Strike Team - A Skirmish Ruleset for Star Wars Legion

"...is your strike team assembled?"

-Crix Madine

Legion On A Smaller Scale

Legion - Strike team is a homebrew ruleset designed to take the mechanics of Fantasy Flight's Star Wars - Legion and use them for a skirmish game on a smaller map and with fewer models. The current alpha rules are located here:

Alpha 0.3

Alpha 0.1

This document is filled with stats and options and is dense with information. Being in alpha, however, means the system needs to be playtested by as many people as possible to fix and refine the rules. In order to make this information more approachable, I will be posting here to discuss my design goals and philosophy behind the ruleset. This post is focused on the main design goals.

 

No Time For Sorrows... or Legion

Star Wars - Legion is in an interesting scale. While not as large as full army games like Warhammer, it certainly isn't a small skirmish. As such, the playtime and space requirements can limit how often Legion can be played. With the popularity of quicker minis games like X-Wing and Kill Team, I've wanted to make a ruleset that can offer a similar experience for the Legion system. In addition, much like Kill Team, I want the system to be playable by new players with minimal investment.

With that in mind, there are two main goals:

1. Faster Games
2. Fewer Models - a single trooper expansion will be enough to get started

Furthermore, I wanted to incorporate a progression system inspired by XCOM games and Kill Team, allowing for a narrative campaign with troopers that grow in skills and abilities.

So let's take a look at some of the changes to the original game that focus on these goals.

 

Make Ten Men Feel Like A Hundred

In Strike Team, you are in charge of a single squad of troopers fighting on a 3' by 2' map. With squads ranging from five to seven miniatures, each miniature represents an individual activation. As such, the order system from Legion was tweaked to allow for the same tension of assigning orders or hoping to pull the activation you need from the pool.

There are still the six different symbols from Legion, but they are assigned to specific types of trooper: Captain, Heavy, Support, Tech, Assault, Rookie. All troopers have between 1 HP (for Rookies) to 3 HP.

We will go over each type of trooper in future posts.

Easy? You Call That Easy?

 Those are the only major changes to the system. While individual weapons and keywords are getting tweaked, all remaining rules have stayed intact.


Check back Thursday for the feature on the leader of your Strike Team: the Captain.