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And that's about all I can do before Disney sues me. Hey folks, my name is Shay Parker, and this is RTFM, the show where I teach you how to play a game because I don't want to bartend anymore. And today, I'm teaching Star Wars Rebellion.
This is a slightly asymmetrical two-player war game set in space. You've probably seen the movies this game is based on, but in Rebellion, you have to tell a story a little differently. You know, it starts the same way with a plucky group of rebels against seemingly insurmountable odds. That really is a lot of enemy ships, but it's okay because the rebels have an ace up their sleeve. See, they have a rebel base, and if they can keep it secret, the Imperials will eventually lose their galactic support and crumble under the weight of their own machinations. Of course, the Imperials know all about the space, and their probe droids are hunting for it every day. So the clock is ticking for our freedom-fighting friends. This game is big, bold, and just about matches the movies in intensity. So get popped now.
Before we start, my eagle-eyed viewers are great at spotting any minor mistakes I might make, and I keep an updated errata list in the description. So check that really quick to see if I messed up. Hopefully, I didn't. Once you're done with that, let's learn how to play Star Wars Rebellion.
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Jumping right into it, this is how your first game will look at the start. There are advanced rules for choosing starting positions, but I'll talk about those a little later. Now, as you can see, the rebels look screwed, for lack of a better word, but that's just on the surface. The rebels are playing a deeper game of cat-and-mouse. Like I said earlier, the rebels have a secret base, and the game really hinges on finding that base for the Imperials and protecting it for the rebels. Outside the board is a time tracker. At the start of the game, you'll place a time marker at one and a rebel reputation marker at 14. Every round, the time token will move forward one space, and occasionally the rebel's reputation will increase or decrease. They'll eventually meet. The rebellion has convinced the galaxy that maybe the Empire is bad, actually, and needs to be shut down. However, the Empire can destroy the rebel secret base before then. The rebellion is crushed, and Luke goes back to his moisture farm. So let's set it all up and get to fighting.
After you choose your faction, let's say you're playing the Imperials, and put all the little things in little thing piles. Pick before starting leaders. These are the ones that don't have this recruit symbol. We've already set up a time track, so next we need to build the rebels' objective deck. These cards will be drawn every turn, and if achieved, improve the rebels' reputation by the number in the corner. You can achieve one objective at the start of each refresh phase and one during each combat, depending on what the card calls for. There are three stages of objective cards, so shuffle each stage, place them like so, and draw the top card. Then take all of your faction's action cards with the recruit symbol, shuffle them, and keep them nearby. Each faction will also have a deck of mission cards, and we'll get to missions in a bit, but first, just grab your four starting missions. They'll have this arrow symbol on the bottom. Show the rest and place them here. Why not? The Imperials will also have project cards, which look just like mission cards, save for this star on the bottom right. Make sure to separate those and put them on the project space. We've already placed our starting units and loyalty markers. The rulebook will tell you exactly how this goes. So now it's time for the rebels to choose the location of their base. To do this, take all the Imperial probe cards, remove the cards with any Imperial units on them, and then secretly choose one and place it face down under the rebel base space. For your first game, it's strongly recommended that you don't choose a system that's adjacent to any Imperial units. Of course, this does give the Imperial player a bit of extra info, so do with that as you will. After you've picked your base, both players draw two cards from their mission deck, and the game begins. Disney, please don't sue me, please don't sue.
Okay, so Star Wars Rebellion takes place over several rounds, and each round has three phases: assignment, command, and refresh. And in each of these phases, unless stated otherwise, the rebels always go first. Command is where most of the game takes place, but you'll have to assign your leaders first, so let's talk about that. This is where those mission cards I mentioned earlier come into play. These will help you in a number of different ways, but in order to use these missions, you need to assign your leaders to them. Let's say you want to lean into this bad guy thing and rule by fear, but you also want to do some research and development. Each of these cards has a prerequisite in the corner, which means you need to assign a leader with at least this many matching skill icons. The card we've played will need a leader with at least one diplomacy and one logistics, and for Palpatine has three diplomacy, so it's more than enough. And our otherwise mediocre general has a logistics, so he'll do just fine. The other symbols, intel and spec ops, won't be used for these missions, but it's possible they'll come in handy later. After the rebels have assigned their leaders, we'll play our mission cards facedown and place our assigned leaders on top of them, so the other player won't know what we're playing, but they will know who's being assigned. For each mission, you can also assign a second leader if you want to, say, if the requirement is too high for just one. For now, each leader you don't assign will stay in the leader pool. Now that's done, let's get to the command phase.
