Hey everybody, Another month has come and gone! April feels like it has been a really good month for me. Easter is of course my favourite time of year, and I’ve had a bit of a break from work that was full to the brim with Star Wars stuff, which is always a great way to spend it. I’ve been rewatching a lot of the live action Star Wars shows, having started almost twelve months ago with a rewatch of Mando s1, and I have to say, I have enjoyed a lot of this stuff so much more the second time around. Of course, we’ve also seen the start of Andor season two, which has been suitably excellent so far…
There has been a lot of Shatterpoint, which is always such a pleasure to see – sadly, I was supposed to go to a tournament last weekend with James, but my youngest was sick (literally) so I ended up staying home to help look after her. It would have been my first event for the game, and while I was a little bit nervous, I was also looking forward to it. Hopefully there will be more in the future, though!
On the topic of Shatterpoint, I’ve finally finished painting the Ewoks! Earlier this month, I had decided to move away from 40k and instead focus on the games that really bring me joy. However, while Shatterpoint definitely counts as that, it also has a significant backlog of unpainted miniatures! Fortunately, the Ewoks are all reasonably similar enough that I could paint them en masse, and while they probably aren’t going to win me any awards for painting, but I am still quite pleased with them! I tried to make them look reasonably different from each other, though watching Return of the Jedi again recently has shown just how alike a lot of these murder-bears are. I have tried to paint one like Kneesaa from the Ewok cartoon series from back in the day, which was fun, but otherwise they’re all just generic troops and so have a fairly basic scheme. The bases had originally caused me some issues as they’re the standard Shatterpoint fare that looks a bit too urban for the forest-dwellers, but I’ve tried to make them suggestive of the forest by using different greys and tans, then random washes and contrasts to create a brown/green messy look, which I think works fairly well. Otherwise, we’ve got the likes of Wicket scampering off a branch that is randomly coming out of a concrete floor…
April is also my blog anniversary month, and this time around I hit 11 years on the site. That is a lot of nonsense that has been spouted, isn’t it?
Having picked up the game earlier in the year, I finally introduced the Outer Rim expansion, Unfinished Business, though was a bit disappointed that my plan to sleeve all of the cards caused the insert I had bought to break. Thinking about it a bit more logically though, I haven’t sleeved other board games, and something like Eldritch Horror has survived pretty much intact for well over a decade now, so hopefully the sleeves will not be required.
Unfinished Business completes (for now, I hope!) the game line for Outer Rim, and also this month I was able to pick up Under Dark Waves for Arkham Horror third edition, completing that line as well. Putting aside the fact that the game line doesn’t really feel all that complete, I’m really pleased to have that box now as well, as I had been after it for at least a year, but it was either completely out of stock or else the price was upwards of £90, much more than I had really wanted to pay for it. Having snapped it up for £43, it has once again doubled from that. I don’t really know why, as it’s a big box expansion sure, but the game itself has always struck me as one that has struggled for supporters, and it’s not the sort of thing I’ve seen much talk about online. I’ve so far played just one of the expansions, but I do think it’s an excellent addition, so I’m chuffed with this!
But don’t get me started on the Gamegenic token silo I bought to organise all of the tokens for it! That thing is nothing short of spectacular, and I am a huge fan! Huge, I tells ya! If only I had more games that I could buy one to organise…
I’ve had some really good games in April, including a game with DungeonQuest that completes the goal of playing one game with each of the Terrinoth games that I still have. I’ve been enjoying the Star Wars deckbuilding game so much that I picked up the Clone Wars version of it, and have continued to play the Leaders variant for that edition as well. If that had been one of my games for 10×10, I would have hit the target there as I’ve been playing it so much…
Perhaps my favourite game of the month, though, was the solitary game of Marvel Champions that I had yesterday. After picking up the Silk hero pack, which admittedly wasn’t a pack that I had been looking forward to per se, I sleeved her up and went against the Sinister Six and had an absolute blast! It’s a multi-villain scenario, but perhaps the one where the designers have really done this right.
I had an absolute blast, anyway, and it has made me a bit thoughtful about all this living card game stuff. Back in February we had the news that FFG were going to introduce a rotation of sorts for their LCGs, and I think a lot of us were taken aback. As someone who has a complete collection of these games, it’s recently got me thinking about the future though, and I’ve come to the decision that I’ll most likely end my Arkham collection with the recent Drowned City expansion, unless something pretty spectacular happens. While Marvel Champions has certainly taken a bit of a dip for me lately, ultimately I enjoy this game far too much, and it’s something that I think I will keep buying so long as they keep pumping out the content.
