With Saw Gerrera and Admiral Motti NOT having the recruitment icon on the back of their Action Cards, how have people been playing this? Cannot find anything in the rules (with the exception of no longer being able to have more than 8 leaders in your pool, which kinda sucks for "Lure of the Dark Side" and Han's recruitment action). Have people been starting with 5 leaders or picking 4 from a pool of 5 and then chucking in their "Action Cards" for random drawing.

According to the rules you start with the 4 leaders that do not have a recruitment icon in them. Even though Saw's action card doesn't have a recruit icon, his leader figure does, so you don't get to choose which 4 will start, they'll always be Leia, Mon Mothma, Dodonna and Rieekan for the Rebels. In the beginning you shuffle all starting action cards (including the one from Saw) and you draw 2 of them. If one of the 2 you draw was Saw, you can choose to draw another inicial action card or use that one immediately to lose 1 reputation and recruit Saw to start with 5 leaders.

Thank-you Lemmi, most useful. Should have looked at the figure as well!

Plus there's another one WITH Saw on it, that is in the normal deck, so if you choose not to take him right away you can still get him later.

Saw and Motti were implemented in a way to add variety to the game. Instead of always having the same 4 leaders to start, there might be a fifth leader running around. However, both come with a drawback. To recruit Motti, you have to put Tarkin and Motti in an Imperial system before the first Assignment phase of the game. This means you will only have 3 Imperial leaders on turn 1 (you give up some turn-one flexibility for a fast ramp-up to 8 leaders). To recruit Saw, you lose a reputation as the Rebels. I think that means you need to be able to convert his presence into an extra reputation or two for him to be worth it. Do you really want to give the Imperials an extra turn to find the Rebel base just so you can have an extra leader for a few turns? Tough question.

54 minutes ago, RobertK said:

To recruit Saw, you lose a reputation as the Rebels. I think that means you need to be able to convert his presence into an extra reputation or two for him to be worth it. Do you really want to give the Imperials an extra turn to find the Rebel base just so you can have an extra leader for a few turns? Tough question.

Full disclaimer: I've only won two of the ten or so games I've played with @Mikael Hasselstein , but when I did, by the time I was getting my reputation to meet the turn counter, I was going past it. I think Saw will be a general "yes" for me for most games, though I do love the extra chance to get the Leia card, which is boss.