CarthAntilles

This is Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit, one of the most interesting board game designs I've encountered in my time board gaming. I fortunately own a complete copy myself (not the one in this photo). It CAN be played with up to 4 players, but if you want to have a good time, it's a 2-player game. It's a tactical wargame modeling the whole Battle of Naboo across four separate arenas -- the Gungans vs the Droids out in the field, the Queen vs the Viceroy in the 3-D palace assembled in the middle, the Jedi vs Maul, and Anakin flying around in space. The Naboo player wins by removing all droids from the game (so Anakin has to complete his thing and blow up the droid control ship, which removes all the droids from the game) and having a majority of pieces in the palace throne room. There are two Viceroy pieces (Nute Gunray and I THINK Rune Haako) which can't be killed, so you have to get three Naboo pieces into the throne room after Anakin wipes out the droids. The Trade Federation player wins by making the Naboo player's objective impossible: reduce the Naboo player to 2 or fewer pieces in the Palace area. The Jedi count towards the Naboo player's piece count, since if they beat Maul they can come into the Palace and tear shit up (and vice versa). Each player has two card decks, the Battlefield deck (governing the Gungan battle and/or Anakin's flight) and the Palace deck (governing the Palace fight and the glowstick boys). At the start, each player draws 5 cards from each deck to form a hand of 10 cards -- with identical backs. They then each lay down 4 cards of their choice facedown, in a stack, with the top card set to resolve first, then the players go back and forth playing their stack until both stacks are empty. Then each player draws 2 cards from each of their decks -- no matter what they actually played -- to set their hand back to 10. Is it based on a good movie? No. Is it solidly designed? Not really. Are there a ton of genius ideas in it that just needed to be refined? Absolutely yes.