The Mandalorian: Adventures

• Designer: Corey Konieczka, Josh Beppler
• Publisher: Unexpected Gamers
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 30-60 minutes per scenario
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4fmYfaS
• Played with advance copy provided by Asmodee USA

When offered a lucrative job, a lone bounty hunter begins a journey that will put his skills to the test and redefine his world. The Mandalorian: Adventures allows players to experience a new part of the Star Wars universe on their tabletops. Navigating unique maps and missions, players must co-operate to accomplish their goals and avoid defeat. Play as one of eight unique characters, each with their own deck of cards and strategies that will help you fight enemies and solve dilemmas to complete mission objectives. All of the action takes place in an illustrated map book as players recreate iconic moments from season 1 of the hit Disney+ series. With an intuitive system that’s easy to teach, the game grows with new rules, components, and mission types added over time – some even featuring a hidden traitor mechanism…

The designer diaries provide a great overview of the game, and it’s how I learned the basics myself.  Rather than re-invent the wheel, I will paraphrase from those:

The game comes to you via a gorgeous book full of thematic missions. Each mission begins with a visual intro that shows the events leading up to this moment. Fans of the TV show will recognize these scenes, and newcomers will learn a bit about why they are undertaking this mission. After reading the intro, you flip the page to reveal the mission itself. Each mission has unique rules and an objective, which you and up to 3 of your friends will attempt to accomplish as a team. 

Each mission also specifies which characters were present during these events. For example, The Mandalorian and IG-11 participated in the mission to capture the asset from Arvala-7. You can limit yourself to just these canonical characters (using special “Shared Character” rules), or use sandbox mode to use any characters.  Each character has a unique deck of cards full of thematic abilities. Any card can be used to perform any action, with the strength (number 1 through 4) dictating how powerful the action is.  You can either stick to the characters listed in the setup (meaning that players might have to share a character or a player might have to play multiple characters) – or you can just use sandbox mode and let players choose whoever they want.

Each of the characters has their own feel.  Some characters might be faster, stronger fighters, or better at planning. This is represented by bonus icons on some of their cards. The icons provide +1 strength when the card is played on the matching action. The true identity of the characters comes from abilities on their skill cards. You can only use the ability if you play it on the matching action, but you gain this benefit in addition to the action’s ability.   Some examples:

• The Mandalorian has a wide range of different weaponry and equipment
• IG-11 has a very specific play style: risky maneuvers
• Xi’an has some of the biggest combos in the game
• Greef Karga shows his strength in diplomacy and manipulation

After choosing characters, they are placed on the start space of the map. Threat tokens are also placed, either faceup or facedown, as specified by icons on the map. Threats represent features and enemies that can help or hinder your progress. There are four maps in the game, each with wildly different layouts, enemies, and environments: from derelict desert towns to capital ship corridors. Each mission is infinitely replayable, with random enemies, features, and events keeping you on your toes each game.  Each mission has its own set of tokens – these elements are what make each unique.

 In addition, after a few games you unlock special missions that can be played on any map.  (These can be mixed and matched for more than 20 different combinations!  After each game, you gain new cards, rules, and components. This makes the basic game easy to teach without sacrificing depth and variety.  The game includes a Guide Deck – it contains a wide range of new cards and rules that are slowly added after each game. It allows you to gradually add new mechanics as you play the game. Each character’s skill deck starts with 12 cards, but as you play, new cards are added to it from the guide deck. For your first eight games, you will always have something new to experience, whether it be new cards, missions, or more.

On your turn, you play 2 skill cards from your hand of 4. You must play each card to a different action shown at the bottom of the map: Move, Attack, Intel, and Plan. When you play a skill card, place it faceup on any action and perform its effect using the card’s strength.

For example, if you play a “4” strength card on the Move action, you can move up to 4 spaces. Likewise, if you play a “3” strength card on the Attack action, you can deal 3 damage to an enemy in your space or an adjacent space. 

