Escape from the Death Star... or not

Being a big fan of hobby amortization, I'd been scheming for awhile about how to repurpose the corridor tiles from GW's classic Space Hulk game for use in a Star Wars "Death Star" game. With the push on to do a game at C4, I'd drawn up a tile layout and some ideas for how the game might work. For various reasons I didn't run the game at C4 but I didn't want to waste momentum, so I ran it on a Thursday night for the boys.

The rules of the game are based on the Star Wars Miniatures game (RIP) from WotC. The Rebels (Luke and Leia, Han and Chewie, the droids, and Ben) start in the corridors and have to get to the Falcon, situated in the hangar. The pursuing Stormtroopers are represented by "blips" (seen in a pile at centre left of the first picture), a mechanism stolen from Space Hulk. Each blip has a number on the back - 0, 1, 2 or 3 - which is the number of Stormtroopers it represents. The blips are only revealed when they come into view of a Rebel character. Blips only move 6 squares per turn but otherwise follow the rules for characters.

There were about seven "blip-spawning" tiles on the board (the dead-end ones as seen above) and blips were generated there at random intervals. The characters ran around the board trying to avoid the blips and make their way to the hangar.

The droids started off near the hangar and the Rebels needed to get Artoo and at least one other character to the Falcon to win (they needed to transport the Death Star plans to Yavin IV). The Imperials could not harm the droids. Vader started on a tile near the hangar but was prohibited from taking any role in defending the hangar until he defeats Ben. In the event, that wasn't required, but he handily aced Ben anyway (I think Frederick rolled two "20"s in the combat and Ben whiffed with "1"s).

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine"

Oh crap, didn't think he was really gonna do that...

"They went that way! Get 'em!"

A fun game but it could use a little tweaking. There were too many stormtroopers and it was too easy for them to gang up and trap the Rebel characters. I'd thought of having a simple "morale" mechanism for the Imperials that would require them to back off if they failed a check after a friend was hit, and that might work to relieve congestion and allow the Rebels to move more freely. I think we'll likely play it again sometime as it looks cool and has potential as a convention participation game.