Star Wars Legion: What's Up with the Rules Update?

• Posted on 18 July 2024
• By G. Carlson
• 0

Star Wars Legion had a rules refresh in July 2024 - what does this mean, and how do you play?

Atomic Mass Games announced sweeping changes for Star Wars Legion at their annual news livestream, Ministravaganza, in July of 2024. These changes resulted in what is effectively a new edition for the game; nearly half of the units in the game have updated stats or keywords, and the ways objectives are setup and games are won are completely different.

This can leave players feeling a bit lost. Just what exactly changed? How do I learn about these changes? Can't I just play the same way I've been playing with my models?

It is important for public venues like ours to use the currently-supported rules so that everyone is on the same page at our events. On top of that, we are also quite excited about the new additions. Objectives have gone through a big change to make a wider variety of units viable in the game, and many older units have been reworked to make them more effective on the tabletop. Overall, we feel this update will be positive for the game moving forward.

Where Can I Find the New Rules?

Atomic Mass Games posted the new rulebook as a PDF on their website immediately after the livestream announcement. If they make changes, they will update them here, too. The rulebook does a nice job of laying out, sequentially, how to setup and play the game.

In addition to the new setup rules, the rulebook covers the revisions to various unit and weapon keywords. Even if your unit has the same keywords as it did before, it may operate differently because the meaning of those keywords has changed.

What About the Updated Unit Cards?

As mentioned earlier, a wide variety of units in Star Wars Legion have been directly affected by the rules refresh. Nearly 60 units have updated unit cards with new formatting and artwork! While many of these unit cards are very similar to their originals, it is probably easiest for you and your opponent's mental bandwidth to use the new cards. The cards you already own are not ideal to use in a game with the new rules if that unit has an update. Thankfully, AMG has posted these cards in a PDF on their website for folks to print out.

What Exactly Changed?

There are far too many revisions to detail here in an exhaustive list. That said, here are some of the most notable changes to the game:

The battle deck has completely changed. The old objective, deployment, and condition cards you already own are obsolete. In this new system, each player chooses Primary and Secondary Objective Cards when making their army, and each player randomly adds one at game setup. Then, each player gets to make two changes to the setup by either replacing one of the cards with a random one of their own, or choosing to be Blue player (and therefore will choose which side of the table they would like to deploy from).

The game is now 1000 points and lasts only 5 rounds. It is easier than ever to fit multiple characters or lots of upgrades into your army. The decrease in rounds and style of objectives have kept the game time from increasing.

Cover adds a random chance of canceling hits. Instead of blocking a flat 1 or 2 damage for light or heavy cover, defenders will roll a white defense dice for each hit they suffer (crits still ignore cover). For each block result, they cancel an incoming hit; surge results also cancel hits in heavy cover. This makes cover swingy and makes it potentially very impactful for large attack dice pools, while also allowing small dice pools a chance to punch through cover.

Terrain only grants cover if the defender is within 3" of it. Meaning that the terrain you're shooting over in the middle of the table doesn't protect the enemy quite so ubiquitously.

Ranges of effect have been increased. You can issue orders at any range, and abilities that give or share tokens like Take Cover, Bolster, and Clone Token Sharing are all range 2.

There's a lot more to find in the new rules, but we'll leave you to discover those on your own.

If you're keen to print out the new cards now, we recommend using Dragon Shield Perfect Fit sleeves and sliding the cards you already own behind the printouts. These sleeves are not as big as Standard sleeves and make it easy to store your printed cards in binders. The Gamegenic Token Silos are also very good for storing the variety of cardboard tokens for games like Legion.

That's pretty much it!