The board game YouTuber Board and Savior has created a terrifying time sink by folding four Star Wars board games into one. The new game, currently untitled and untested (you’ll soon see why) is a modified form of the much-loved Star Wars Rebellion.
However, by combining Rebellion with other Star Wars board games, Board and Savior was able to make a game that really goes into detail and shows Galactic conflict in true simulationist style. The only trouble is it extends the gameplay a little.
Combat in Star Wars Rebellion takes about three minutes – as the YouTuber says, it’s “pretty streamlined, it happens pretty quickly, and it’s a good time”. But it’s far too abstract, merely rolling dice to skip over the intricate details of combat. In the true ultimate Star Wars board game, each fight will be 8-10 hours. Oh, you’ll also need four tables to play it.
That’s because, in Board and Savior’s new version of Star Wars Rebellion, each combat requires you to crack open another board game. First off, ground combat. That’s pretty simple – for each fight you play a game of the miniature wargame Star Wars Legion using the correct models to represent the Rebellion pieces. That’s three hours for each fight.
Space combat’s a little knottier though. It starts out, as you might expect, with a game of Star Wars Armada, with the exact ships (or their closest equivalent) to those present in the Star Wars Rebellion fight. Star Wars Armada games are about 2.5 hours each.
But we’re not done zooming in yet: the best/worst part is still to come. That’s because, when two groups of fighters meet in Star Wars Armada, instead of resolving it in that game like a sane person, you go and start a separate game of X-Wing. (Another hour to 90 minutes).
Board and Savior says he wants someone to try the game, but takes “no responsibility for what happens to you if you do.” He’s not sure how long it would take to play the whole thing, but suggests you might need to enter the game as a 20 year old and leave when you’re 85.
“I don’t know if it would be worth it. It would be a story, certainly, but I don’t know if it would be worth it.”
One clever rule that appears in the video, is that since all the games have rules for incorporating different hero and villain characters, if you have a character involved in a scrap in Rebellion, you can choose which of the three other games to use them in – but you can’t use them in the other two.
Board and Savior tells Wargamer that the idea for this megagame has been floating around in his brain for about four or five years, ever since he started playing Rebellion with his friend Hussain.
Originally, the idea was just to incorporate Armada. “I didn’t have X-Wing or Legion stuff yet, which was what made the idea actually somewhat feasible,” he says.
But it soon grew out of control. “One of the last times Hussain and I played Rebellion, I told him about the Armada/Legion idea and he wondered whether there was a way to work in X-Wing, too.”
“That was when I had the idea for zooming into the dogfights of Armada to play a separate game of X-Wing, and it’s also what cemented the idea as properly bonkers.”
Board and Savior describes the idea as a curse that will always be in the back of your mind as you play Star Wars Rebellion from now on, tempting you to give it a try. “Make sure you’ve got lots of food stored up; you’re going to need rations I think.”
If you enjoyed this article, check out these other strategy board games – we promise they won’t take decades to play.