Matthew BaileyAll of the surprises keep coming at the moment as we reach the end of the Summer Holidays, and today and tomorrow I have 2 excellent Star Wars games to talk about.
Today I’m going to talk about Star Wars: Bounty Hunters, a really simple yet really cool card game with no downtime as everyone plays their turns simultaneously. Really simple rules but a surprising amount of strategy.
Each player is playing as a bounty hunter, attempting to capture targets and earn as many points as possible. There are three different ways to score points: you can capture targets, you can buy crates at the Jawa Market, or you can complete contracts which are kind of extra points by accomplishing specific missions and collecting specific targets or groups of targets.
The game starts by you laying out the four different zone cards: green, red, blue, and white. Green is targets, red is bounty hunters, blue is contracts, and white is the Jawa Market which generates droid cards or crates.
Each player takes one card from each pile and then takes one extra from any of the four piles of their choice and then you’re ready to play.
There are no turns – all players take their turn at the same time. But in order so that younger kids can follow along you usually have one player who acts as the Guild Master, who basically reads out whatever everyone’s doing and when they do it. Once you get a bit more confident you can just have everyone do their turns and it goes very, very quickly.
On a turn each player draws another card so you end up with five cards in your hand. Then you choose a card in your hand to either sell, which gets you a credit that you can then use to pay for the use of other cards, or play the card.
If you play a target card you simply put it down in front of you. This target card has a score value attached to it, which is how many points it’s worth if you manage to capture it. It also has a number of shield values which are green, blue, and red numbers, and in order to capture that card you need to lay other cards next to it that have numbers that are higher or the same as the numbers on that target’s shields.
Two types of cards can do this. Firstly, you can use bounty hunter cards from the bounty hunter deck to add up to that value, but the downside of using bounty hunter cards is that they have a negative point value attached to them. This is a really key mechanic as generally speaking you’re trying to be as efficient as possible with cards when trying to reach those values, because the further you go over an amount that you don’t need to, the more overall points you lose. A good example of this is that Toby had a 17 target and I had an 8 target, but because I was more efficient with the cards that I used we both ended up with the same amount of points at the end, even though he’d used a lot more rounds and a lot more cards to beat his target.
The alternative way is to use droids that you can get from the Jawa Market. These also have attack values that add to your total, but rather than costing points at the end of the game, they cost credits from the cards that you sell. This means there’s a different kind of negative. So basically the decision you’ve got to make is: is it better to lose points and capture that target quicker, or is it better to spend more time to get it and get it cheaper? That’s the trade-off.
The other two types of cards are crates and contracts. Crates can simply be bought with credits and count as points at the end of the game. Contracts normally have specific targets on them which give you more points for capturing those targets. Alternatively, they might require you to capture a pair of two targets where you get even more points if you manage to capture both of them. These can sometimes be useful if you’ve already got certain things.
What is really key about how you play the game is that on your turn, once you have either played a card or sold a card, you then pass your entire hand to the left, much like if you’ve played games such as Sushi Go. This means it’ll be a few turns until those cards come back to you and by that point another player may have either used that card or sold it for a credit, so you need to be aware of what other players are doing as well.
The game ends when one player captures their fourth target. The game doesn’t last super long – it’s over in about 20 minutes and can be done even quicker once you’ve got to know it and can do your turns really quickly.
It comes in a relatively small box, and obviously the Star Wars licence is a big extra bonus for my boys who are really into Star Wars, but to be honest you could reskin this to something else and it would still be a really good game regardless of the theme.
Really strong game, really would recommend, and it will definitely be on our roundup of the best games we played this summer.