During this part of the game, the players will go back and forth performing one of two actions: you can either reveal a mission card or activate a system. Since we've been talking about mission cards slightly, let's start with that. As with the assignment phase, the rebels get to go first, but once our turn comes around, let's say we flip over our research and development card. This one's nice and easy, as the card says we resolve it in any system that has Imperial loyalty. Loyalty is shown by these tokens that show the Imperial symbol. The tokens with stormtroopers are subjugated, and they are considered Imperial systems, but they aren't loyal. I'll talk more about that in a minute. So let's say we pick Corellia. In order to complete the mission, we place our leader into the system, and because the mission card says resolve, we simply get to perform the rest of the text. In our case, we can draw two project cards and keep one, or we can fix a sabotage system and just draw one project card. I'll talk about sabotage systems a little later. And for project cards, just know that they allow you to do some very impressive things, like build a pointy boy or ease your Death Star to turn a planet into sadness. So wishes that just resolve are a sure bet, but other missions, like rule by fear, have to be attempted. What that means is that after you place your leader, your opponent can choose whether or not they want to send a leader of their own from their leader pool to oppose your mission. If they don't, your mission automatically succeeds. But if they do, you compare the skill values that are relevant to the mission and roll that many dice for each leader. For each hit or direct hit, you count one success, and each special counts as two. If the opposing leader can roll as many or more successes than the active player, the mission fails. Now, it's important to note that if there are multiple leaders in the system, their skill icons will count towards the mission, which is another reason you might want to bring a second leader along, especially for those super important stuff. Even if the leader just happened to be there, they'll still count, but you only count matching skill icons, and each side can only roll a maximum of ten dice because that's all there are in the box. Also, some missions will show a leader's portrait on the card, like this one showing one Mr. Robert. You don't have to send Bobby here on the mission, but if you do, you'll automatically get two successes before rolling any dice. Now, those first two missions we looked at were starting missions, which means that after we play them, they'll go back into our hand. However, if a card doesn't have the starting mission symbol on the bottom, it will be discarded after it's played, whether it was successful or not. And that's missions. A lot of the cards will change things up a bit, but they're pretty self-explanatory. So let's move on to activating a system.
Go to your leader pool and take a military leader, that's one with numbers on the bottom, and place it on a system. Then you can move as many units as you like from adjacent systems into the activating system, but there are three restrictions. First, you can't move units out of a system that already contains one of your leaders. Second, you can't move through these thick red lines. And third, ground units and TIE fighters need to be carried by ships with transport capacity, which is listed on your player board. We've got enough capacity to take every ground unit here, but we might not want to do that. Besides leaving systems vulnerable, subjugated planets will only remain under Imperial control so long as there's at least one ground unit in the system. If they're ever removed, and the subjugation marker is removed as well. Once you move units into a system, a few things happen. If the planet is populated and the Imperial player lands ground units, immediately place a subjugation token down, even if that system already has rebel T. Then the rebel player has to announce if their base is located in that system. If so, flip the probe card and move all units from the rebel base to the system. And whether the base is there or not, if there are enemy units, you'll engage in combat. We're just gonna get its own section a little later. Now, for the rebels, you can move units between the map and the rebel base if the system they're moving into or out of is adjacent to the system in which the base is located. Keep in mind, though, that does give your opponent a pretty clear search window, so do it sparingly. Of course, if you think the enemy knows where you are, there's a mission that lets you establish a new base. At the end of the round, when doing so, draw the top four probe droid cards and choose one to replace the old location of. Of course, you can't choose a location that contains Imperial oil tea or any Imperial units. If none of the locations are suitable or you just don't like any of them, you don't have to move your base. But if you do, reveal your old base's probe card and move all units in the rebel base space to the old base's system. You'll have to hoof it to your new base next round.
Now, instead of taking an action, or if you have no leaders left to take actions with, you can pass. If you pass, you won't take any more actions this round, but if you have leaders in your leader pool, you can still use them to oppose missions or for combat. Again, I'll talk about combat later. Once both players have passed, we move on to the Refresh phase. Here you'll do a bunch of things. Most of what you can do at your own pace. You don't need to go in turn order. First, you retrieve leaders. Every leader on the board or on unplayed mission cards will go back to their respective leader pools, that is, unless they were captured. See, the Imperials have missions that allow them to capture rebel leaders, and if so, place this captured ring around the stand. Anyway, if a leader is captured, they won't be returned during the refresh phase. They can't participate in combat or missions, except in the case of missions targeting them, and the Imperial player can move them around as if they were grounding it. The leader will be freed if there are ever no Imperial units in the leader's system, usually after combat, or if the Imperials get greedy and capture another rebel leader. There's only one of these rings, so the first captured leader gets to go free. Now, regardless of how it happened, a freed rebel leader is placed on the rebel base space and will be returned during the next refresh base. Speaking of, let's get back to it.