I’ve been trying to think of some interesting match-ups that I can get, to essentially combat the decision fatigue of knowing which heroes and which villains to play, now that there are so many of them. Having said that, I enjoyed playing Silk so much that I think I’m going to attempt the Sinister Motives campaign with her at some point…
I don’t really do product reviews on this blog, but I’m just so impressed with this thing that I just had to write up this review!
For a while now, I’ve been concerned about just how messy some of my game storage is, especially the big table monsters like Arkham Horror. I’ve been amalgamating the expansions into the core box as well, so it’s like it’s all just one big soup of cosmic horror in there – very thematic, for sure, but when set-up can take about an hour, you know there’s a problem. After being impressed with the Folded Space insert for Outer Rim, I was trying to find a similar thing for this one, but their insert for Arkham only fits the base game and Dead of Night.
Enter the token silo.
I’ve been using Gamegenic sleeves for Marvel Champions since I started to pick that game up, so I knew they were a decent brand, but I didn’t really pay much attention to anything else they have. This token silo is among the various deck boxes and similar, and is a somewhat modular design.
There are nine trays, all removable, with the biggest of them fitting a deck of cards, if you want to use it as a big deck box.
All of the trays can come out (and they suggest you can use the box as a dice tray), so it’s a neat storage solution that also has in-game applications, as you can place the trays around the table to keep those token piles under control.
I absolutely love it!
I think it has solved my Arkham problem very nicely, but it also feels and looks great, which is fantastic. It doesn’t fit inside the core box, unfortunately, but I can live with that.
Honestly, this thing has been an amazing investment of £15. I’m definitely considering another for Eldritch Horror, even though those tokens haven’t really been an issue for me, and I’m trying to think what other games I have that need a token storage solution like this…
Hey everybody, It’s been a while since I played Marvel Champions, but after picking up the Silk hero pack last week, I’d been planning how best to take her out and see what the deal is. In the event, I opted to play a scenario I’d never played before, the Sinister Six from Sinister Motives, alongside my favourite hero, Spider Man himself.
The scenario is great – the campaign guide calls it a “chaotic melee” as the heroes battle each member of the crime gang, and having played a few of these multi-villain scenarios now, I think this is probably my favourite one. It reminds me a bit of a cartoon where the villains and heroes are in a ball of smoke and limbs, and you’ll see an occasional flash of someone’s head or fist surfacing. You don’t go up against all six at once, but rather it’s 1+ the number of players, so as I’m playing two handed solo, that’s three. There are treachery cards in the deck that bring out more, though, and so early on, I had five of them in play!
That said, they have between 7-9 hit points each, so it’s not too tough to get them defeated. The only problem with that is, they can come back! You need to defeat the villains to help remove threat from the side scheme though, as thwarting that is how you win – you just need to survive against the continual onslaught to escape.
It’s so good, anyway, I think it has surprised me really, because scenario 4 in one of these boxes can sometimes be a difficult one. Though Hela is in the same position in Mad Titan’s Shadow, and I really enjoyed that one, as well…
The other exciting thing about this game was playing Silk, who has only recently come out. Part of the Agents of SHIELD wave, I think she was only marginally above Shuri as Black Panther in terms of how much I want them (that is to say, not much). I think this mainly stems from my familiarity with the comics though.
As it turns out, her deck is great to play. Protection isn’t my favourite aspect (so she was really fighting an uphill battle, wasn’t she!) but I think this version of protection is probably my favourite way to play, which is that you’re mainly playing the game during the villain phase.
Her gimmick is that she can tuck cards under her identity, up to a max of four, and certain other of her cards will interact with what exactly is under there. Otherwise, you can discard one of the tucked cards while in alter-ego to draw two cards, so there’s always an upside there.
I think I’ve had two surprises here, then, in that the Sinister Six were a lot of fun to go up against, but also Silk, a hero I had little to no interest in, has proven to be a ton of fun and I’m really looking forward to playing her again.
I absolutely love it when a game gets you like this…
It’s been eleven years since I last delved into Dragonfire Dungeon. In that time, I would hardly have said that I miss it, but it was still there in the back of my mind that this was a game that I used to really, really enjoy.
