tests and I had the Force reward from the first side mission, but didn't use either.

Wasn't looking too good for most of the mission but kept Chewy moving forward (double moved to get across the water effectively) his auto pass makes working out moves much easier, Diala took one outside and two in the room Chewy did the same, one the last turn since I knew Chewy would pass and Diala passed her first attempt of a possible four, Jyn was left with two activations and not a lot to do so she ran back to pick up supply crates.

I have concluded the same that 4 heroes is much better than 2 with two activations, not only can you have more skills coverd, cover more of the board for missions, but critically you get the same rewards per hero, if two heroes got double credits or more xp I think they might be better off, as is I might change to running 4 heroes just because it will open up more strategies which will keep things interesting as the campaign goes on.

The problem our group had with this mission was that by the time we finally found the key, got the door open, and were close to being in place to grab barrels of spice, we didn't have enough healthy heros (or Chewbacca) to carry them out in time!