After returning leaders, each player draws two mission cards, then discards down to ten cards in their hand. Your hand size includes objective cards to the rebels and project cards for the Imperials, so be aware that it can fill up quickly. After drawing and discarding, the rebels draw an objective card, and the Imperials draw two probe cards. Make sure to keep those secret so the rebels don't know what you know where they weren't. Yeah. Then we advance the time marker, and a few things might happen. Obviously, at the time marker, the rebels' reputation marker, the game is over, and the rebels win. If not, check for these two symbols. The first signals a new recruit. For this, you draw two action cards and choose one of the leaders shown on the bottom of either of them. For now, just taken or the rest of the text. We'll talk about that when we get to the advanced rules. This leader will go into your leader pool and will be available next round. The second icon indicates building. So let's see how much stuff we get to build. Each populated system has a number and one or two symbols next to it. These symbols and their color correspond to specific units that you'll find on your player board. The number corresponds to the build queue on the side of the board. So Corellia here will allow us to place a TIE fighter and a Star Destroyer on a space three of build queue. However, if we're subjugating the system, we'll only get the leftmost symbol, which is always a weaker unit. And if the rebels have sabotage the system or if there are any enemy units there, we won't get to build anything. Also, the rebels have a choice when building space triangles or ground squares, so check out your options and build what's best for you. After building, we get to deploy. Shift each unit in your build queue down one space, so anything that wasn't space one gets to go to the map. You can place up to two units in any of your systems, so long as it isn't sabotage or there aren't any enemy units there. Of course, you don't have to place all of your units. If you want, you can leave some in the build queue, which might be a good idea if you know you want to shore up a specific fleet. And that's all for the Refresh phase and gameplay in general. Next up, let's get to the combat.
Okay, I'm gonna be honest, combat in Star Wars Rebellion can be a little fiddly, but after you've done it a few times, it all clicks together, so don't worry if it seems a little hard to grasp on your first build round. Anyway, let's say we've just moved a bunch of units into an enemy space, so now we gotta get out. I'm gonna move all the ships over the side of the board so it doesn't look like this. Now, before combat starts, the defending player gets to add a military leader from their leader pool if they want to, and you can do this even if you already have a leader in the system. Let's say they send Jan here. Once that's settled, both players will draw tactic cards based on their leaders' tactic values. Vader gets us two space cards and three ground cards, whereas Jan gets two space and only one ground. If the rebels had a second leader, you would draw based on the higher of each value. So having General I can't pronounce this name would only let them draw an extra ground card. Anyway, after that, we take a combat round. There are four steps to combat: give a space battle, then the ground battle, then either player can retreat, and if both players still have units in the system, you started over again. So let's take a look at a space battle.
Each unit has a few statistics that are shown under the player board. The first two spaces show you how many of each dice this ship rolls, and the third space shows the unit's health. The color of the health matters too, as it corresponds to the colors of the dice. I'll show you what I mean. Both sides have one of each of their ships. Because we initiated the combat, we'll be rolling first. Now, our ships have a ton of firepower, but you only get to roll up to five dice of each color per round, so we're maxed out. The symbols on the dice show hits, direct hits, and special. For each hit, you can deal one damage to a unit with matching health. Here we roll a bunch of black hits, but not a lot of red, which means that their fighters are in deep trouble, but their bigger ships are gonna be okay. Now, if we had rolled a few direct hits, we could use them to deal damage to any ship we wanted, regardless of what color health they had. For each hit or direct hit, assign one damage to an eligible unit. Any ships with enough damage to be destroyed will be removed after the defender takes their turn. Also, after you've assigned all your damage, if the defender has any tactic cards that block damage, they can play them to remove damage counters that you added this turn, potentially saving their ships. These tactic cards can really make or break a fight. A lot of them can be played without cost, but others require you to have rolled a special, spending one special die for each special card you play. Of course, if you roll a special and can't or don't want to use it on a card, you can instead suspend it to draw another card, but it has to match the theater of battle you're currently in. So right now, we could only draw a space tactic cards. After we make our attacks, the defending player takes their turn in the same way we took ours, then count the damage dealt and remove any ships with enough damage to destroy them, after which we move on to a ground battle, which works exactly the same as a space battle.
