A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

It is a period of Civil War. Rebel forces face the evil GALACTIC EMPIRE in mass battles across multiple planets. The heroes of the rebellion inspire and rally their rag tag bands against legions of Stormtroopers led by the Sith Lord Darth Vader.

In another age the Galactic Republic is embroiled in the Clone Wars against the SEPARATIST ALLIANCE and their droid armies. All of these forces are aiming to win the war, and to restore peace to the galaxy….

Star Wars Legion is the miniatures wargame from Atomic Mass Games, and in this full review we’ll be taking a deep dive into the game, seeing how it plays and talking a little about how to get started with Star Wars Legion.

If you would like to support the site then why not order your Star Wars Legion goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed a host of Legion content with unboxings and reviews of both the Empire and Rebel Alliance Starter Sets like here on the site, with videos just below or over on YouTube

So sit back and let’s check out the latest iteration of Star Wars themed battles with Legion.

Star Wars Legion Review

So before we jump into the full review, first a little bit of background. Back in 2017 Fantasy Flight Games released Star Wars Legion, a miniatures game set in the Star Wars universe pitting the Rebels against the Empire. This was later expanded to also include Prequel Trilogy units with the addition of the Galactic Republic and the Separatist Alliance in 2019 with the Clone Wars core set.

In 2020 the game moved under Atomic Mass Games and now sits as one of their core games alongside Marvel Crisis protocol and Star Wars Shatterpoint.

While MCP and Shatterpoint are fast paced skirmish games with a small number of larger scale models, Legion is a more traditional wargame with entire armies facing off against each other, with all 4 factions now much expanded compared to the original release.

This summer, AMG released the second edition of Star Wars Legion with the full rulebook and all the cards available to download online and they have started to update a lot of the older soft plastic miniatures released during the early years of the game, to bring them in line with the more modern and detailed hard plastic miniatures they have done for other systems.

To bring in some new blood, AMG have also released 4 brilliantly good valued boxed sets that give players a starter 600 point army for less than £85. We’ve covered reviews for both the Rebel Alliance box and the Galactic Empire box, but there’s also one of these for both the Galactic Republic and the Separatist armies – These have around 4 boxes worth of units, plus a plastic hero to lead them which totals around £200 of models, plus all the cards dice and tokens needed to play the game.

These cards, tokens and extra bits are thing you are deffo going to want to have if you are getting into legion, which makes these starter sets well worth picking up even for people who have an older collection from the Fantasy Flight days.

So let’s take a look at all these bits first and what they do for the game.

Every single unit in the game has a unit card that shows their profile and points costs. If you’ve played other miniatures games you might be used to having to pick up rulebooks that contain the profiles of the models in your army, but for Legion every single box contains the rules for the models in the box in card form. Now one thing to be aware of here is that just this summer AMG have released the new edition of the game, and they are currently in the process of reboxing everything with the new cards. If you’re unsure if it’s new or old models in the box you’re picking up then the easiest thing to do is check the box – if it has the new logo with “Legion” written in orange then you’re good to go. If you have any kits with the older black and white logo then the cards in the box will be for the previous edition of the game. Thankfully, AMG have also released card decks for every faction in the game that can be used to get access to the latest rules for them – If you are just buying new releases then you dont need these (perhaps with the exception of the generic upgrade deck, which has all of the upgrades that can be taken for any unit in the game).

List building works much as it does in other games with minimum and maximum of each type of unit that you can take – so for example in a normal 1000 point battle you have to take at least 1 commander, and can have a maximum of 2, while Corps (Your basic troops) have to have at least 3 units and a maximum of 6. This stops you spamming certain units and ensures that armies look accurate to their movie counterparts.

Each of these units tend to start off at fairly more unit sizes. Stormtroopers for example have a unit size of 4, however one of the cool things about Legion is that each unit can be upgraded a number of times based on which symbols are printed on the card – so for example some units can take more models, others can take special weapons while some can even be given different gear, armour or force powers. All of these upgrades are also printed on cards and have their points costs printed on them too.

So back to our Stormtroopers example we start off with a unit of 4 troopers for 42 points, but then can add another 5 for an extra 40 points. This gives us extra bodies in the squad along with an extra couple of special rules. We then decide we want a heavy weapon, so we decide to add a Stormtrooper with a T21 Repeating Blaster for another 20 points. Finally we know we’re going to be going up against some droids, so we give the unit EMP grenades for another 3 points leaving us with our fully outfitted squad costing 105 points.

With all of these upgrades being on cards showing their rules, profiles and relevent keywords it makes managing these units really easy during games too!

In Star Wars Legion each player also has a deck of Command Cards that are used both as a way of determining priority, but also as a way of getting access to a guaranteed selection of units to activate during the turn along with some special rules. In Legion player activation happens alternately, with players taking turns to draw a token – this token shows what type of unit you can activate that turn, making things never guaranteed and a little less predictable during the fog of war. This is a great mechanic which makes things exciting and players to have to think one step ahead. Here’s where the Command Cards come into things though, as they allow you to “Order” a certain number of units that can be activated at any point during your turn rather than drawing a random token. Some cards are better than others – for example one card might specify a certain type of unit that gets the order, while another might be more generous and allow you to pick any. But there’s a twist here with the command cards also being used to determine priority. A “good” card normally gets beaten in priority by a more basic card (The cards each have a number of pips displayed on them, with the player with the fewest going first) meaning there’s a lot of gameplay in making sure you use the right card on the right turn.

