My son is turning 16, and he wants to have an Imperial Assault game day. Hassle is, even with him as Imperials, pulling it off will mean there will be 6 to 8 players.

Does anyone have any suggestions to make it happen?

Might not necessarily be the answer you want to hear: if I got 6-8 people I'd just split it into 2 group and have 5 of us play IA + 3 other people play something else

5 is the perfect number

Anything more than 5 means there'll be more downtime (I've come to notice that I prefer 1v1 nowadays: me Imperial vs. someone else controlling all 4 heroes, everything goes super fast) and no guarantee on mission balance

6: you can try to have 2 Imperial players discussing Imp strategies

7: same as 6, but throw in an extra Rebel ally (and give Imp the corresponding threats)

8: not sure

Again like I said, I would just cap it to no more than 5 people, but those are some of the houserules I've seen for 5+

To echo what @ricope said, it might not be what you want to hear, but "something else" is going to be the way to go.

To at least keep IA on the table, you could take the 8 people and split them into 2 groups and play the 4 player skirmish maps from Hoth and Jabba, but that requires you to then provide materials for 8 people to play skirmish which I'm assuming isn't in the proverbial cards.

I would suggest with a group of friends that large, all playing the same game, to get into a social deduction game like Battlestar Galactica, The Thing, etc.

On 2018/01/21 at 11:53 AM, TheEldarGuy said:

My son is turning 16, and he wants to have an Imperial Assault game day. Hassle is, even with him as Imperials, pulling it off will mean there will be 6 to 8 players.

Does anyone have any suggestions to make it happen?

If he is determined to play the campaign with a larger group, you could try the following without messing with the balance :

Split the group in some way, 1 : 7, or 3 : 5 or something. One side is the Imperial player, the other is the Rebels. Instead of anyone controlling any specific hero or side, each side can make decisions by committee. Each player takes turns to be the the deciding player to prevent spending too much time making decisions. Eg every activation is the next player and the rest offer advice. This way you can still play 4 heroes without messing with the way the game was intended to be played.

I very much appreciate everyone's response. He's pretty keen to get some of his friends into the game. Some of these suggestions are pretty useful. The only other person to run the game would my daughter, and I don't know if the 16 year old boys want to get beaten by a 13 year old girl. She wipes us out every time.

Girls can be ruthless.

Again, thanks.

I've played 6 in large home brew maps, but at that point it's really more about throwing lots of minis on the board for the Rebels to annihilate than following the rules of a mission. Since the Imperial player is taking half the turns it's important that they play very quickly. It will still be a bit slow though. You are best splitting into two groups.

A couple thoughts-

If there are 6 players, you could potentially add in one player who picks an ally to play as. The Empire would earn threat for that ally, and they should probably pick an ally with decent health (like Chewie, Han, or Luke) to discourage player elimination. I wouldn't suggest Lando, for instance.

If there are 7, have two players play as the Empire- one can activate merc troops while the other activates Imperial troops. Maybe make a rule that you can not deploy or reinforce groups from one faction if it has more units on the board than the other faction and the minority faction has undeployed open groups, just to encourage keeping it even. Try to avoid missions where the units restrict an entire faction.

Not sure about eight players. You could potentially bring in another Rebel ally. If you do this, I would suggest giving the Empire the threat, but I'd also increase their Open Groups by 1 for each mission, with the caveat that that chosen figure could not exceed 3 pts (or maybe more, that's just an example) and is deployed during setup. This would allow the Imperials to hopefully avoid the funky activation disadvantage they'd start to see with more and more Rebel units hitting the field.

Or , you could design your own group of epic scenarios. The above situations are obviously going to mess with the game's balance anyway, so why not have a seven hero mission on a giant map with tons of Imperials and walkers, maybe seeing Luke and Han squaring off against Vader and Fett as well? You could roughly playtest the thing yourself. The thing about balance in campaign is that it's basically an illusion. Sure, all games are playtested, and they are balanced as much as possible, but it's absolutely impossible to account for all herl/item/class/open group combinations, especially when so much new content has been released. Do you think the Core set balanced itself for the eventual arrival of Sentry droids or Jet Troopers? I seriously doubt it.

My suggestion would be to assign some sort of threat amount for the additional heroes- a typical mission, early in campaign, for instance, might see rprobe, rstormies, and rofficer as starting groups. That's 11 threat, or roughly 2.75 threat per Rebel activation. If you're adding in more activations, you may want to consider either sticking with that number, or perhaps even raising it to account for the activation advantage. Also, consider that you will not necessarily need or want the Imperials to have activation advantage on the first round, but they should have the opportunity to gain it via deployments.

As a final warning- while perfect balance is definitely an unattainable goal even for FFG in these campaigns, you are likely to notice larger margins of victory with the more components that you add to a mission. Once one side starts to win the pitch of the battle, a snowballing effect is extremely possible. Maybe you can add mission effects to counter this- such as "if there are no more troopers on the board at the end of the round, deploy one regular stormtrooper group," or "Whenever a hero is defeated, all other heroes can choose whether to recover 5 stamina or 5 health."

Stuff like that, that can benefit a side that could be losing.

8 players around a single map?!? That's very likely to slow down the mission pace I think. I would split players into 2 groups of 1 imperial vs 3 rebel players (one hero per player). Each would play a different mission. After each mission, some rebel players could switch group for fun. You could try to pick up missions that you can somehow relate to each others. For example, there is one mission in the core set that has the rebels holding a base buying time for another group (just mentioned in the narrative) to fulfill their mission. You could pick this mission for one group and another mission about the rebels infiltrating an imperial outpost for the other group. If you are only playing with the core set, you may come up with the issue that some imperial figures are needed on both missions. Maybe you can try to avoid that by selecting the missions that have the less imperial deployment in common. Or you could just use other markers (pennies?) to represent the extra imperial troops?

6 hours ago, IanSolo_FFG said:

8 players around a single map?!? That's very likely to slow down the mission pace I think. I would split players into 2 groups of 1 imperial vs 3 rebel players (one hero per player). Each would play a different mission. After each mission, some rebel players could switch group for fun. You could try to pick up missions that you can somehow relate to each others. For example, there is one mission in the core set that has the rebels holding a base buying time for another group (just mentioned in the narrative) to fulfill their mission. You could pick this mission for one group and another mission about the rebels infiltrating an imperial outpost for the other group. If you are only playing with the core set, you may come up with the issue that some imperial figures are needed on both missions. Maybe you can try to avoid that by selecting the missions that have the less imperial deployment in common. Or you could just use other markers (pennies?) to represent the extra imperial troops?

Unless you have two core sets you can never play two missions at the same time. Not enough tokens, doors, joining tiles. While most can be faked, the joining tiles would be tricky. Or you'd have to print out the maps which is costly. Even drawing from the supply cards would be tricky unless you're both drawing from the same deck.

as my Son's birthday is near the Grand Prix - and that's going to be his primary present, we have been able to bring his party down to a manageable 5 to 6 friends.

I appreciate the response and some of the creative ways getting the game moving, I like the 6th player utilising the Ally idea.

If the crew had more experience, I'd try and set up a tournament style play in two teams.