(Instead of bombing and necroing my way through all the threads I've been reading, I thought I'd aggregate my fanboying right here, feel free to delete if inappropriate).
My literal thought process when I saw the videos:
I live 80 miles away from the nearest FLGS. I "play" X-Wing because I can convince or connive my wife into sympathy games every now and then. I would never get to play this.
It's expensive.
I own partially assembled and painted core sets for several games (Classic Battletech and 40k's Assault on Black Reach both spring prominantly to mind), this will just join the pile.
grow up self, you have four kids and muchos stuff you need to spend money on.
. . . who the **** am I kidding, I want it. I want it sooo bad. I'll make up rules and play by myself, and I love painting figures, self-inflicted Christmas (well, new years.. [sigh]), gift on the way.
Kinda amused at how one's initial knee jerk reaction is "Hunh... it's 40k, StarWars Edition!.... oh well, that's fine".. Then watch the Team Covenant video and designer boy all but practically says that exact thing. i.e. "I was drawn to something as a teenager, I think it was 40k." , all the talk about movement and actions being simplified without the ugly specific of what they were simplified from .
It's all good though, That the concept even exists is both creating and scratching an itch I didn't know I had.
Thought it interesting that folks are mentioning the distinct possibility of Imperial over-saturation. But then realized that I rather suspected they were right, because 1. I wanted to play Imperial (but I always have, given the choice), annnnd 2. From tabletop distance, you could almost scoop up the rebel troops (except the Duros) and plop them down on a dozen other game boards and they wouldn't seem out of place (even 40k). Whereas Stormtroopers are unmistakably and definitively Star Wars. Thoughts?
Custom terrain; this has always been on of my favorite parts of walking into an actual game store with a community.. seeing evidence of hobby love going on. Stoked about this bit. Never cared for the concept of IA, no offense at all to those that do, but it wasn't the droid I was looking for, if that makes sense, much more of a skirmish guy than a dungeon crawler. Don't laugh but I've been using a square of black felt covered in salt for my X Wing board, hey, it's very OT authentic.
So.. white dice suck. The offense/defense balance difference between Rebs and Stormies is kinda cool.. just hoping the white dice hit ratio doesn't lead to unupgraded Stormtroopers being essentially styrofoam packing peanuts on the game board, (which would be thematic I guess). If you can keep your Rebel Troopers on the board the black dice seem (using only my powerful imagination, mind you), to hit comparitively like a ton of bricks.
When I saw the included vehicles I thought the speeder bikes were cool, but would be a points waste that could go towards upgraded hero or troops. Then when I watched the Covenant video, I changed that viewpoint to just "Are Cool". I especially love that they can also fire their holdout pistols... even if two black dice each for those things seems like... tremendously good shooting from a guy hauling **** on a bike twisting around to shoot a snub nosed pistol. Not that I would change it for anything, it's awesome, I want to play with the bikes just to specifically use that 360* range 1-2 pistol shot.
Also stoked about the handling of the heros, from what wee little we've seen so far. Interesting that we get ESB era Luke. In fact I immediately thought .oO(Eh, I'll paint mine up like RoTJ Luke)Oo. but then realized that they'll probably release an RoTJ Luke down the road and oh what a faux pas I will have committed then.