DungeonQuest came out in 1985, though this third edition from Fantasy Flight was published in 2010. As a game set in the Runebound universe, featuring heroes that were cross-compatible with that game and Rune Wars, picking this up was a bit of a no-brainer at the time.
The premise of the game is quite simple. You play as one of the dungeon-delving heroes and draw tiles, creating a dungeon full of twists, turns and traps as you go. There are a whole host of cards for what you might find in these dungeon rooms, as you inch your way ever closer to the dragon’s horde at the heart of the dungeon. You can then try to steal from his treasure without waking him up, but you need to get out before sundown, otherwise you’ll be locked in forever! Or something like that.
The dragon at the centre of this game is Kalladra, who notably also appears in Rune Age. Anyway, the game is often pretty brutal, and there are plenty of traps and monsters that can kill you well before you make it to the dragon’s horde. The fact that you’re at the mercy of drawing tiles to create your way through the dungeon is yet another way the game can thwart your progress, as you may be so unlucky as to never draw the right kind of corridor or room with a decent exit. That said, searching the corpses of those adventurers who came before you could still turn up a few coins – and you may be able to win with just a small handful of looted gold, while the other heroes remain trapped forever!
The game is definitely a lot of fun, and there’s a kind of whacky, unfeeling charm about the way the game can just kill you with a swinging blade when you’ve almost made it to the exit.
I also really like the combat system, which uses cards rather than dice, similar to a few games that came out around this time, most notably for me being Mansions of Madness. It’s very clunky though, and I think this type of this has been done better elsewhere but also has died off a bit now, regardless. We also have rune cards to give powerful, one-off abilities for the heroes (and to further cement this game in the Runebound universe, I guess…)
But for all this, playing the game again yesterday made me realise that I don’t exactly love it anymore. It feels very slow, and the fact you place a tile then draw a card to see what’s in the room, but you can’t search it until your next turn definitely seems to slow it down a lot. There’s a certain sort of excitement from having the dungeon deck telling you to search a corpse, or a crypt, but the board has eight different decks of mini-cards, and I think it’s quite clear that this really should have been condensed into maybe 3-4. Rather that telling us you’ve come upon a trap, so draw from that deck, why not just give us the trap card in the dungeon deck and be done with? I realise this is to allow for the dungeon deck and the search deck to direct players to the same decks, but this just emphasises how clunky it is having that two-step approach to a turn.
It’s definitely got classic status for me, and I can see it being good for a laugh with the kids maybe, when they’re older, especially if we use one of the many combat variants to streamline monster encounters. But it’s a bit like Escape from the Death Star for me – the kind of game that’s maybe showing its age now, but can still be fun every once in a while…
After finally picking up Under Dark Waves last week for Arkham Horror, I had a game with the Ithaqua scenario at the weekend, and I was really impressed. Though the addition of new town spaces makes the table extra crowded…
The new tiles and travel spaces are a new thing of course, and each of the four new scenarios use them in different ways. The other universal new-thing is Terror, which is a bit like a cross between doom (in that it uses tokens that mount up in neighbourhoods), and rifts (in the design of the cards that get placed on top of the location decks).
It was a good game, for sure, and I was glad to see the scenario definitely had the feeling of dread that we’d expect from these games now.
Something else that fills me with dread, though, is just how crammed this box is now!
The Folded Space insert for this game only holds the base game and one expansion, but I currently have two expansions in there, but all the investigators. So that’s not going to work!
I’ve got a plan though, hopefully that’ll be here tomorrow…
We’re one-quarter of our way through season two of Andor, and while I don’t think it’s a particularly original take, I am really enjoying this story so far. It really helped to re-watch season one recently, because I had really only remembered the major beats, and there’s so much to this story… the rewatch also helped overall with my appreciation for what Tony Gilroy is doing here. Initially I thought it was a bit boring, but I think I could see how it was supposed to be a slow-burn and ultimately, I suppose, it was decent enough. Coming at it for a second time… it was so much better!
