“Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”

–Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Hope

If you’ve ever wanted to stage your own epic battles across the Star Wars saga, you have your chance with Star Wars™: Destiny! Recently, we announced this collectible dice and card game for two players that invites you to gather a team of iconic heroes or villains and play out any duel you can imagine throughout the Star Wars saga. You may find Qui-Gon Jinn and Poe Dameron battling Jango Fett and General Veers in the Emperor’s Throne Room, or you might stage a battle between a squad of First Order Stormtroopers against Rey and Finn in the Mos Eisley Spaceport. No matter where you go in the galaxy, Star Wars: Destiny opens the door for you to enter the Star Wars saga.

We’ll be looking at every aspect of Star Wars: Destiny in coming weeks, and today, we’ll start our series of previews with a closer look at the heart of the game: the dice.

Ready for Action

What makes the Star Wars: Destiny dice different? Unlike many games, the dice in Star Wars: Destiny do not use stickers. Instead, the images on each side are physically heat-pressed onto the dice, essentially printing the artwork directly onto the plastic. Finally, the die is covered in a scratch-resistant coating, allowing you to roll these dice without their quality deteriorating.

In Star Wars: Destiny, the first thing that catches a new player’s eye are the large, full-color, premium dice. These dice have a stunning visual and tactile presence, and they have an equal presence within the game itself.

After all, to win the game, you’ll need to eliminate each character on your opponent’s team, and your dice are the primary way for you to deal damage to enemy characters. You’ll also use your dice to remove your opponent’s cards and resources, generate resources for yourself, shield your characters, and trigger special abilities; it’s immediately obvious that your team will live and die based on how you choose to use your dice.

These dice don’t just begin the game available to you, however. At the start of a game of Star Wars: Destiny, you’ll only have the dice associated with your characters (one or two dice per character, based on whether you’ve fielded the normal or elite version of the character). All of your other dice are hidden from your opponent and will only be revealed after you play the corresponding card from your deck. For instance, once you play Sith Holocron (Awakenings, 16), you’ll take the corresponding die and place it on the card. Dice always begin play on your cards, but they can’t be used immediately—first, the card has to be activated.

As we’ve mentioned before, gameplay in Star Wars: Destiny is much like a lightsaber duel: fast-paced, back-and-forth action with constantly changing conditions. On each turn, you can only take a single action before your opponent has the chance to respond by taking an action. One of the most important actions that you can take is to activate a character, sending your best warriors into the fray to use their unique powers and fighting style.

As an action, you can activate a character or a support card like the Millennium Falcon (Awakenings, 48). To activate a card, you simply exhaust it by rotating the card 90˚ to its side. After exhausting the card, you can immediately roll its dice and the dice of any attached upgrade cards. These dice are placed in your dice pool, and you’ll be able to use them on a future turn by spending another action.

Skill with a Lightsaber

Once you’ve rolled some dice into your pool, you can use an action to resolve any number of dice that share the same symbol. There are nine different symbols that can appear on your dice, and each one helps you in a unique way.

Melee Damage – Spending this symbol deals melee damage to one of your opponent’s characters. There's no difference between melee damage and ranged damage, except the abilities of some cards.

Ranged Damage – Spending this symbol deals ranged damage to one of your opponent’s characters. There's no inherent difference between ranged damage and melee damage.

Shield – This symbol grants shields to one of your characters. Shields absorb damage before it reaches your character.

Resource – This symbol can be spent to gain resources, which are used to play events, upgrades, and support cards from your hand.

Disrupt – Spending this symbol forces your opponent to lose resources. Losing resources at a crucial moment can be a crippling blow to your opponent's plans.

Discard – Spending this symbol forces your opponent to randomly discard cards, taking away options and opportunities to reroll dice.

Focus – This symbol can be spent to change some of your other dice to the sides of your choice. By making your other dice more reliable, the focus symbol helps you pursue your chosen strategy.

Special – This symbol has special rules listed on the corresponding card. For instance, if you rolled a special symbol on the Sith Holocron die, you could spend the symbol to swap the Sith Holocron for a Blue ability upgrade from your hand and spend a resource to roll its die.

Blank – This symbol has no effect. All but the most dangerous and reliable dice have at least one blank symbol.

Alongside most symbols, you will find a number. This number determines the power of the corresponding symbol. For instance, if there’s a number “2” next to a disrupt symbol, you can spend that die to remove two of your opponent’s resources.

Some dice results can be more powerful, but have restrictions on exactly how you can use the die. As you can see in the example above, you may roll +3 ranged damage with Jetpack (Awakenings, 66). However, you can’t use this result unless you have a normal ranged damage result to pair it with. Similarly, some die faces show a small resource icon in a yellow box at the bottom of the die. In order to resolve that die, you’ll need to spend the resources shown in the box. Resources can be hard to come by in your games of Star Wars: Destiny, so you’ll have to carefully weigh whether or not resolving your die is worth losing a resource.

Prepare for Battle

Your dice may form the heart of your actions, but they certainly aren’t the only part of your forces in Star Wars: Destiny. You also have a deck of cards that you can use to support your characters as they battle against your enemies. In our next preview, we’ll take a closer look at these cards and the ways that you can use them to support your strategies on each turn during the game!

For now, make sure you head to your local hobby game retailer and pre-order your Star Wars: Destiny starter sets and booster packs today!