Just to clarify what I mean, I initially entered Imperial Assault somewhat cautiously in early 2016, right around the same time Rebellion came out. The base game seemed cool, and I liked the idea of skirmish (ironically, I've since played almost exclusively campaign).

To me, the main draw were the minis, really. I first got the Core Box and all of its associated packs, then went and got Twin Shadows and Hoth (also with their associated packs). I gradually started picking up the other packs (the bantha, smuggler, etc) and I got The Bespin Gambit when it was first announced.

If anything, from those early months, I remember being really overwhelmed. The idea of "waves" was something that I latched onto pretty early on, since it seemed to dictate what I should or shouldn't buy at any given time, but even so there was so much to learn, so many packs that I needed to place in their respective waves.

Nothing really stuck out to me, though. It was all classic Star Wars, but I think that was kind of what made it not particularly stand out to me. It's not that I disliked it, but since I hadn't started even playing the game yet, it just kinda seemed like Rebellion had a lot more driving narrative force (which I still don't necessarily disagree with, from a certain point of view).

Obviously the minis were cool (especially the AT-STs!) but I really didn't appreciate the heroes for what they were yet (again, it would be several months until I actually played the game).

For some reason, my perspective really changed with the game with the announcement of Wave 7. The inclusion of Obi Wan and Greedo in the game were totally unexpected, but very welcome. Instead of going through the motions and bringing in the obvious characters (like the then unreleased Jedi Luke, for instance) we were getting characters who really didn't fit quite into any of the stories yet- and that was totally okay with me!

What really got me was the Grand Inquisitor, though. It would be about half a year before I even tried to begin Rebels at that point, but I'd seen enough promotional material to know that he was the show's big bad (at least for a while). Even not being a fan of Rebels then, the concept of the Grand Inquisitor joining the game really blew the roof off of this game's potential for me. Again, instead of just going through the motions ("we did Hoth, now let's do Bespin, then Endor") Wave 7 opened up the game to the new canon, which at that time I was still pretty unfamiliar with, though eager to learn about.

I think that Jabba's Realm was an exciting announcement, but it didn't have the pizzazz that Wave 7 did. Luckily, Waves 9 and 10 both continued and built on my enthusiasm for Wave 7. More Rebels characters, stuff from the comics, some light prequel sprinklings, and some iconic stuff like the Emperor and Jawas to temper the more out of the box elements.

So yeah, for me, Wave 7 was what really defined Imperial Assault for me. But I'm curious what others have to say. Obviously, if I'd started playing earlier, maybe something like Return to Hoth would've been equally as surprising (especially since it wouldn't have been lumped in the large pile of components that were available when I started playing). And I'm sure for many, stuff like Wave 7 is actually pretty polarizing, especially with the precedent it set for stuff like Wave 10. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

It wasn't any Wave in particular that hooked me. I just bought up everything as soon as I could get my hands on it after playing a skirmish match with a friend and his painted minis, also in 2016. I've played Core with a friend & Hoth Solo with RJAI and most of Jabba's with 3 other friends. I'm starting my 7th? play through of Flight of the Freedom Fighter with an experienced IA player but he hadn't played LotA before Tuesday night. I have a serious issue where I can't play with unpainted minis.

Great post!

A little back ground first : I entered IA somehow by accident. One day I stumbled on FFG's website and found out that Star Wars Rebellion the board game was in the making! That brought great memories as I used to play the video game some 15 years ago and loved it. Since Rebellion had just been announced I wanted something to chew on in the meantime. At the store I had 2 boxes in my hands : Armada and Imperial Assault. Armada finally won as the Endor space battle had always been one of my favorite scene from the original trilogy. However, after several attempts, I found out that Armada was not the game I was looking for (Where were you Obi-Wan, you could have saved me a lot of trouble ) To that point I had already bought a space mat, the Home one and ISD expansions as well as a few fighter expansions. The lack of a proper campaign slowly got me out of Armada. So I decided to sell it ... first time ever I sold something with a Star Wars tag on it. Interestingly Armada released the Correlian campaign a few months after I sold the game, but by that time I had went back to that store and bought Imperial Assault and never looked back at Armada. However, IA collected dust on my shelf for quite some times since in the meantime Rebellion got released. I played Rebellion non-stop (with friends and alone despite the fact that this game was clearly not meant to be played solo) for several months, until a friend of mine who also bought IA actually had me put Rebellion aside on one night (quite a remarkable feat at that time lol) to try it out. I loved it! Only listening to my impulse I bought several expansions, while my lovely wife got me pretty much everything else I was missing for my birthday (It was the time when Jabba's Realm was about to come out).