There’s spoilers for the first three episodes of s2 here, just so you know…
So after all the shenanigans with Aldhani and getting Cassian to join the cause, Luthen seems to have him posing as a test pilot for the Empire, where he steals a prototype TIE avenger and delivers it to a pre-arranged location, only to find his contact there has been killed by a bunch of ‘rebels’. I put that in quotes, because they can’t seem to decide what they’re doing, and after a protracted captivity, Cassian manages to escape what we then learn was actually Yavin IV…
Meanwhile, Krennic is back! He’s leading a top-secret meeting that includes our favourite Imperial Security Bureau officers, in a plot to strip-mine the planet Ghorman. This is the planet Mon Mothma had been passionately defending in season one – and in Legends, the site of a massacre that was one of the earliest rallying points in the Rebellion history. In Legends, it was simply a revolt that Tarkin put down when he landed his starship on top of the protestors, but here I think we’re headed for something far more… diabolical…
Speaking of Mon Mothma, her arc here has come under a lot of scrutiny in the days since the three episodes dropped. At the end of season one, we see that she is essentially offering up her daughter Leida in marriage to the son of Davo Sculdun, the “thug” whose help was necessary for Mon to gain access to her finances that she intends to use to help the Rebellion. Over the course of the first three episodes, the toll of what she is doing, and the isolation and is feeling as a result of it, begin to wear her down. Is a wedding-rave to electronic dance music “real Star Wars”? Well, the people asking this question have clearly missed the subtext of pretty much every scene Mon Mothma has been in, both in this series and the last, but ultimately, I think it’s a terribly tragic moment that is made incredibly uneasy to view thanks to that soundtrack…
The third episode is pretty difficult viewing all around, as we also catch up with the Ferrix ex-pats, Bix and Brasso, who have been living as farmhands on Mina-Rau. The atmosphere is uneasy, as they’re awaiting Cassian’s return from his mission, but then the Empire shows up for a census, and when the lieutenant in charge tries to take advantage of his position by forcing himself on Bix, she kills him. Brasso is shot down as he attempts to defend her, and while Cassian is able to ultimately rescue Bix, it’s not exactly a happy reunion.
I think Brasso’s death here is just setting the tone for more to come. The series is going to lead us directly into Rogue One, so a lot of people need to die for the characters to be in the places they end up. Unfortunately, I do think that Bix and co will also kick the bucket. And obviously Luthen isn’t going to make it out alive. Dedra Meero has been brought into Krennic’s think-tank, but I’m sure he’s going to set her up to take the blame for whatever happens on Ghorman.
So far, then, it’s been a very compelling start to the season. Some difficult viewing, but that’s okay because this is a very mature story, where you get to see the “real deal” of why the Rebels were doing what they were doing. It’s all pretty much fun and games when we have the glossy heroic stuff from Luke, Leia and Han, but this is the dirty underbelly of what was going on. The Empire is an oppressive fascist regime, and pushed people to breaking point and beyond. We’re seeing brutality, but that’s why the Rebellion existed. If the Empire wasn’t all that bad, or whatever, there’d be no need for the Rebel Alliance to attempt to stop them, would there?
I think that characters like Darth Vader make the Empire seem like it’s powerful and worthy of admiration or something. There has been a fairly big deal made of Imperial characters who are genuinely good, just doing a job, or some other attempt to blur the lines and increase the grey areas there. But what a lot of people seem to forget is the original source material, George Lucas made the Empire so blatantly “the baddies” that there’s no room for argument. Personally, I’m surprised it’s taken almost 50 years of continued Star Wars storytelling to show an Imperial officer attempting to take advantage of his position in this manner. But when people online are trying to say that it has “gone too far” or, my personal favourite for stupidity, “Darth Vader would draw the line at sexual assault”, I think perhaps they missed the domestic violence where Vader Force-choked his heavily-pregnant wife, which wasn’t too long after the heavily-implied murder of defenceless children by ol’ Darth. This is not a nice man, and the Empire is not a nice regime, so none of this should be cause for outrage.
There’s so much more that can be said on this, but I don’t really wish to start any more down this rabbit hole. For my part, I think if this series is making people uncomfortable, then that’s a good thing.
Earlier this month, I made a post about a couple of images seen online that seemed to be teasing a new Star Wars game from Days of Wonder. Well, this has indeed been confirmed as a Star Wars version of Memoir 44, the classic WWII game in the ‘Command and Colours’ system.
I think this could be a very exciting addition to Star Wars gaming, and the fact that there seems to be quite a number of solo variants for the game gives me hope for this one, as well!
While the Assault on Hoth board game is a classic, I think this could be such an improvement with the minis and all…
Looking forward to seeing more for this in the coming weeks, anyway!
