Star Wars: Shatterpoint, the best wargame released in 2023 so far, will be getting its first mission pack expansion in November 2023. ‘Sabotage Showdown’ was announced on the Atomic Mass Games website on Monday.
Wargamer’s Star Wars: Shatterpoint review was glowing, describing it as “one of the best Star Wars experiences you can have on a tabletop, packed with kinetic action, tense gambits, and sudden turns of fate” – it’s in contention for a place on our guide to the best miniature wargames. Here’s YouTuber The Pickle Jar expressing similar levels of enthusiasm for the game:
Among Star Wars Shatterpoint’s few weaknesses when it launched was the very limited mission options, consisting of one scenario with a variety of different objective layouts, so a new mission pack should spice things up nicely.
Sabotage Showdown will be “a much tighter battle” than the default mission pack found in the Shatterpoint starter set, with the objectives spaced more closely. As in the base game, players must win two of three ‘Struggles’, phases of the game in which the active objectives are determined by a randomly selected Struggle card, to succeed.
The main twist for Sabotage Showdown is that whenever you activate a unit using the Shatterpoint card (a wild card in the deck of unit cards used to determine which of your models activates next), it gains a special ability printed on the current Struggle card. The article says you’ll be able to do things like “Dash, refresh Force, or remove damage or conditions”, which could bring unexpected units back into relevance during a round.
The article rounds things off by saying “The arrival of Sabotage Showdown will start you on your first steps to this larger journey… There is plenty more to come beyond the standard mission packs”. Atomic Mass Games has plenty of experience supporting organised play, as well as special narrative events at stores.
Shatterpoint really is the wargame that we’ve been most impressed with this year: launching around the same time as Warhammer 40k 10th edition it faced some stiff competition, but between the Shatterpoint core set and the Warhammer 40k Leviathan boxed set, we would have said that Shatterpoint was the better product.
Want some more miniature wargames that released this year? Check out our DnD: Onslaught review, The Doomed review, and Snap Ships Tactics review.