I played this earlier this year and was frustrated. Maybe it was the person running the game fault (their first time running it), but I didn't know what my limits were. My background in gaming is to play a level to perfection, getting every item you can. The first time we played the first level, we knew that there was an unknown time limit, so we wanted to complete our mission as fast as possible, but at the same time we saw these boxes full of goodies that we can get. My thinking was, there are boxes we can get, so therefore we must have time to get them AND complete the mission. Nope. Also things would happen without warning, either ending a level(I forget what a level was called), or causing us to miss out of something.

What I'm try to say is, it seemed like there was a lot of guessing involved in what strategy to use, no matter how good of a player you were at strategy games. It left a sour taste in my mouth and I LOVE these types of games. I'm hoping the person running the game just did it wrong, or do you see this type of opinion here a lot?

If it's suppose to be that way, I guess it's very realistic, because rebels wouldn't know everything that would happen ahead of time, but... even though realistic, is that fun?

No, they have not read the rules.

The imperial player reads the flavor text and the associated rules block for each event if and when that event happens. This applies to mission briefing too. The rebels always know their lose condition (including round limit or the absence of it) and they know either their win condition, or how to progress the mission.

Also, both the imperial player and rebels should carefully read the second page of the campaign book. There is nothing secret before page 4.

An example of the mission briefing of Aftermath: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/27437636#27437636

Edit: Of course, not everything is known, so the rebels are still guessing how much time they should spend defeating imperials and how much advancing their objective.

It's true, you should always know the rules and victory/loss conditions during a mission.

Of course, these can change over time. For instance, one time, the Rebels loss condition went from having ALL players wounded to having a specific player withdraw- so sometimes, the Imperial player is going to know more than the Rebels.

So, essentially you should always know what your objective is, but you really can't afford to be a perfectionist in this game.

Your imperial player messed up. I know some boardgaming groups frown on this for some reason (I guess because of D&D) but when playing IA, it's a good idea to keep a copy of the Rules Reference Guide and Learn to Play Guide on the table for all players to be able to reference during the game. You can also ask to read the page of the campaign guide for the mission you just played after the game to double-check and make sure no rules were skipped or missed during the mission.

When I first started playing IA as a Rebel player, our Imperial player was using a lot of Descent rules that hadn't carried over into IA, like delayed Resting and movement for large figures, and didn't even know about using surges to recover strain. And after we played Gideon's side mission, he only gave us Gideon's character reward card, and I thought it was odd that the reward gave you a discount for an ally we didn't even have, so I asked to look at the mission page and pointed out that the mission reward included Rebel Troopers, which he had missed. Imperial players are human and it's a good idea to check their work whenever you can.

That being said, your notion that just because there are boxes on the map means that you should be able to open all of them and still win the mission is flawed. Usually you will be able to open 2 and still have enough actions left to win the mission, but unless you have some heroes that make opening crates easier like Mak or Loku, chasing all of them is usually a plan B when you know you are going to lose and want to pad your loss with some extra credits. If you're able to open every crate on the map and still win the mission, your Imperial player is probably going easy on you.

7 hours ago, Darth Poopdeck said:

I played this earlier this year and was frustrated. Maybe it was the person running the game fault (their first time running it), but I didn't know what my limits were. My background in gaming is to play a level to perfection, getting every item you can. The first time we played the first level, we knew that there was an unknown time limit, so we wanted to complete our mission as fast as possible, but at the same time we saw these boxes full of goodies that we can get. My thinking was, there are boxes we can get, so therefore we must have time to get them AND complete the mission. Nope. Also things would happen without warning, either ending a level(I forget what a level was called), or causing us to miss out of something.

What I'm try to say is, it seemed like there was a lot of guessing involved in what strategy to use, no matter how good of a player you were at strategy games. It left a sour taste in my mouth and I LOVE these types of games. I'm hoping the person running the game just did it wrong, or do you see this type of opinion here a lot?

If it's suppose to be that way, I guess it's very realistic, because rebels wouldn't know everything that would happen ahead of time, but... even though realistic, is that fun?

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

~Joshua (WarGames - 1983)