I’m very happy with this – after about ten months of checking, I have finally found Under Dark Waves for the third edition of Arkham Horror. With the recent news from one of the FFG livestreams that they consider Arkham Horror 3rd edition as a complete game, this brings my collection to completion. Even though the last expansion, Secrets of the Order, referenced a mechanic that was said to be from an upcoming product. Hm.
Under Dark Waves is the sole big-box expansion, and gives us tiles for Kingsport and Innsmouth, along with a hefty stack of new cards, four new scenarios, and new investigators. It’s a shame how they consider the line to be complete, though, as even with the number of new investigators here, we don’t have 3rd edition versions for all the old favourites…
But, we’ve got what we’ve got, so it’s time to start playing more games with this one!!
I had the base game of Outer Rim for Christmas, and have been enjoying it so much, I snapped up the expansion after a few weeks, with the intent that I would wait until I had played some more with the core box. Gone are the days of buying every expansion after a single game, I wanted to try to get a real feel for the core concepts of the game first. Knowing that I loved it, buying the expansion didn’t seem too frivolous, but given what was going on with games selling out and disappearing at the time, I wanted to make sure I had it!!
Unfinished Business seems to be something of a requirement for Outer Rim, as it is mainly comprised of “more of the same” – expanding the market decks, if nothing else, is a massive bonus. Even with just a handful of games under my belt, I was seeing the same cargo cards time and again, so I was seeing the need for more there!
There are two huge stacks of cards in the box, I think there’s almost as many as in the core set. But we also get more characters, and two new end caps to bring in the idea of ‘crossing the core’.
The playable characters are broadly characters who appeared as contacts in the core game, so here we have new orange contact tokens to represent the core characters, which go directly onto planets at random. Not sure how that works if you have people playing as those characters, though.
I think the most exciting thing I’ve noticed so far here is that Enfys Nest is a playable character!
There’s a second AI deck, as well as more cards for the main AI deck that have got character names on the top. Don’t know what that’s about, maybe they get added in to help improve the solo experience of playing against a character, making the AI feel more like that specific person?
Now, the expansion looks immense, and I’m really excited to see how things are changed up with the new cards and characters. However, after sleeving the entire game, I’ve found that it no longer fits in my box insert!
The sleeved cards are pushing the edges of the insert, and I still can’t fit like 60 of them in there. So with a heavy heart, I’ve unsleeved everything (and repaired the insert). It is supposed to fit sleeved cards, but the matte sleeves that I’ve used are 100 microns thick, I believe, so I might look into different sleeves… but honestly, I suppose Eldritch Horror still looks great and it’s over ten years old now…
Hey everybody, It’s been a long time since I last read the Empire ongoing series from Dark Horse comics. This was a run of 40 issues that ran from September 2002 until March 2006, and I can still vividly remember collecting this run at the time. There was a real sense of excitement from the first arc, I think in part because it included flashback scenes of Vader’s introspection to elements from Attack of the Clones, which had obviously only come out a few months before. On the whole, the series is extremely uneven in its storytelling, but the highs are actually some of the very best stories the old Star Wars expanded universe had to offer – indeed, I think some of them are perhaps the high points of all Star Wars media.
Betrayal The first arc, Betrayal, deals with a cabal of the Empire’s top commanders, led by Grand Moff Trachta, who have grown dissatisfied with the fact the Empire is effectively being run by a religious group of two exclusive figures. Trachta, while outwardly one of Palpatine’s staunchest supporters, leads a plot to assassinate both the Emperor and Vader, and intends to install a military junta to lead in their wake. The conspiracy is far-reaching, but of course it is ultimately foiled, as the members of Trachta’s plot fall on each other. Vader is sent on a mission to investigate the report of a lightsaber-wielding vigilante out on the rim, and thinks it might be his child but is disappointed to discover otherwise. A group of local thugs discover Vader alone and try to take him on as a group, but with the help of Boba Fett, Vader dispatches them all. I think this is one of the least-gratuitous appearances of Fett, as he offers his services to the dark lord in the future and therefore partially explains how Vader would know to call upon him in Empire.
Darklighter Biggs Darklighter has very little screentime before his death during the Battle of Yavin, though of course there are cut scenes that show his relationship with Luke prior to the assault on the Death Star. This comic serves to give us the whole story of Biggs, from his days on Tatooine to joining the Imperial Academy in an attempt to escape the sand. Biggs is posted to a picket ship, the Rand Ecliptic, but is uneasy with the authoritarian nature of the Empire. After being party to a massacre of innocents, Biggs and friends intend to jump ship and join the Rebellion, but he doesn’t realise Hobbie (who is also on board the Rand Ecliptic) was also leading a mutiny, and so once the dust settles, they all team up to join the Rebels and are instrumental in capturing a number of X-Wings for the Alliance. Unfortunately, Hobbie is injured, so there’s a spare ship for the assault on Yavin, which allows Luke to join the battle.
