One of the most engaging and thematic features of the 1998 PC game was the way the Empire and Rebellion played a cat and mouse game, with the Rebels typically moving its HQ and construction facilities to more distant star systems and having its fleets evading Imperial forces until such time as they had grown significantly in strength. Playing as the Empire, it was huge fun trying to hunt down Rebel forces with probe droids (shades of Vader's "What of the reports of the rebel fleet massing near Sullust?") and then trap and crush them. It was also great having limited intelligence on systems on which you didn't have a political or military presence. It was, for example, fascinating to drop out of hyperspace and find that the planet believed to be uninhabited now contained a small neutral colony with growing industrial facilities (shades of Admiral Ozzel's " My Lord, there are so many uncharted settlements. It could be smugglers ; it could be pirates. ")

Can a Star Wars strategy board game really work without this kind of fog of war? God-level overview of the whole playing area and its contents would surely wreck the experience?

Surely FFG are going to build FoW into this game?

Oh, please do, FFG...

This is by far the most important question about this game. How do you keep players honest if they're going places and building things outside the view of their opponent?

Does anyone know of any existing board games that accomplish what hismhs is talking about?

Letters from Whitechapel has London police chasing Jack the Ripper. Jack has to escape to his hideout each night, and his moves are hidden, revealed only if a police player investigates a space Jack moved through. The Jack player records his hideout location and his moved on a scoresheet provided with the game.

You could easily do something similar with Rebellion for the Rebel player.

There are a number of good fog of war mechanics - blocks (see columbia games) fake counters 'dummies' and general misdirection rules (you rolled a 3 to search, so i am undetected...) but i think this game is too zoomed out for any of these.

Maybe the combat mechanic will be such that it's unnecessary. And of course theer are the cards which could deal with the random encounters you refer to.

You can see in the top left there, some sort of 'holding zone' for rebel units. And on the right of the board, there's 3 zones for rebels and 3 zones for Imperial units. Maybe this is some sort of production track?

Here you can see more clearly that the zone in the top left is 'generic' planet - this probably represents the rebel base, but doesn't place it on the map. You can also more clearly see the spaces on the right of the board, and the imperial and rebel symbols for each faction's zones.

Also A closer look at Mon Calamari ™ reveals the hexagonal space in which either the Rebel or Imperial player could place a loyalty marker, as well as its two resource icons and the "3" in the green circle to their left, which indicates where any ships that you build using its resources would be placed on the build track.

So I guess the build track is that portion of the board along the left edge?

They do appear to be numbered 1-3. Now is that a countdown, or a count-up? I think a countdown would be more fun (because countdowns are always fun and the units would be coming closer toward you), but I bet it's a count-up because Mon Cal's production facilities are supposed to be pretty superb.

[EDIT: D'oh, I thought you said right edge.]

As was pointed out above, there are other several ways to introduce a fog-of-war element without having to use some sort of hidden movement mechanic (though there's nothing wrong with that either). We don't really know how units get activated currently (other than Leaders appear to be involved) so there might be some restrictions that hamper the Empire's ability to act against Rebel units freely.

Freedom in the Galaxy, as an example, had all stacks of unit counters on the map (though what was in a stack was hidden IIRC); what prevented the Empire from simply hammering the Rebels was that the Empire player had to draw cards that restricted where he could move that turn; this represented political interference with military operations, interservice rivalry, etc. The COIN series of games from GMT deal with insurgency, and are also open map; the games are card driven and require the anti-rebel to fix and then destroy rebel forces, giving rebel forces a chance to escape or go to ground before the hammer comes down. I suspect that something like this will be used for Rebellion.

-Will

Hi, I found part in the announcement that might be pointing to Rebel Base being hidden. There's part about the Empire capturing rebel leaders and using traps like "Homing Beacon" that releases the character and forces him/her to be placed in any system in the Rebel's base region. Seems like the Empire is taking an awful risk in releasing a rebel leader, so the information must be worth it.

EDIT Duh, later it clearly says that the Empire is looking for a hidden Rebel Base, so that's hardly news, but maybe Rebels have cards and leaders than can infiltrate imperial systems freely.

A lot of the speculation here is correct. Rebels do have ways to infiltrate systems, and even cause uprisings. Han can blow stuff up. The generic planet in the corner is where the Rebel players stores all the defense units that are in his hidden base. Only the rebel player knows where his base is. The hidden base can be moved periodically, but there are one or two consequences to that. Troops, ships, and things are put in the build que on the side, which counts down. Little units take only one turn, while larger units take as long as three turns.

I would tell you more, but I'm keeping my last live bothan as a pet.

(On a side note, I know where to get some really cheap forclosures on the bothan home world.)

Honestly I think the "hidden movement" with leaders is just a you-go-I-go system, so a player won't know where that leader is going to go until the holding player activates it to do its thing. I can believe that leader characters remain off-board until they are placed for activation to do their ability, so movement is not really hidden as much as "it doesn't happen anyway".

As for military forces, we know the Rebels can allocate defenses to the Rebel base that just triggers when the base is discovered. But the Rebellion cannot hope to withstand any decent assault by the Empire (I'm guessing) since Imperial units are just so much stronger than anything the Rebels can field. Otherwise card play is probably going to allow instantaneous unit movement, no hidden movement is required since units will not be in transit.

interesting!