I like the new direction the game's taken, I mean, I LIKE it a lot. But I wonder if perhaps there are too many tokens? I count Wound, Focus, Force, and Death Star counter, for a total of 4.

I recall CoC and how its two primary resources (Wound and Investigation tokens) are printed on opposite sides of the same square tokens. This tactic makes it seem a lot less cumbersome to have two types, and I sincerely hope FFG does the same with Star Wars' Wound and Focus tokens, even though the game has the disadvantage of frequently requiring both types to be placed on the same card.

I thought the same (repeatedly!) while watching the gameplay video. Piles and piles of tokens! It seems that each new FFG release has more tokens than their previous. By 2014 we'll have Tokens:The Tokening, a game box with 6000 tokens and a 32-page rule book. Where do I store all this crap? FFG's game boxes are often enormously oversized for their contents, especially their LCGs, yet there are no dividers or any other ways to store different contents :/

I think that the pile of tokens is ridiculous. If I buy this, I won't use them, except for maybe the Death Star and the Force. You can easily turn cars sideways when exhausted, and the objective cards can be turned 90 degrees for one use of resource and 180 for two. I don't get why they need so many game pieces for a card game.

herozeromes said:

The reason for this is that multiple Focus tokens can be placed on a single card, with cumulative effects. The demo video that's been posted here revealed that this will likely happen frequently during an average match.

The tokens they had out on the table were their generic coloured tokens from the web store. I'm sure they'll have something more intuitive, that won't require you to have dozens of each in a pile in the middle. In practice, if you were playing with a friend that had his/her own collection, you would just use your own, which you can keep off to the side in a little organizer.

I don't mind LCG's coming in a box that's way to big for the 200 or so cards contained within. There'll be expansions to add in. I just use strips of cardboard to divide everything into rows, and you can go further with dividers by set if you please. There are plenty of pics on BGG for various games that show off people's organization skills.

Bandai really won my heart with their Resident Evil deck building game. By the time you get the Premiere set, and the three expansions, you'll have one relatively small box to hold all the cards in (even sleeved), in two rows, and a full-colour, cardboard divider for each type of card in the series. While the game is fun and not without its problems, Bandai gets a A+++ on built-in card storage with your purchase.

You forgot the shield token. Watching the demo video from GenCon I was almost expecting extra tokens to pop-up during the game like green bacta token for healing effect.

I so agree with you, I think it's getting ridiculous. It shouldn't be called a card game anymore.

As someone who played the Lord of the Rings TCG by Decipher, I can tell you that game had a lot of tokens as well and it never bothered me in the least. The LotR game had tokens for Burdens, Wounds, Threats, and the Twilight pool.

I actually think that its easier to keep track of certain game states with tokens rather than other methods.

but that's just my 2 cents

herozeromes said:

You don't get why because you clearly have never played or seen the game played. You can jam up enemy cards with so many force tokens with the tactics ability that in order to use any "tap" method you'd have to rotate each card 1/16th for each force token applied. Does that sound doable to you?

ScottieATF said:

You don't need to be hostile to get a point across. In fact it's usually harder to do it that way.

Might just be me but it may be easy to just use dice, most gamers are going to have millions of different dice and a simple use of a D10 for force counters on stuff should be generally more than enough and will also result in less counters being needed. this will also make reading card texts easier and also allow to see more of the artwork

Yeah, dice are a little less cumbersome that tokens sometimes, but I think sometimes they are shied away from as an "official" counting mechanism just because of the possibility of knocking them over during play and losing the info. I often used d6s with printed numbers in Decipher's Lord of the Rings, but in large tournaments I had to go back to tokens.

Majeh_XIII said:

I could go for this instead of using tokens for everything. I hope they decide to do different colors of dice instead of tokens. Otherwise, there really are just too many components to deal with.

I must be immune to this issue, having played so many FFG games, but the tokens issue just isn't one, for me. In fact, having an alternative to the usual trick of exhausting a card by turning it on its side is something that greatly appeals - having the space around each card to move it around all the time often leads to having an unwieldy play area, so just dumping a token on the card to signify this is going to be a lot easier for me, I think.

spalanzani said:

That's a good point, friend. I think this game is going to force us as players to dispense with a lot of sacred cows that have been around for the last 20 years. This time last week, I was savagely opposed to the idea of pod-based deckbuilding, and now I'm staunchly in favor of it. Similarly, turning a card on its side just seems like the natural order of things when it comes to CCG gameplay, and departing from that in favor of tokens is gonna take some getting used to. But the company's goal is to make this LCG "the greatest, most engaging game experience that FFG could deliver," and if making that a reality will come at the price of butchering some sacred cows, I say off with their heads!

Dice would be way worse than the counters. Instead of just grabbing one token off of each activated unit, you'd have to pick up each die and find the newly adjusted number.

That's fine for like 2-3 units. That is not fine with like 10 or more units, like what I saw in the demo videos.

I use six-sided dice to track damage in the SWTCG, which typically has several units in play on each side. It's not that hard. All the same, I agree that tokens would be the preferred option.

Surely for there must better way of doing without the counting, it's just the designers has been using that as their solution for most of their game. Not a bad thing, I have a lot of fun with them. But I must say I find the idea of the best experience involving a lot of counter disappointing. After all the effort with the redesign I was hoping for a more elegant system, not more token than ever.

I am still not sure if I'll get the game. If I do though, I'll design and print a few numbered cards (+1 +2…) with different colors to replace all those tokens. I am not sure how if it will work and it's still a lot of bean counting but at least it'll feel like I am playing a card game. I have tried using a dice before but it didn't really work.

My biggest gripe is probably the # of tokens. But, after playing, it wasn't horrible. The Death Star counter won't probably be a token, and not that many cards have shields. Many cards won't have a wound on them for much of the game either. Maybe too many rules for a starter set, but overall I rarely thought 'too many tokens'. *shrug*

Look at the Decipher game - your deck was your life (which I LOVE as a mechanic) so that was cool…but by the 2nd or 3rd set people had 12 cards on the table before the game started. There are different ways to clutter up the table, and I would rather have tokens than a huge amount of cards that you have to remember at all times.

Talk about tokens… let's say, an old classic game called Vampire: The Eternal Strugle. Lot's of tokens everywhere…

Talk about a new classic game called Android: Netrunner. Lot's of tokens and most of them distinct.

So no. This game doesn't have too many tokens.

rings said:

Let's be fair… it wasn't until the 6th set that you could start more than 1 card on table at all, and that only gave you one extra card.

I don't mind tokens in card games - Dune CCG has piles of tokens, sometimes more than 10 on several individual cards. The four types of tokens are: favour, deferment, spice & solaris.

I find using 4 colours of the FFG gaming tokens work quite well. Alternatively you can use the dials made by companies like Litko that can count from 0-100 or 0-10. As mentioned dice can also work, especially oversized dice, or pen & paper.

My preference is to use tokens.

I've been using the same tokens that FFG was using in the demo videos (they sell them through their online store) to play my homemade demo decks and I really like them. These nice plastic counters are easy to pick up and move and don't hinder or delay play. In fact, they become rather intuitive.

That said, the tokens will be nice cardboard when the actual game comes out, like all of FFG's other games, as indicated by the pictures in that first preview, which I also don't really have a problem with in playing other LCGs like Lord of the Rings. But I might just keep using the plastic counters if the colors will still sync up good.

I do sort of wish, though, that the Focus tokens were a color other than red, the ubiquitous "wound token" color.

MarthWMaster said:

Agreed. That was my first thought as well when I saw that.

MarthWMaster said:

Maybe the wound tokens will be textured in Counter-Intuitive Green?