For me, the campaign aspect of IA is very important as this is what I was looking for originally with Rebellion . You tell a story on a galactic-scale. Now IA is much more intimate. What I really like about that game is that feeling that whatever you are doing must be happening "off-camera" (Have yet to find the deleted scenes of A New Hope where Gaarkhan charged those poor stormtroopers ).

Probably the best example of that : Return to Hoth spoiler

As much as I like timeline, I think the release of the Heart of the Empire expansion is a promising and refreshing idea. Aside from Maul and to a lesser extent Ahsoka, that campaign could really be happening anytime from the birth of the Empire to the the original trilogy era. So for me it's that sort of campaign that let me uses all of the minis without the feel that this character shouldn't be there because according to canon timeline he's one with the Force. As far as Maul goes, if I wanted the HotE to occur between ANH and ESB, I suppose I could setup a little narrative about a force user shapeshifter using Maul's form to taunt the Emperor maybe? It may, in itself be a defining moment of IA too.

Interesting stories, guys!

@The Cocky Rooster , I'm the same way. I've been building and painting my Descent collection lately, and while my wife wants to give the app a try I'm making us wait until everything is painted.

@IanSolo_FFG Agreed as well. Like I said, skirmish is what initially attracted me to the game, but campaign immediately stole my interest. Curious- since The Corellian Conflict brought campaign play to Armada, have you been tempted to jump back in? (I know I have been wanting to give it a try).

I'm a wargamer and miniatures painter since my early teens almost 30 years ago, and I'm a Star Wars fan even longer than that. Imperial Assault never was on my radar, until I stumbled into my flgs last summer and bought the Hera & Chopper Ally Pack just for the fun of it to have a look at the minis and paint them. It helped that I greatly enjoyed REBELS. I found the minis to be of a much higher quality than many people claimed (and I've seen loads and loads of minis over the years), and I really liked the style of the sculpts and enjoyed painting them. THEN I was told at my flgs that a new expansion was due by the end of the year, accompanied by three new figure packs. I asked which characters would be new, and they told me Ahsoka Tano, Maul, and Palpatine. They had me at 'Ahsoka Tano' - my favorite character since Clone Wars, so that gave me the impetus to have a go at the skirmish game. After the first game, I was hooked and excited as I've not been in a long time. The rest is history. I paint all my Imperial Assault minis to a high display standard and regard them as much more than just playing pieces, and I go out of my way to teach the game to many other boardgamers and wargamers I know here in Germany - with some success, which is very encouraging.

I've played many, many games in my life - boardgames, wargames, miniatures games, the last category being my favorite simply because I love collecting and painting beautiful miniatures. Without exaggeration, Imperial Assault is the miniatures game I enjoyed and still enjoy the most of all the games I've played, something I'd never have expected only a year ago - it just ticks all the right boxes.

See I jumped ship from Armada (pun accidentally, but now totally intended ) which I loved obsessively! I played a few tournaments and had almost weekly games with a couple of mates of mine. I'd got into tabletop gaming in last few years due to friends of my girlfriend, one day someone jokingly said "now its your turn to buy into something", and I fell down the FFG rabbit hole with Armada.

But moving to a new flat with a slightly smaller living room made Armada a bit cumbersome, what with the real estate needed to play, plus set-up took a looooong time. I was also listening to Intensify Forward Firepower podcast at the time, which eventually fizzled out, due to them moving on to other games, IA in particular them saying had drawn them in. So I ordered the core set for xmas and loved it.

My group are a lot more inclined to play narrative based games, so it was a much better fit for us (I had written an epic Armada campaign, but it was homebrew, so an out-of box-star wars narrative game sounded great). Plus I get to throw loads of stormtroopers at them!

Also, Armada had been the first minis I'd painted in 15years, and then IA got me back painting minifigs, and its totally given me back a hobby, I forgot I had loved so much!

My friend got me into X-wing, but told me a better game was coming out that had more balanced dice and command cards. He didn't like IA, so he got out. But after he did, he gave me his painting supplies. I never thought I'd paint, but I did and enjoyed it. That and I was getting **** sick of all of the cheaters and whiners in X-wing. I find IA more civilized. There's less questionable ways to play and **** you get to sit down! I'm an old man! I don't want to stand for 8 hours playing a game only to win a piece of paper alt art card or plastic tokens!

Wave 2 hooked me in. Boba Fett? Where? Also, having Threepio and R2 being actually useful in the game was pretty cool. However, the best wave is still wave 7 in my opinion. Because GIA.

For the longest time, I looked at Imperial Assault as a Campaign game. No one in my area seemed to be playing anything competitively besides X-Wing. In the lead-up to my first Worlds, some of our local players started to teach me about Skirmish. It was much closer to the wargames I've played in the past so I decided to give it a try. I thought it would be okay (it was great) and I thought maybe I'd just borrow figures (I went all-in). By the time we got to Worlds, we were playing Skirmish any chance we weren't playing X-Wing and had even brought tourney lists in case there was any way to get into that event (there wasn't lol).

