Here’s how to play the new Star Wars: Shatterpoint Game from the Atomic Mass Games demo review at AdpetiCon 2023!
We’ve seen a decent amount from AMG over the last couple of months about the gameplay, but seeing a full game is much better! We’ll go over a bunch of the mechanics but also have the video for you below so you can watch a whole game if you want.
With the Core Set available for pre-order it’s even better to see how the game plays before you actually buy it, so let’s get into the game.
How to Play Star Wars Shatterpoint Game Full Demo & Review
Each unit comprises a certain number of characters and each character or unit will have two cards. Each unit can have more than one character in it, which you can tell by the number of little men on the bottom. Some abilities will only affect the main character, while some will affect the whole unit. Characters in a unit don’t have to stay together; they can go about as they, please.
When looking at the cards, they gave us a legend to keep track of everything:
Using this as a guide we can see that Anakin has 1 Active ability, 2 Reactive abilities, and 1 Identity since he is a Primary Unit. The cost to use Force Jump is 1, I’m Going to End This is 2, and Deflect is 0. Per the rules for Identity abilities, Anakin never has to spend Force to use his This Is Where The Fun Begins ability.
However, remember those Wound tokens we talked about earlier? They don’t just matter for determining when a Unit is defeated. For each Wound token a Unit has the cost of its Active and Reactive abilities increases by 1 Force. So, Anakin with 1 Wound token would have to spend 2 Force to use Force Jump and 1 Force to use Deflect. Wounding enemy units not only helps you win victories it also can significantly slow them down as their abilities become more and more of a drain on your opponent’s limited Force Pool.
There aren’t too many symbols, so looking at the cards shouldn’t get too confusing. It’s also interesting that you increase the cost as the characters get injured. Definitely an interesting mechanic and makes wounding units even more valuable.
Struggle Counter
Before we talk too much about the Missions themselves, let’s talk about the Struggle. There is a dashboard for players to track the Struggle – a sort of tug-o-war between the players. At the end of each player’s Turn they will score points, moving the struggle token toward their end of the track. If the Struggle token ever reaches the end of that player’s track, they win the current Struggle!
When a player gains a Momentum token, it is added to the end of their track.
But, unlike the old school-yard game, Shatterpoint throws a monkey wrench into the works. Momentum tokens are added to a player’s side of the track as certain actions are performed – most notably wounding enemy characters, but there are character special rules and other ways to gain momentum as well. Momentum moves the end of your track toward the center making it easier for you to achieve victory and is an important part of any strategy!
You gain momentum tokens for wounding enemy characters, getting objectives, and so on. When you pull the struggle token to your track, you win. The game is based on three different struggles, so after you win the first one, the game is not over. The trackers all get removed, and you go to the next objective.
However, you will keep all your damage and such, meaning if you go all out to win the first one, you might not be able to win the next two.
Whoever loses the struggle gets to pick the following map.
Character Activation
Each character will also come with a third card; this will be their activation card. You shuffle your cards together, and whatever card you flip is what character goes next.
How to Play Star Wars Shatterpoint: Force Tokens
At the start of the game, you pool all your force tokens and these will be what you can use throughout the game.
Throughout the game players will spend Force to activate their Unit’s abilities and to place Order cards in reserve. It is up to each player to carefully weigh how to use their limited Force pool when activating their Units. Should they spend a majority of it early on a couple of powerful activations? Or should they be more sparing with the Force available to them, letting every Unit potentially use some of their abilities but not all? Smart use of a player’s Force pool will mean the difference between victory and defeat.
Jedi and certain characters can use these tokens to perform different actions, but once you’ve used all your force tokens, they are gone for the rest of that struggle, so use them wisely!
Maybe the most common use of the force tokens is to put a drawn card into reserve. This allows you to draw another activation card, and you can decide to play the reserve card whenever you choose (on your activation).
Movement
The game uses 5 range tools for measuring things like abilities and attacks: 4 range tools numbered 2-5 and a shove tool. Range 1 abilities can be measured using the short end of any of the Range tools or either end of the shove tool. Movement in Shatterpoint uses just two movement tools. The long movement tool is used when a character makes an advance, while the short movement tool is used for a number of different movements like dashing, jumping, and climbing. The use of these tools means that measuring anything in the game is fast and easy.
Movement sticks and aides are a cornerstone of AMG games, so this isn’t anything too crazy. You can also use the markers to attack or climb. However, if you don’t want to move, you can use those actions to recover (take wounds off), take cover (extra defense die against ranged attacks), or focus (make your attack better).
Just keep in mind, you move each character separately, and they must end their move touching the movement tool.
For moving over elevated terrain, you have this smaller tool. If your tool is taller than the terrain, you can move over it. If you can’t get over the terrain, that’s that. However, ingress points, such as ladders, will let you move up basically for free.
If you end within range one of a ladder, you’re character just moves up.
Abilities
There are different types of abilities, such as defensive, innate, and attack. Some are free, others cost actions, and some cost force. There are also built-in actions, such as taking cover.
Attacking
In Star Wars Shatterpoint to attack, first, you have to look at the attack’s range and measure it with the correct tool. Then, the first number in the block is the number of attack dice you get; everyone (without special rules) gets four attack dice.
Then, for the results, you have strikes (normal hits), criticals (can’t be stopped by the defense dice), fail results, and expertise rolls.
Expertise rolls are pretty strong as you look at the bottom left of the card and add the results from that column to your roll. In this case, two expertise rolls add a critical hit and two regular hits.
How to Play Star Wars: Shatterpoint Defense
You start with your defense dice and add your hunker-down tokens as extra dice. In this case, they had two hunker-down dice; then there will be failed blocks, expertise dice, and blocks. These cancel out the attacks, but cannot cancel the critical.
Instead of just dealing one point of damage, you also get to move down your own stance tree. This can do additional damage to characters, disarm them, and do all sorts of things. Then, you put all your damage into a damage pool which gets resolved at the end of the turn and put it on the opposing character’s card.
Once you have more damage tokens than your stamina, the character takes a wound. Once wounded, characters get worse and can just be moved away from by other characters.
Once you take more wounds than your durability, the character gets removed. Lastly, for wounding a character, you get a momentum token on the struggle counter. So, this leads to winning, as the more wounds and objectives you control, the more tokens you get, thus winning the game.
Be sure to watch the Star Wars Shatterpoint how-to-play video how to play below for all the insights from Atomic Mass Games themselves.
Click Here to Get Your Star Wars: Shatterpoint Core Set
What are your thoughts on the game? Do you like the rules so far?
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About the Author: Travis Pasch
Travis Pasch
Job Title: Head Writer & Editor
Joined: 2019
Socials: @paschbass
Bio: Dark Eldar Dracon and Warhammer 40k hobbyist since the third edition in 1998. He also loves camping because you can only paint so much! He joined the Spikey Bits team in 2019 and has been our lead writer since 2020.
Currently, he’s working on converting all his Ad Mech models and becoming a true tech enjoyer, complete with both sad and happy robot noises!