The Plan action lets you draw a number of planning cards equal to your skill card’s strength. For example, if you play a “4” strength card on the Plan action, you can draw 4 planning cards. You may keep 1, place 1 on the top of the deck, and discard the other 2. You keep planning cards faceup in front of you, and you will be able to use the ability in the future. These cards have powerful effects, such as blocking damage or retaliating when attacked. 

The Intel action allows you to secretly look at a facedown threat token OR move an enemy. For example, if you play a “2” strength card on the Intel action, you could look at a facedown token up to 2 spaces away. Alternatively, if you play a “2” strength card, you could choose an enemy up to 2 spaces away from you and move it 1 space.

At the end of your turn, you’ll refill your hand of skill cards and before the next player takes their turn, you check the total strength of skill cards in each action slot..  When you play a skill card, it stays faceup below that action. For each action that has 6 or more strength, you need to resolve a crisis, then an event, then discard the skill cards and tokens from that action.

Each mission has a unique crisis which hurts players in a different way.   Events represent the unavoidable march of time – they usually make enemies move and attack or present a nasty obstacle for you to overcome.  Although events are unavoidable, the back of each event card has one or more icons on it. By looking at the top of the event deck, you can get a hint as to which enemies will be activating next. Players can use this information to their advantage to try to mitigate the effects of the card before they see what it is..

Each map has a unique set of enemies that match the foes our hero faced during this moment in his story.  Each enemy has a health value which shows how much damage is needed to defeat it. Each enemy also has a class icon; this is referred to by event cards, and each class behaves differently. For example, event cards will often instruct sharpshooter enemies to attack from a distance, and rarely make them move.  Any time a character is attacked by an enemy, the character takes one damage. This may not sound bad, but characters have very limited health (usually 5 or 6), and there are very few ways to heal damage.

For each action that has exactly 5 strength, you avoid the crisis! Resolve only an event then discard the skill cards and tokens. If all actions have 4 or less strength, the cards remain, and you have avoided events and crises this turn.  Obviously, you’d like to get a column to exactly 5 strength to avoid bad things – but be warned, effects (including setup) place disrupt tokens on action slots. These tokens add their strength to the action during the event step, making it even harder to hit exactly 5.  You need to balance what actions you want to take with the knowledge that they might cause detrimental events.

The group wins if they are able to accomplish the stated objective before any of the failure criteria is met.

As you work through the different missions in the game, you will add complexity slowly though the guide deck and secret envelopes.   As mentioned earlier, the guide deck gives you small changes to the game, reflecting experiences/skills gained as you progress through the missions.  The envelopes add in larger changes – adding different modes to the game and more significant rules alterations.  To be clear, The Mandalorian: Adventures is NOT a legacy game.  Though it does have things hidden in envelopes; the game is not forever altered by the contents, and you can in fact roll the game back to its original state (by simply putting the envelope contents back in the envelope).  

The two extra modes in the envelopes are:

• Mercenary Mode:  This uses previous mission maps but mixes in different rules and objectives to make them more challenging
• Hidden Motives Mode: at the start of the round everyone at the table gets a card that tells them whether or not they’re working with or against the Mandalorian 

You’re free to use these as you wish. Or if you hate hidden role games, like I do – you can read about Hidden Motives and then put them back in the envelope never to be seen again…

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My thoughts on the game

So I’m a big fan of the original Star Wars trilogy – but I’ll admit that I’ve lost touch with the franchise since the explosion of new content since about the time of The Force Awakens.  I haven’t seen many of the big screen movies, and I haven’t caught any of the TV series.  Despite that, I remained interested in this game due to the Star Wars IP – and because it was made clear that you didn’t need to know anything about the Mandalorian TV Series to play. The missions here stem from the series, and a novice like me does get a little bit of an introduction via the comics in the book.  The other gamers in my group had watched the TV show, and they said the missions we played thru were quite faithful to the show.