In our practice games this led to some really fun moments where the choice of card could make a massive impact on your chances of winning the game.

There’s a lot of tokens in the game, which can seem a little overwhelming at first, but they are very useful for recording statuses and effects on units and being able to see the big picture of who has activated and who is yet to move. Without tokens you would very quickly lose track of where things are up to, and after a couple of games you’ll quickly learn what means what and be able to eyeball which units are defending and which are suppressed.

Rather than being measured in inches and centimeters, Star Wars Legion uses custom measuring devices to manage movement and shooting. AMG havn’t changed these from the first edition, so if you already have some from the original release then these will still work here. Movement uses 3 different movement dongles, each for a different speed – you simply put one edge against the side of your leader model, lift him up and place him at the other end of the ruler. You then move the rest of the squad within coherency of your leader model. This makes unit movement quick and easy without too much faff or having to worry about positioning – your leader is all that matters really as long as the rest of the squad is in coherency around them.

For shooting and other measuring in the game, Star Wars Legion uses a series of 6 inch long sticks that can be combined together to quickly check ranges. I’m in two minds about if i’d rather this just be a distance that could then be measured with a tape, but in game it’s easy enough to put the sticks together and check ranges, with no arguments about wonky tapes not capturing the range properly.

Rather than using normal dice with numerical values, all of the combat mechanics are built around custom dice with unique facings. Essentially there’s fails, successes, critical successes and “surge” icons that trigger a success or fail based on the unit stats. After a couple of rounds of combat this comes together really quickly and is really easy to eyeball rather than having to look up charts or profiles to see if you have defeated your target.

Mission building is also a little more involved than in some other games – Essentially, between the two players you will build the mission (including the map), the secondary objectives, determine which player is blue and which is red along with some “twists” that impact some certain units on the battlefield. Rather than just drawing these randomly and playing, each player gets the chance to try and adjust the mission twice by drawing a new card – meaning that you do have some power to shift things up if you’re playing a mission that your army is not best suited to. If you’d rather not use this mission building mechanic however, it is easy enough to simply draw all these at random and go with fate for what turns up!

The battlefield itself is a little smaller than things such as Horus Heresy as it’s 6 foot by 3 foot – before playing I thought this would be a little too narrow, but realistically units move a little slower compared to other games and actually start deployed off the board, with their initial movement taking them onto the board (Which is essentially the movement they would be making if it was 4 foot wide) – This also means you’ve got a nice space on your side for all your unit cards and tokens (Something that makes the game go much quicker if you have set up ready).

So how does a turn go? Well once priority has been determined, players will alternate back and forth either activating a unit that has been ordered by a command card or drawing a token at random to determine who can active. Once activated a unit can make two actions, this could be moving, shooting, laying in wait ready to move or shoot in the enemy turn, readying weapons or gaining a status such as aiming or defending. You can only shoot once, but you’re free to do the other actions as much as you like – so in our games it quickly became apparent that getting yourself into a good position and in cover, and then aiming and shooting the following turn was a solid tactic.

There is a spanner in the works though, units will take suppression when they take fire – if enough of this builds up it could cause a unit to only be able to make a single action, or not make any actions at all. A cunning player will try and get enough suppression on an inactivated threat in order to try and limit what they can do in return – and it’s here when priority and unit availability is really important to players.

Once all units have activated there’s a clean up phase, units normally score and then the game moves on to the next round. There’s only 5 rounds (With games also ending when a maximum score is also hit) making the games feel fast paced and exciting.

Our first game of Star Wars Legion went a little slower as we were checking rules and token images as we learned how things worked, but by the end of the game we had already started picking things up faster and it’s way easier to learn than I originally thought it would be.

My one complaint would be the lack of a hard copy rulebook – I’d much rather have a physical rulebook I can flip through myself rather than looking for rules in a pdf, so I ended up printing out a copy for reference, but I do wish a hard copy version was included in the starter sets, as I feel it’s easier to read a printed rulebook than on a screen, especially when you are learning how to play.

This is a minor complaint though, and we had a lot of fun playing Star Wars Legion, to the point where we are already thinking about what other factions we want to pick up.

If you’re a fan of Star Wars then you’re going to want to check this out for the amazing miniatures, but thankfully the game itself is brilliant too, with some really nice mechanics and exciting gameplay. Don’t be put off by the number of tokens, custom dice and measuring sticks, when you play it all comes together and I wouldn’t change any of that!

We’re hoping to do a lot more Star Wars Legion coverage on the site, and we’re all furiously working away on new forces for the game, hoping to recreate some epic moments from the movies and some cool “what if” scenarios to see if we can change what happened in the films!

Star Wars Legion and all the cards can be downloaded for free from the Atomic Mass Games website.

If you want to get into the game, the Star Wars Legion army sets can be picked up from Element Games for less than £80!

Published by Matt Crowther

View all posts by Matt Crowther