Designer Diary 3: Dangerous Foes
What do stormtroopers, mercenary bounty hunters, and security droids have in common? They all stand in the way of The Mandalorian and his goal.
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.
Event Step
After performing two actions on your turn, you check the total strength of skill cards in each action slot.
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. 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.
So, what are crises?
Each mission has a unique crisis which hurts players in a different way. For example, the crisis for mission 1 places damage on a special track. When there are 3 damage on the track, you must spawn a reinforcement on the map. This might not sound too bad, but these powerful enemies want nothing more than to ruin your day.
Ok. Crises are bad. Got it. So, what are events?
Events represent the unavoidable march of time. They usually make enemies move and attack or present a nasty obstacle for you to overcome.
For example, the event card shown below moves all melee enemies 2 spaces towards the nearest character. Two melee enemies then attack characters in their space.
When a character is attacked, they always suffer 1 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.
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. Use this information to your advantage.
The core strategy boils down to this: try to make actions hit exactly 5 strength so you can avoid the crisis. You will often be tempted to exceed 5 and will need to weigh the costs. Maybe you need to move 4 spaces to unlock a door – is it worth doing this if it will cause a crisis, or should you just play a 3-strength card for now?
These juicy dilemmas are frequent. If you don’t cause an event, the skill cards you played will stick around and become a problem on your teammate’s turn. Round and round the wheel turns.
As if that wasn’t enough, many 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.
Enemy Abilities
You now know the basics of enemies and events, but there’s one last wrinkle. We didn’t want enemies to be just mindless foes that run and fire blasters. Some enemies are a little smarter or specialized. These are marked with an enemy ability icon.
The first mission only has the sentry ability, and more abilities are introduced later. Sentry enemies deal you 1 damage if you end your movement in their space or an adjacent space. This adds a little puzzle to solve – do you run up and take the damage, or perhaps use intel to move the enemy out of the way? Some characters have skill cards that allow them to avoid these abilities, or even attack enemies from a distance.
