Star Wars Legion 800 pt Battle Report

By Chris Masucci

It has taken me quite some time to get around to playing Fantasy Flight’s licensed star wars ground combat offering, Star Wars Legion. Being pitched as a small scale skirmish game centering around a few fire teams, a commander and a vehicle or two, Legion sells itself as a light miniatures game that uses the Star Wars license to create your own small scale battles. Originally starting with units and vehicles from the original Star Wars set of films, the game has expanded more recently with the inclusion of two new armies from the Clone Wars era. All of these armies are fully compatible and can be fielded against each other.

Our group met up this past Saturday to get a game of legion in and see how the ruleset plays out. The sides were set with four players on the table, two of us with empire and our opponents with clones and droids from the newer clone wars set.

Constructing our armies was simple enough, each unit comes with a stat card and a number of upgrade cards. Any players familiar with Fantasy Flight’s X-wing game system will feel at home. Players will alternate activating units and are allotted two actions per unit to use on things like moving, shooting, aiming and dodging.

Numerous commander cards and abilities further enhance unit synergies and can modify unit synergies further. Assembling our forces, we ended up with two empire players on one side and a republic and separatist player on the other side. The mission was a simple 3 objective capture with clear conditions and battleline deployment.

General Veers and an imperial officer lead the empire’s army while the fearsome General Grievous and Captain Rex faced them on the opposing side. The battle began with the imperial forces deploying their stormtrooper corps to take defensive positions near the central objective, while two occupier GAV tanks moved more squadrons to begin an attack on enemy positions.

In response, Rex lead a large grouping of clone troopers and a BARC speeder into the center and left flank to claim the vital objectives while Grievous and a horde of B1 droids moved around to the right flank of the table. The fighting soon began when imperial troops disembarked from their transports and began firing at the advancing clones. Weathering this storm of fire, the clones provided fire support on the flank and eliminated the imperial troops while suffering casualties themselves.

The center of the board was also seeing an attack by the BARC speeder and more advancing clones. To combat this threat the imperial elite, death troopers and royal guard were called up, their superior and advanced attacks made short work of those attempting to advance to the center objective.

With the center of the board dissolving into a stalemate the clones were successful in taking the left flank, providing heavy fire support with their speeder and infantry heavy weapons, one of the occupier tanks was destroyed. In response to this, the royal guard changed course and charged the speeder, making short work of it. Rex and his troops ran into the center objective and put heavy fire onto the death troopers, but again the royal guard and numerous stormtroopers sent them back again.

The imperials brought the fight to the droids as well, with Grievous falling to the combined firepower of the second occupier and more stormtroopers. The B1 droid horde moved closer to the center objective, but we reached the end of turn six before their arrival took place, ending the game with a 6-4 imperial victory.