Last year I started playing Star Wars: Destiny, a two-player collectible dice and card game from Fantasy Flight Games. For 2018, the game has a new expansion: Legacies, which consists of a 160-card booster set and two new starter sets. I took a look at these new additions along with the recently released storage binders for managing your collection.
Legacies Starter Set Components
The two starter sets in the Legacies line focus on characters from the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett. As with the original Rey and Kylo Ren starter packs, these sets each contain:
- 24 Cards
- 9 Dice
- 8 Resource Tokens
- 5 Shield Tokens
- 12 Damage Tokens
- Legacies Card Checklist
- Updated Rules Sheet
With a starter set, you can play a game of Star Wars: Destiny straight out of the box against an opponent with their own starter set. These starter sets are designed for one player and are not a complete game on their own, so if you’re buying this for a household that doesn’t already own any Destiny sets, you’ll either need two starter sets or one of the Two-Player Game sets I reviewed last year.
It’s also worth noting that a custom Destiny deck (as used in competition) contains 30 cards, not 24. If you’re looking to play competitively you will need to pick up some booster packs or a Draft Set, but two starter sets will play perfectly well against one another without any extra cards required.
Legacies Changes
There are three main changes to Star Wars: Destiny in the Legacies expansion. These include new character abilities and a new card type.
Indirect Damage
Indirect Damage is a powerful new mode of attack but it has a drawback. Indirect damage often offers higher attack values than ranged or melee damage, however, when using Indirect Damage to attack an opponent, your opponent can distribute that damage among their active characters however they wish. That makes this particular attack method powerful but unfocused. You can also choose options that increase the Indirect Damage you hit an opponent with, at the cost of taking some collateral damage yourself. This option helps to reflect a more realistic battlefield environment where precise hits at a specific target are often impossible. The starter sets both contain several dice with Indirect Damage options so you can test this new attack mode out.
Power Actions
Another new concept introduced in Legacies is Power Actions. These special powers can be found on multiple cards and have, naturally, very powerful effects. The hitch with using Power Actions is that they can only be used once per round and so, must be deployed well for maximum efficiency. In the starter sets, Luke and Slave One both have Power Actions available to them so you can try out these new moves without the need to buy boosters.
Plots
The final new feature of Legacies is Plot cards. These cards cannot be found in the starter sets and must be found in boosters or draft sets. This is because they are designed for more advanced players who have begun building their own custom decks. When building a custom deck, players get 30 points to spend on choosing characters for their team. However, the point values of some characters made it difficult for them to add up to exactly 30 and playing with a 28 or 29 point deck left players at a disadvantage. This is where Plot cards come in. All Plot cards are valued between one and three points and can be used to make a deck up to 30 points by adding in some special abilities. Plot cards are great for adding flexibility to your deck building and will no doubt be welcomed by more competitive players.
Storage Binders
Once you’ve moved beyond your initial starter sets, you’ll soon find that storage for Destiny becomes an issue. Although there is space for extra dice in the boxes, fitting the extra cards in there too soon becomes difficult and you’ll quickly end up with a stack of starter boxes filled with cards from booster packs which are neither practical nor pretty as a storage solution. To help with this problem, Fantasy Flight have released a set of official storage binders for the game. These binders are available with the following characters on the cover, although others may be released in the future:
- Darth Vader
- Princess Leia
- Boba Fett
- Jyn Erso*
- Luke Skywalker*
- Captain Phasma*
*Currently on pre-order, to be released soon.
Interestingly, the Luke Skywalker binder features him as he appeared in The Last Jedi, while his starter set shows him during the A New Hope era.
The artwork on these binders is beautiful. Each one has a large illustration of the character on the front along with a color splash and a patterned lining which matches their character type: blue for The Force, red for Command, and yellow for Rogue. The large size means you can really appreciate the artwork too. I love a lot of the art on the Destiny cards but the small size makes it hard to take in the details. This is not a problem here.
Each binder has space for 44 dice and space to store a deck of 44 sleeved cards. I was able to fit all my dice from the Two-Player game, both Legacies starter sets, and a few booster packs into a single binder with room to spare but the card storage is more problematic. While I was easily able to fit a single deck into the card box that came with the binder, the box didn’t offer nearly enough space for my entire card collection, and there was no space at all in the binder to hold the many tokens that Destiny comes with.
To solve this, I bought a single standard black deck box for my cards and used the card storage area in the binder to hold my tokens. The magnetic closure on the binders means that I can also keep a copy of the rules and my card checklist in there without them falling out, and my entire Destiny collection can be neatly stored in a single binder and deck box. For now…