The game is well constructed and it’s easy to teach/learn.  The four base actions are easy to grok, and the system of using the strength of cards is neat – especially when combined with the event/crisis system.  There are plenty of times when you are forced to make hard decisions… I really want to move 4 spaces to get into range to attack that enemy, but if I do that, I’ll trigger a crisis… But if I don’t move that far, the event card looks to trigger that class of enemy, and we might end up taking damage from it if it is still on the board…

Having a bit of hint on the back of the Event cards is another nice concept, and one that I’ve seen on a number of recent cooperative games (most recently also in Weirdwood Manor).  It’s a clever way to give the team one other thing to consider when planning their moves.  Having to juggle all of these things in the decision making process does allow for a lot of lively discussion, and it really helps keep everyone in the game.  Should you try to make plans to avoid a possible attack from the event card, or maybe even delay an event card by a turn so that you have more time to prepare?  

The rules are pretty good, and with one exception, things are organized pretty well to get started as quickly as possible.  The one thing that confused us at first is that while each scenario has a suggested roster of characters – you can use the sandbox mode to play with whatever characters you want.  So, if your player group size doesn’t match the number of characters listed; it’s no big deal – you can just be a bit unfaithful to the actual story from the TV show and just play with extra characters…  This came up at the start for us because the first few scenarios only have 2 characters listed, and we really didn’t want to have to share them amongst 4 players.

I have played the first two scenarios in group mode (3p each time) and then played a solo game with the third scenario (me playing all 4 suggested characters).  It worked pretty well each time, though I do have some questions about scaling.  The reason for this is that one of the fail conditions is that the team loses if one of the characters dies.  If you add in extra characters, your team then gets extra HP to work with – and there is nothing in the game that otherwise scales for the addition of HP.  I suppose each particular character has to survive proportionally more events between each of their actions, but since the team can often make decisions about how the events play out, it seems easy enough to spread out the damage amongst the players.

I mention the scaling, but honestly not in a negative way.  Because I think it’s also worth saying that we had a blast playing the first two scenarios with an extra character (we played with the 2 canonical characters and then just added in one of our choice).  The first scenario turned out to be quite easy with the extra player, but the second was close – making me think that we probably would have failed with only two!  In addition, in retrospect, you could re-create the difficulty with an extra character by converting to the expert side of the character cards, giving each character 2 less HP to work with – keeping the total per group close to the same.

I’m not the most veteran cooperative player, but it still strikes me a little weird that the number of characters changes per map.  And that might just be because I’m not a fan of the whole sharing character concept – because hello quarterbacking situation.  So I’m glad to say that we were able to have a great game session using the sandbox rules, and in the end, I’m more concerned about having a fun and engaging game than being true to the story.

The Guide Deck is a nice concept – while it looks like it would make the game a Legacy game – it most definitely is NOT.  The Guide Deck is just a way for the game to slowly evolve; giving you the cards/concepts that you need to play each scenario – and preventing you from being overwhelmed with rules and cards that you don’t need as you start out.  Any of the parts can be taken out, so you can play at whatever development stage you like.   The envelopes also add in different play modes, but again – you only get them when you should be ready for them.   Nothing in them is meant to be a spoiler (as this is NOT a legacy game), but just a way to keep things separated until you need them.  It will also allow for storage of the different bits if you want to keep the parts separated.

As far as cooperative games go, this one has a lot going for it.  As I said earlier, the decisions in the game are really interesting.  The way that each character has a different focus to their deck allows for you to play a scenario completely differently based on who you choose to play.  The base rules are easy to grok, and I like the way that the game adds in rules slowly as to not overwhelm you.  I do kinda wish that there was a consolidated rulebook though as the extra rules come on cards from the Guide Deck, and it gives you a couple of extra places to have to look when trying to answer questions.  I look forward to finishing the missions here – each one I’ve played so far has felt different from the previous, and I really like that aspect of the game where each scenario plays out uniquely.  Would happily recommend this to anyone who likes cooperative games, and I probably don’t need to recommend it to any die-hard Star Wars fans, because it’s probably a must-buy.

Amazon Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4fmYfaS

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…