Star Wars: Outer Rim – Unfinished Business Expansion

Star Wars Outer Rim was a game that took me pleasantly by surprise when I first played it. I wasn’t expecting much but it offered a surprising amount of depth and a sort of reminded me of a combination of Xia: Legends of a Drift System and with a few aspects of Eldritch Horror mixed in and then all wrapped up in a Star Wars Theme. The Outer Rim Unfinished Business expansion is here to make a new and added excitement.

Return Of The Scruffy Looking Nerf Herder

1-4 players will be taking on the role of one of the more roguish characters from the Star Wars universe and then you clamber up into a bit of a rubbish ship and set out to make a name for yourself. You can go about delivering goods, smuggling cargo, doing a spot of bounty hunting all while buying new bits for your ship and hiring new crew. It’s a great little sandbox to play around in. Almost everything you want to do could be a path to victory and the huge number of cards in the box gives you an almost endless amount of variety and replayability. So, what could expansion possibly add to all that to make it worth your time. Well, I’ll tell you!

First off, there is just more. More of pretty much everything. More characters, more ships, more market cards, more databank cards and a brand-new AI deck to give you more variety when you are flying (Han) Solo. There are a few new bits and bobs that can really change the game up so those warrant looking at them into a bit more detail.

Also, you’re no longer confined to the titular Outer Rim, you can now head off to the core worlds held by the Empire. The core worlds are basically 2 new map pieces that sit at either end of the board. They give you 2 new places to have encounters, but they also allow you to zip across to the other side of the board in less than 5 parsecs. This can be quite useful as the patrol ships can’t follow you, so you can use it as a chance to escape their grasp. But as the core worlds are under Imperial control you may be in for a rough time if you’ve got a negative reputation with them.

You’ve also got some extra contact tokens that allow you go and meet up with all of the original playable characters from the base game. To go with these, you’ve also got a whole new pile of playable characters to add into the mix. But this is where things start to get a little bit clunky. You see, there is now a chance to get a contact token that points you at one of your opponents. And if this happens, nothing happens. Absolutely nothing. It’s a bit of a let down and it doesn’t happen often but it’s a bit rubbish. It makes sense I guess, how could you get in contact with a player who is all the way across the board. It’s just a bit disappointing that it doesn’t lead to some sort of madcap chase or co-op mission or something.

Great Kid, Now Don’t Get Cocky

To get back to the good stuff we’ll have a look at my favourite part of the Outer Rim Unfinished Business expansion, the ambition sheets. Sandbox games really thrive when you get a chance to tell your own stories. In my last game of Outer Rim I was a robot wanderer in an anti-slaver ship who was liberating any droids that were taken as other people’s crew. Did I win? No, absolutely not. Did I have a great time and add some lovely flavour to the game? I like to think so. Have my friends who I played the game with spoken to me again? Not yet, but it’s early days so I’m hopeful.

Anyway, ambition sheets! These are sort of multi part quests that’ll have you trying to achieve certain goals in order to tell a loose story for your pilot. You need to finish all of these objectives as well as hit the fame goal in order to win the game. I really enjoyed this as it really did add to the stories you could tell during a game. My only real complaint is there aren’t enough of them in the box. There are only 8 meaning in 2 games you could have played with all of them. And with everything else in the game feeling so bountiful, this does come across as a little stingy. To me at least, anyway.

In Debt To The Hutts

The last major thing you’re going to find in the Outer Rim Unfinished Business expansion box are the debt tokens. These work with a new mechanism for trading and negotiating with your opponents. Now you’re able to trade favours and money in order to help each other pass tests by lending dice or traits for skill tests. This can all be very amicable, but any future promises aren’t binding. And these characters are the scum and villainy of lawless space, they probably shouldn’t be trusted. So, to add a little credence to your words you are able to offer your debt token which will allow a player to call in a favour in return when they need it. They work a little like the promissory notes from Twilight Imperium.

These tokens are ok. I never really found myself trading and negotiating that much when I played. There is very little incentive to help your opponents as you’re basically helping them beat you. I’m happy they are here though as it does give you that extra option to help get out of a tight spot you find yourself in.

Last up you’ve got the new (Ben) solo cards. Yes, I used that joke twice, I like it though. Each character in the game now has its solo card. This has some unique behaviour that will mean each opponent will act slightly differently. You also get a brand new set of basic AI cards as well. Whereas the cards found in the base game were all about delivering cargo for fame, these new ones are all about bounties. This modifies the behaviour of the AI opponent drastically and gives the solo game a completely different feel to it.

I’m pretty sure that is everything in the box. This is the kind of expansion I love. More of everything that made the base game good and a few new ideas to keep things fresh. I would never say I was bored of the base game, there were still plenty of cards I’ve not seen but these new ones have really injected new life into the game. It’s not all smashed out of the park but there is nothing here that I would say is bad. I said in the beginning of this review I often compare Outer Rim to Xia. I really enjoy Xia but this expansion has definitely made me more likely to reach for a galaxy far away.