Summary: Outer Rim follows the theme pretty well and has an easy-to-learn ruleset. It takes too long to play, though. It also has some issues that make it unappealing as a solo game.
Star Wars: Outer Rim is a pickup-and-deliver game. The player takes the role of one of the characters from the expanded Star Wars universe. That character pilots a ship between planets, fighting off patrols and gathering fame (victory points). The first one to ten fame wins.
Fame and credits can be gained primarily in four ways - delivering cargo (legal and illegal), performing jobs, fulfilling bounties, and completing encounters on planets or interstellar way points. In solo play, the AI can also just purchase fame. Some of these require ship-to-ship or ground combat. Others require passing skill checks. Each ship and character has different combat capabilities. Each character starts with a set of skills. They can add crew to their ship to provide additional skills.
Combat requires both sides to roll dice equal to their offensive capabilities. The party with the most hits wins. Attacker wins ties. (It isn’t totally clear from the “Learn to Play” book which side is the attacker.) Then damage is assessed. Since victory is assessed before damage is assigned, a character or ship can “win” but then still be “defeated” by taking damage equal to or more than their remaining hit points. Don’t worry - defeated characters and ships clear all their damage at the start of their next turn and are resurrected.
There are at least a half-dozen different skills. Each character starts with three. A character can also use the skills of crew gained during the game. A skill check means rolling a pair of dice and comparing the result to a threshold needed for success. Succeeding on a skill check when neither the character nor any crew are trained in it has just under a ¼ chance of succeeding. If one of the character or crew are trained, the chance of success goes up to about 60%. If more than one of the character and crew are trained, the chance goes up further to over 98%. Most jobs and some cargo deliveries require successful skill checks. That sounds like the player would have pretty good chances of success. Many times, however, multiple skill checks are required, with different skills. Not much of a problem in the late game, but it can be a serious obstacle early in the game. Successfully performing three skill checks, when the character has no crew and is only trained in one of the skills being checked, has about 4% chance of success.
Pros:
Theme - Most of the characters and ships are iconic, from Han Solo to Dr. Aphra. The tasks that they are doing are those that scoundrels in the Star Wars universe would be performing. The only off note is the fact that Imperials, Rebels, Hutts, and the Syndicate all patrol the same areas of space without conflict.
Rules - The rules are pretty easy to learn. With included player aids and a back-of-rulebook reference, I rarely had to stop play to look up rules. The exception was combat with patrol ships, which did not occur until well into the game.
Neutral:
Difficulty - There are many different options for what a player can do. It seems deciding what to do would require a lot of analysis. At least in my playthrough, that was not so. Work towards completing a job or delivering a cargo; pick up the next one while you are doing that. That was the basic gameplay. Work in the achievements needed to give your character and ship special powers when you can. Try to recruit some crew when you land on a planet. Almost all the gameplay is focused on these few things. There is some long-term strategy and some tactics, but they are general guidelines you need to take into account. There is enough randomness that thinking too far ahead is not useful.
Randomness - Randomness occurs in three ways - dice rolls to check skills, dice rolls to resolve combat, and which cards are available for purchase in planetary markets. There are some ways of mitigating this randomness. Skill checks become much easier when the character or crew is trained in the skill. A player can discard a card from a market deck before purchasing one. The player can increase their character and ship combat stats to make winning a combat more likely. Still, the result of my solo game was determined by luck. I failed to complete my last job several times due to bad die rolls.
Components - The components are pretty decent quality. There are several relatively small decks of cards. Sleeving them up made shuffling them much easier. The need to shuffle and to layout these decks and to place quite a few tokens slowed down setup. Setup was not too onerous, but did take a while.
Negative:
Bounties - Collecting bounties can give the player credits and fame. Capturing a target requires the player’s character win a combat with that target. Unfortunately, the characters all start significantly weaker than any of the bounty targets. I did not see many opportunities for the characters to get better at combat. Also, it might take a while to determine where to find the target, unless the player gets lucky. Overall, it might be worth trying to collect a bounty in the late game. Otherwise, it seems like a low-value proposition. That makes bounties a low-value addition to the game.
Playtime - Playing a solo game took two hours. There was little slowdown from a first time play. This was effectively a two-player game. I don’t see how the playtime would not scale about linearly with more players. It would be close to four hours for a four player game. That is just too long for a light game like this.
The AI - Many AIs in recent games do not try to play the game. They just try to interfere with the player. The Outer Rim AI does play the game. For the most part, it does fine. It can get stuck in a loop. Early in my game, the AI had to complete a job that required three skill checks - in only one of which the AI character was trained - and then win a combat. As mentioned above, the chance of making all of those checks was about 4%. The chances of winning the combat was about 50-50. So, completing the job was about 1 in 50. If the AI failed, it had no option but to try again the next turn. Not only was that pretty boring, it allowed my character to zoom way ahead.
If I was more than halfway to the 10 fame goal when the AI completed its job and got its second fame, I should not have had a problem winning, right? I’ve already said I lost. There is a second major problem with the AI. It can buy fame points for credits. The player cannot. And the fame points are pretty cheap. The AI had accumulated enough credits doing side jobs while sitting in one place to purchase several fame points in quick succession. Doing jobs not only got it fame points from the job but also provided credits to buy some more. Of the AIs final eight fame points, it earned three from completing jobs and fighting patrols. The other five were bought. The ability to purchase fame might be necessary to compensate for the AIs inability to act tactically or strategically. But the price of fame is too low. In this game, credits come pretty fast and easy.
Conclusion - This would be a fun game for three or four players, if it were half as long. Only the biggest Star Wars fans would want to spend an entire afternoon playing this game. There are plenty of good games that play in half the time. Aside from the length, the AI is too flawed for me to want to play it again solo.
Den of the Red Wolf 