by BananaCrapshoot

Hello Troopers. Today I wanted to compare and contrast Star Wars Unlimited vs Star Wars Destiny. I want to see if we can draw any conclusions based on these comparisons. We will start by talking about the games individually then work into side by side examinations.

First off for those that do not know, Star Wars Destiny was a dice & card game made by FFG. You build your deck around 30 points worth of Characters then make your 30 card deck consisting of supports, upgrades, and events. This novel gameplay experience had a really unique niche hook of the characters, supports, and upgrades having a custom printed dice assigned to them that you would roll into your dice pool when you activated them.

Your goal was to defeat your opponents characters. Your events a lot of the times would manipulate your own dice or your opponents dice. On top of the variability card games traditionally offer it had the added variability of dice. This experience allowed you to embody one to three characters at a time normally and face off against your opponents in a skirmish-like dueling game system. Star Wars Destiny implemented the shared round turn, one action each turn until you pass for the round.

Star Wars Unlimited is a game where you embody your leader character and build your 50 card deck full of events, units, and upgrades with the goal of destroying your opponents base. There’s a few neat gimmicks going for it here. One is the way the leader works. Sure lots of card games have the leader type characters but I can not think of a game where they mechanically operate like this. You play more passively until you reach your deploy trigger, currently they are all resource values, then you can deploy that leader as a unit for free as long as you meet the threshold needed. Another cool piece is this is a 2 lane game. There’s the ground arena and the space arena. So you have this cool space and ground battle happening at the same time and it feels extremely Star Wars to me.

Deckbuilding:

Star Wars Destiny – choose 30 points of characters. Each character is in a faction/color and gives you access to deckbuilding in that faction/color. You then build a 30 card deck, 2x copies of a card, full of supports, upgrades and events.

Star Wars Unlimited- choose a leader card which gives you access to 2 aspects for deckbuilding. And choose a base which gives you access to a third aspect. You then build a 50 card deck full of ground and space units, upgrades, and events.

Star Wars Unlimited deckbuilding is more traditional because you don’t have to factor in cards that give you access to dice. In destiny a lot of times you knew what cards were in your opponents deck just by seeing their character line up. It was really easy to throw in the 5 best removal events and move on. I think Star Wars unlimited will give us more varied deckbuilding options due to the increased deck size and the way aspects function.

Winner: SWU

Gameplay:

Star Wars Destiny focused on your characters, the game featured a shared round with players alternating actions. Your actions included activating a character or support to roll their dice into your pool, resolving dice, playing events. There was a good back and forth tempo but the dice rolling did add time to a game that felt like it should go quicker.

Star Wars Unlimited features a similar shared round turn structure with players alternating actions. Removing the dice aspect and adding in a focus on board control through played units makes this feel like a more traditional tcg at the same time it does feel more streamlined and a player never feels disengaged from the action.

The two arena gimmick given to us here adds another layer of strategy and game function as there are separate space and ground arenas. Forcing you to Manage two battlefields simultaneously.

Winner : SWU

Theme:

Both games have a very rich theme to them. Though at times the clunky-ness of the dice could ruin the immersion. In SWU the thing that can throw off the immersion for some is the uniqueness rule. You can have two of the same character on the board as long as it’s not two copies of the same card. This isn’t a huge deal for me personally as a person that sees cards as game pieces and I am not looking to recreate specific scenes from Star Wars. FFG has always done a good job incorporating theme into their design and it’s not stopping here.

Winner: Tie

Products:

Star Wars Destiny featured 36 pack booster trailers for each set. The first set of each block got 2 starter decks, as well as the surprise 2 player starter set that released. To play constructed you needed to buy at least 2 of each starter as they came with 20 card decks and not enough to play each character at their elite point value giving you the second dice. You also needed to purchase a separate draft kit to be to play draft games.

Star Wars unlimited will launch with 24 pack booster boxes and a 2 player starter set. The two player set features 2 fully playable 50 card decks out of the box along with full play sets of the starter unique cards.

Winner: SWU

Organized Play:

OP in SWD was shaky at best. Inconsistent weekly kits, some stores could order but some couldn’t. Lackluster prizing for most of the games life. The last prime season was a step in the right direction with prize support and people really like the prize wall at the last world championships.

SWU isn’t even out for another 5 months and we have a complete roadmap for competitive and casual OP for when the game launches. The alt art treatments we have seen are cool and we know there’s more they haven’t shown us yet. They also teased some awesome prizes at bigger events. Games not even out yet and already takes the W in OP support.

Winner: SWU

Community–

Star Wars Destiny boasted a decent sized and faithful fan base. This still continues with a few continuation community projects with a couple new set releases a year and lots of TTS events. There were lots of content creators around the game.

Star Wars unlimited already has a strong base that continues to grow every day. There’s a whole bunch of content creators for SWU. One thing that’s been amazing to see with the amount of community sites. Swudb the holocron wiki, forcetable, and all these other ones I’m forgetting that have been created and maintained by community members months ahead of release.

Winner: SWU

In closing I just want to say that I loved SWD, I met some amazing people as a result. But it’s time to let the last die and embrace the new great upcoming game that is checking all the boxes and walking the talk. Thanks for stopping by and we will see you in the arenas