Once we're done with that, each player, starting with the attacker, can retreat, but there are a few restrictions here. First off, you can't retreat if your opponent has no units left in the system you want to fight. Don't get greedy. Second, you have to have a leader in the system in order to retreat. Third, if you have the Death Star or a Death Star under construction in the system, the Empire can't retreat. Fourth, you can't take captured leaders with you while retreating. And fifth, in order to bring your ground units and TIE fighters with you, your remaining ships need the capacity to carry them. You can leave ground units or TIEs behind, but if you do, they'll have to continue the battles that are in and won't be able to retreat on their own. Okay, so let's say the battle is going great, and we have the Death Star, so the rebels want to get out of there. First, they take one of their leaders in the system and look for an adjacent system with either friendly units or loyalty. If there are multiple options, you can choose. If there's only one, you have to retreat to that system. But if there are none, you can retreat to any system that doesn't have enemy units, except for any systems your opponent's left to start the attack. And unfortunately for the rebels, even if the rebel base is located in an adjacent system, you can't retreat to it. Your units just have to stay on the map. If there are no available systems, you can't retreat, and it sucks. Whether the combat ends by retreat or by the enemy forces being destroyed, once it's done, both players shuffle all tactic cards back into their respective decks and remove all damage from surviving ships. And that's combat. Like I said, it's a little involved, but you'll get the hang of it after a few rounds.
Before I move on, I want to talk about the special units that each side has. The Super Star Destroyer and the Death Star can only be built through project cards, that's what this symbol means. And the Death Star can't be destroyed by dealing damage to it. The rebels will need a Death Star Plans objective card in order to take it out. Of course, if the Death Star is still under construction, and it does have health, and it can be destroyed normally. On the rebel side, we have the Shield Generator and the Ion Cannon. These, like the Death Star under construction, are immobile, so they're tied to the planet they were built on. The Shield Generator allows you to draw a ground tactic card before each round of ground combat, and the Ion Cannon forces the Imperial player to fire two fewer red dice during space combat. However, you count down from how many they would roll before heading to five dice maximum. So if they would roll ten and you would remove two, making an eight, they would still only roll five. Another however, though, is that these abilities stack. So if you have more Ion Cannons, you can remove more dice.
Okay, so now that you know all the basics, let's get a little advanced. Y'all have Star Wars, so please don't sue me. I'm helping you sell your product, so it should be clear. You played your first game, or maybe you just want to dive right in. Here are some advanced rules that are gonna keep each game from playing out in the exact same way. First off, is a way to change up your starting positions. Instead of placing units on pre-designated planets, take the probe deck and just start drawing cards. The first three cards that show a rebel symbol and the first five cards that show Imperial are where you're going to start. Unlike the rest of the game, the Imperial players will place their tokens and units first. The first two systems drawn will get a subjugation marker, and the next three get loyalty markers. Then check page 15 of the rules reference to see how many units you start with and place them between your starting systems however you like. The only rule is that each system has to have at least one ground unit. Then the rebels put loyalty markers on their three systems and divide their starting units between one of their planets and the rebel base space. Once you've done this, both players draw two random starting action cards, and then you can move on to the rebels choosing the location of their base.
Let's talk about these action cards because they have a really big impact. Until now, we've just been using these cards to recruit leaders, and they still do that, but now you choose one card to recruit a leader. You also get to keep the action card that comes with it. These are powerful abilities that you'll get to use just once during the game, and they come in a few different flavors. If they say immediate, as soon as you gain the card, you have to reveal and play it. Assignment cards are played during the assignment phase. Instead of playing a mission card, you reveal the action card and assign the shown leader to it. Start of combat cards are played immediately after the add leader step of the combat, and other cards are special, so they'll tell you how they're played. Any card that's played during missions or combat can only be used if at least one of the leaders shown is in the system where the mission or combat is. Stay in place. And there's one more advanced game mechanic that I'm not gonna teach. There's a team variant to this game, but it basically boils down to two people playing each faction, and it's fine if you're really down to play this version. It's not hard to learn. I have faith in you. Anyway, that's how you play Star Wars Rebellion. Thank you so much, my rules lawyers, for supporting the channel and voting for this game. It's one I've had my eye on for a while, so I'm glad I finally got to get it to the table. And even though I filmed this before the next game was decided, I can tell you now that it's gonna be this one. Nice. If you want to vote on what games I teach, get behind-the-scenes info, or get exclusive strategy and expansion videos a month before anybody else, consider backing my Patreon and become a true lawyer yourself. I have it on good authority.
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