The story of Star Wars may take place a long time ago, but IGN can exclusively reveal the upcoming Star Wars: Unlimited trading card game from Fantasy Flight Games and Asmodee will release at retailers and hobby stores in the near future: March 8, 2024.
Check out the release date announcement trailer below:
Unlimited sees players choosing an iconic Star Wars character as their leader and piloting a 50-card deck full of heroes, villains, bounty hunters, droids, weapons, and ships. Leader characters, such as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, make a dramatic entrance in the middle of the game to help turn the tide in your favor. Gameplay takes place across two battlefields, one on the ground for characters and the other in space for ships. Victory goes to the first player to deal 30 damage to the opponent’s base, which are familiar locations such as Cloud City and Jedha. Cards pull from everything from Star Wars movies and TV to comics and video games.
Lead game designer Danny Schaefer told IGN that they took inspiration from a wide variety of games when crafting Unlimited’s mechanics, including industry titans Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, digital card games like Hearthstone and Runeterra, and of course FFG’s own games such as Netrunner and Legend of the Five Rings.
“Our philosophy as we were designing was to look at all those different card games, competitive card games that we've played, and strip out the parts that feel the least fun and focus on the parts that are the most fun,” Schaefer said.
For example, Unlimited allows for any card to be used as a resource in order to eliminate getting “mana flooded/screwed.” Two cards are drawn every turn in an effort to avoid players getting stuck in the dreaded late-game topdeck mode. And play bounces back and forth with each player taking one action at a time so you don’t have to sit and wait for the opponent to finish a long turn, a mechanic taken from FFG’s previous Star Wars tabletop game, the card-and-dice battler Star Wars: Destiny.
The first Star Wars: Unlimited set is titled Spark of Rebellion and will feature over 200 cards.
One of those cards is the Legendary rare Mace Windu – Party Crasher, which IGN is excited to exclusively reveal for the first time (in both its standard version and full art Hyperspace variant).
Evoking the Jedi Master’s badass entrance during the Battle of Geonosis at the end of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Mace Windu has the ability to ignore "summoning sickness" to immediately attack and then continue attacking every time he takes out a unit, so he’s perfect for mowing down a series of smaller enemies, just like he did Jango Fett and so many Separatist Army Battle Droids.
Star Wars: Unlimited products to expect upon release include the Spark of Rebellion Two-Player Starter with decks featuring leaders Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (MSRP $34.99) and Spark of Rebellion Booster Packs that contain “a mix of Common cards, Uncommon cards, at least one Rare or Legendary card, a leader, a base, and a foil card” (MSRP $4.99). One week before release, the Spark of Rebellion Prerelease Box (MSRP $29.99) will go on sale, featuring “6 Spark of Rebellion Booster Packs, 2 promo cards, quickstart rules, damage counters, a deckbuilding guide, and a deckbox.”