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Game details Designer: Corey Konieczka and Lukas Litzsinger

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Players: 2

Age: 10+

Playing time: 30 minutes

Availability: US: Check your local game store / UK: ~

Corey Konieczka and Lukas LitzsingerFantasy Flight Games10+30 minutesUS: Check your local game store / UK: ~ £16 per starter pack on Amazon

Who would win in a fight—Han Solo or Jango Fett? What about Rey vs. Captain Phasma? What if you gave Phasma a jetpack, an F11D blaster rifle, and a thermal detonator? What if General Grievous teamed up with Count Dooku to take on Jabba the Hutt and Darth Vader?

Star Wars: Destiny, a new collectible dice-and-card game from publisher Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), is here to help you put these niggling questions to the test. It’s something like Magic: The Gathering... but with dice. And it plays like an all-star battle royale featuring characters from every era of the Star Wars saga.

It’s also really good.

You cannot escape your destiny

Star Wars: Destiny will feel familiar to anyone who’s played Magic, Hearthstone, or any number of similar collectible card games (CCGs). Play cards, do damage, kill opponent. Instead of doing damage to your opponent directly, though—the player-as-wizard conceit of Magic—Destiny has players begin each game with a number of characters already in play. Each character has a certain number of hit points; take out all the other player’s characters to win.

But beyond those surface similarities, Destiny injects a surprising amount of innovation into a somewhat staid formula. And most of that innovation comes down to its liberal use of dice.

The dice may look cheesy and cheap in pictures—the loud primary colors give them an almost kiddy appeal—but holding them in your hands will make you a fast believer. I’m not sure of the manufacturing process, but the images are sealed into the dice; these are not stickers slapped on top. The dice are big, chunky, and satisfying to roll.

Star Wars: Destiny uses these dice to simulate a fast-paced skirmish between two teams of Star Wars characters. Absent from the proceedings are the ponderous turns that occasionally bog down similar games; Destiny instead takes a boardgame-y tack by giving players quick one-action turns within a series of rounds. I do an action, you do an action, back and forth until we’ve both passed. At the end of a round, ready all your spent cards and dice and begin again. (A similar system was used in Plaid Hat Games’ 2015 card game Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, another dueling game that uses dice. Destiny does the formula even better.)

And what actions can you do?

Activating a character will let you exhaust its card to roll its dice (and any attached upgrade dice—lightsabers, blasters, and special abilities) into your dice pool. You can then use an action on a later turn to resolve any number of the same symbol from your pool by putting the dice back on their respective cards.

Resolve a few dice showing blaster icons to do ranged damage to an opponent’s character, or resolve your resource icons to get more cash to play more cards. Resolve your “disrupt” or discard symbols to make your opponent get rid of resources or cards. Certain cards have a “special” symbol that allows you to activate a character- or upgrade-specific effect. Mind Probe, for instance, lets you deal damage to a character equal to the number of cards in your opponent’s hand.

But here’s the great thing about this system: after you take an action to activate a character and roll its dice, the turn passes over to your opponent. Before you can resolve those juicy damage symbols to finish off an ailing General Veers, your opponent can see exactly what you’re up to and respond. And this is where the game really shines.

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Aaron Zimmerman

Never tell me the odds

Destiny is a game about timing and tempo. Although its rules are simple—and easy to learn and teach—the game boasts a surprising amount of strategic depth due to the delicate dance of action and reaction you’ll do with your opponent each round. How and when you play your cards, roll your dice, and take your actions is extremely important because a good opponent will usually have an answer to your threats.

Event cards—one-off cards that you discard after use—give you countless ways to screw with your opponent’s dice. Use the Force lets you turn a die—yours or an opponent’s—to any side, as long as you have a Force character in play. He Doesn't Like You lets you remove one of your own dice to remove one of your opponent’s. As with other games in the genre, Destiny’s strategy opens up as you learn what event cards your opponent could have and how you can play around them.

But what about the randomness of the dice?

I dropped Hearthstone a few years back because of its escalating focus on randomness (“summon a random minion and do a random amount of damage to a random enemy!”). So when Destiny was first announced as a card and dice game, I wrote it off. Card games are already pretty luck-heavy, and throwing in a bunch of dice sounded like a recipe for nonstop randomness.

But although Destiny’s dice system does involve luck, finding a way to bend that randomness to your will is a key design element of the game. You can always discard a card to reroll any number of dice in your pool, which provides a tense and interesting decision about when and how to reroll. And cards and die effects will allow you to reroll dice, turn dice to any side you want, and remove your opponents’ dice from their pool. Most dice have a blank side, but you can even use blanks to trigger certain card and dice abilities. Each turn is a puzzle, and you have to constantly think about how to counter your opponent to give you an advantage.

The result is that the game feels like a real-time battle. Rey swings in with her staff, but Kylo Ren Force-throws her and she takes damage. A Tusken Raider fires a blaster rifle at Luke, and he deflects the bolt back. The gameplay is highly thematic and very interactive.