The book is amazing. The artwork is beautiful, and the story is just perfect – I don’t mean this lightly. Getting Biggs’ story is fantastic, as it draws on so many elements from the lore that had already been established to this point, and incorporates the cut scenes from A New Hope beautifully. We also get the addition of Captain Nera Dantels, a smuggler and love interest for Biggs who would become something of a recurring character later on. Dantels was created for the X-Wing comics by Michael Stackpole back in 1997, which told the story of the capture of the X-Wings prior to the Battle of Yavin. She’s a really interesting character, and I really hope the new canon can find a use for her in some way, as it would be great to have her back.
Darklighter was delayed a couple of times when it was being published, I think because of the art being so much work, so we also have The Short, Happy Life of Roons Sewell, a two-part story that is basically General Dodonna delivering a eulogy for a dead Rebel leader. It’s kinda bad, especially sandwiched into Darklighter like this.
The Imperial Perspective When compared to the previous book, this one is kinda full of throwaway stories. The trade paperbacks collect the stories out of order, but sort of grouped by theme, and so we have a number of stories where Vader is a badass, but nothing really too impactful happens. The one story here that I would say is of any importance is To the Last Man, a three-parter that follows the Imperial infantry, in particular Lt Janek Sunber. The infantry is on Amanin, where they come under attack by the natives (the huge guys with flat faces we see one of in Jabba’s palace). It’s something of a classic story of a junior officer shows up his immediate superiors to the general, who winds up giving him a field promotion in the face of the enemy onslaught but dies during the battle. Sunber’s commanding officer survives, despite his cowardice, and doesn’t support the report of promotion, so Sunber is left a lieutenant. But his loyalty to the Empire means he doesn’t really care, because he knows his own worth.
The artwork in To the Last Man is in the cartoon style of Davidé Fabbri, who drew a few stories for the Republic series around the same time. It’s fine as a story, but turns out to be important for what it foreshadows.
The Heart of the Rebellion While the last book was all about the Imperials, this time we have more stories about the Rebels (as you might expect from the title!) Princess… Warrior is a two-parter that expands upon Leia’s mission to Raltiir that was first mentioned in passing by the radio dramatization of A New Hope, and introduces us to the insurgent Basso who has important information for the Rebellion, though we never learn what that is. A Little Piece of Home is another two-parter that follows Leia after Yavin, as she contacts an old flame in an effort to find a suitable location for a new base. Said old flame is a bit creepy, but she winds up getting him killed on his hunting range, so the new base is a no-no. Alone Together introduces us to Deena Shan, an admin clerk for the Alliance who winds up stuck with Han, Leia and Chewie when the Rebels are forced to flee at the proximity alarm of an Imperial attack. She feels out of her depth surrounded by so many heroes (and has a bit of a crush on Han), but ultimately is impressed how selfless they all are, and how quick they are to include her in the team.
Aside from the introductions of Basso and Deena, who both play roles in later stories, there isn’t really much more to say about these. It’s very much the sort of “story of the week” material that I guess Star Wars is based on, adventure serials and whatnot, but the accumulation of throwaway stories in the Empire ongoing series is really quite something…
Allies and Adversaries Volume five continues the theme of throwaway stories! We start off with a story about BoShek, the smuggler Obi-Wan is seen talking to at the bar before he talks to Chewie in Mos Eisley. This was touted as a big deal when it first came out, like we were going to finally get a story that was going to potentially set up a new recurring character, or something. Instead, we get this – BoShek is tasked with smuggling a woman away from some rebel zealots, and it turns out she was an undercover Imperial. BoShek is imprisoned, and that is that. Huh. Idiot’s Array is a two-part Han Solo story with some of the worst art I’ve seen – I mean, I can’t draw, so it’s not like I can do better, but I’m also not drawing comics for Star Wars that are then being sold to readers. Han is picking up some parts for the Rebels and decides to join a card game, only to then be imprisoned for his ties to the Alliance when an old flame sells him out. Vader shows up, but Han is able to escape, so all is well once more. Finally, “General” Skywalker is noteworthy as we get to meet a clone trooper who has been forgotten about since the end of the war. The Rebels are trying to create a listening post on a remote world when the clone, Able, gets confused by the fact the bad guys are now wearing similar armour to his, but throws in his lot with the Rebels when Luke reveals his lightsaber – prompting the clone trooper to follow Luke as his general.