What really sold Imperial Assault for me was the ISB Infiltrators pack. When I started playing, Bespin Gambit was the newest release and the Infiltrators were the first thing I bought. They reminded me of the Imperial Commandos from the old SW Rebellion PC game, and I always enjoyed the portrayal of the Imperial Security Bureau in the old X-Wing novels. I hope future releases make the ISBs a bit more relevant because I'd love to play them more often. Right now they are pretty out-classed by Riot Troopers and Jet Troopers.

4 hours ago, NeverBetTheFett said:

Wave 2 hooked me in. Boba Fett? Where?

Many waves later, and we're all still saying "Boba Fett?! Where?!"

On topic, for me it was the first announcement that it was even coming out. I've been with the system since Doom and once I got my hands on that Core in December 2014, I made preparations to liquidate Descent 2E and actually managed to sell it to someone before literally walking in to a game store to use some of that cash to by the X-Wing premier scum wave, and then I proceeded to win the Store Championship that was about to take place.

18 hours ago, Smashotron said:

For the longest time, I looked at Imperial Assault as a Campaign game. No one in my area seemed to be playing anything competitively besides X-Wing. In the lead-up to my first Worlds, some of our local players started to teach me about Skirmish. It was much closer to the wargames I've played in the past so I decided to give it a try. I thought it would be okay (it was great) and I thought maybe I'd just borrow figures (I went all-in). By the time we got to Worlds, we were playing Skirmish any chance we weren't playing X-Wing and had even brought tourney lists in case there was any way to get into that event (there wasn't lol).

What really sold Imperial Assault for me was the ISB Infiltrators pack. When I started playing, Bespin Gambit was the newest release and the Infiltrators were the first thing I bought. They reminded me of the Imperial Commandos from the old SW Rebellion PC game, and I always enjoyed the portrayal of the Imperial Security Bureau in the old X-Wing novels. I hope future releases make the ISBs a bit more relevant because I'd love to play them more often. Right now they are pretty out-classed by Riot Troopers and Jet Troopers.

I played the #$@* out of Rebellion on PC. Loved that game!

1 hour ago, zuckuss12 said:

I played the #$@* out of Rebellion on PC. Loved that game!

I got it working on Steam recently and cannot stop crushing those pesky rebellions!

Edit: It can crash sometimes before or after a space battle so save often! http://store.steampowered.com/app/441550/STAR_WARS_Rebellion/

I think my file may have been corrupted, because I downloaded it a few years ago (to prepare for the board game actually) and the space battles didn't work for me. Seems like a really cool game otherwise, though! Also, @IanSolo_FFG , I totally got into IA while waiting for Rebellion, too! I love both games, but I never would've thought that IA would get significantly more play time at my house.

Wave 1. First game I ever played I knew I needed more of it in my life.

The core / wave 1.

We got our 5th player back semi-regularly, so I was in a look-out of a 5-player game. Imperial Assault hit the spot. Although it wasn't that good of a match for our group in the end, that didn't prevent me from getting really deep into it, thanks to BGG's Imperial Assault rules forum and little later the Play By Forum forum.

Imperial Assault made me a Star Wars fan, not the other way around.

I have kept up to date with Imperial Assault ever since the beginning, and gotten better in painting - IA was not quite my first game to paint (Room 25 was).

1 hour ago, a1bert said:

Imperial Assault made me a Star Wars fan, not the other way around.

Now that's really interesting. Just out of curiosity, do you have any preferences on new canon vs Legends?

I got into the game shortly after Hoth came out. Everything was super cool and interesting, and I had high anticipation for Bespin. I checked the updates daily and was giddy when they announced Bossk and counted down the days till release. The tiles for bespin are also really cool, which added to the excitement. I remember when it came out and one of my friends calling Murne "Murnie Sanders". It was a good time, and the game has only gotten better since then.

35 minutes ago, subtrendy2 said:

Just out of curiosity, do you have any preferences on new canon vs Legends?

I have read a few SW books back in the days, but don't remember much, so I'm pretty much aligned with the current canon. (Sure, I have watched the original trilogy probably more than half a dozen times during the years, but it wasn't being a fan of Star Wars, just a fan of speculative-fiction/fantasy in general.)

When I started out on skirmish (never played campaign, as I own everything Descent and play that as campaign instead) I went to play Scum, as I didn't seem to need the Core set that much (and could borrow). So I bought Sabs and C-3PO & R2D2 box to flesh out my Scum lists. Didn't go all too well

I think, while Hoth is left in the dust, the HKs that came there were the first shining light for Scum-skirmish but ultimately Jabba's Realm is what has really made them both competitive and unique as a list.