Other than the fact we’re collecting side characters for the eventual final arc, this book and the previous one really are just a whole load of filler.
In the Shadows of their Fathers The sixth volume in the series, while not as good as Darklighter or Betrayal, is finally a return to long-form storytelling with the five-part arc that effectively acted as a sequel to the Battle of Jabiim that featured in the Republic series. The Battle of Jabiim during the Clone Wars saw what seemed to be the death of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker was tasked with withdrawing Republic support for the fight against the Separatists. The story was published during the summer of 2003, and was something of an event for being the first long-form arc in the Republic series that dealt with the Clone Wars. When Empire returned to Jabiim in February 2005, it was to see the lasting impact of Anakin’s seeming betrayal, as Leia attempts to gain the support of the native Jabiimi for the Rebellion, but when she unveils the guy who blew up the Death Star as being Luke Skywalker, all hell breaks loose and Leia and the rest are locked up.
The storyline is very wide ranging, and I think it suffers in part for having a collection of characters who look very similar, so I found it tricky to work out who is who. However, in terms of stories that have lasting impact, this one is definitely a stand-out. Vader shows up here as well, of course, so there’s plenty of callbacks for the Republic series. It’s really interesting to see how Dark Horse took this route, of having events from one series reverberate down into the other. I suppose that’s really the advantage of big stories like Star Wars, there are opportunities to have arcs that have meaning and consequences, etc. Something that I suppose isn’t always seen to its fullest advantage in the Empire series!
I also like the fact that Captain Dantels is back, and it’s not just because of how she is drawn in the first few issues! (The artist changed for the last issue, and Dantels in particular becomes unrecognisable, except for her distinctive eyes). The pairing of Dantels and Leia on this mission is something that I wish we had more of during the Rebellion era, but sadly she is only featured in one further arc of the follow-on Rebellion comic series. Lastly, we have the introduction of Jorin Sol, a mathematician who is creating the codes for the Alliance fleet. He is captured by the Empire at the conclusion of the story, a poor substitute though, as Vader had been expecting to capture Luke.
The Wrong Side of the War The final arc of the Empire ongoing series is another stand-out storyline, for me. We’ve got Luke and the rebels on a mission to Kalist VI, to steal Imperial fuel from the station there whilst dressed as Imperials. Deena is along for the ride as well, and seduces one of the local Imperial officials, drawing out a significant portion of the guard there to a trap while the main rebel contingent steals the fuel. However, Luke bumps into none other than Tank, who is initially overjoyed to see that Luke has made it in the Empire as well. The plan goes wrong when Basso and Able discover the Jabiimi were taken to Kalist VI as slaves, and Basso wants to save them. Luke reveals to Tank that he is actually the rebel who shot down the Death Star, and that Biggs died to allow it to happen, which rocks him to the core.
This is the kind of storyline that I love about the old expanded universe. We’ve had a fairly significant build-up of the story here, with To the Last Man giving a lot of hints as to who Tank is, then the reveal that he is Luke’s childhood friend. Their confrontation is really well done, and I think makes for some great character moments overall. I remember it being a huge thing when it came out as well – as daft as it sounds now, of course, getting to find out who this other throwaway character is was quite nice, I thought! Completely unimportant to the story of A New Hope, but it has allowed for some truly first-rate storytelling, in my view.
It’s also really good to see how the various characters who we have collected along the way now function together as a unit. It’s something that I really liked with the Republic series, which ran for a lot more than 40 issues in the end, but they had a rotating cast of original characters who would weave around the main movie characters and, on the whole, made it feel like a really joined-up universe. The Galactic Civil War era has suffered so much, in my view, for keeping a narrow focus on the Big Three, and so I really welcome the idea of expanding out the cast to get more Imperials as well as more Rebels, and of course, more Scum and Villainy!
At any rate, that’s my canter through the Empire series from Dark Horse. The series was cancelled and replaced by the shorter-lived Rebellion series, which I’m going to cover at some point in the not too distant future, as well, so stay tuned for that!
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