Star Wars Unlimited's Xander Tabler Talks Twilight of the Republic, Clone Wars Faves, and New Keywords
Fantasy Flight's Xander Tabler talks Star Wars Unlimited's Twilight of the Republic set, new keywords, and Clone Wars
Fantasy Flight Games hit the ground running with Star Wars Unlimited's second set Shadows of the Galaxy, and now that the set is out in the world it's time to get excited for the third set in the series. That would be the anticipated Twilight of the Republic, shifting the focus from the Outer Rim to the world of Clone Wars and the prequels and introducing new mechanics into the game while also building upon things established in the previous two sets. ComicBook had the chance to speak to Fantasy Flight Games Community Manager Xander Tabler about the new set and what it brings into play, as well as some of the new keywords and mechanics, and the how the new set and beyond will work with some of the previous keywords already in the mix.
Twilight of the Republic
While Spark of Rebellion focused on the original trilogy and Shadows of the Galaxy focused on the more fringe elements of the franchise, Twilight of the Republic moves to the Clone Wars era, and that encompasses quite a bit of Star Wars lore. "I've been so excited to talk about Twilight Republic since, I remember seeing it in playtesting and what they were going to be doing with it, it's really exciting. So the set focuses very much on like the Clone Wars era. So you know, Episode 2, the Clone Wars show, Episode 3. It's going to have a lot of those prequel characters that you really know and love. Not all of them, obviously, but a lot of them are going to make an appearance, and it'll be really fun to see people's reaction to seeing some of these beloved characters in a card game," Tabler said.
New Leaders
With the Clone Wars era, fans will get to bring some big time favorites into play, including Ahsoka and Assaj Ventress, who also bring with them some new mechanics. "And I think the keywords and the things that they're adding and the new mechanics for Set 3 really mesh well with that. We've got for the Heroes, like Ahsoka Tano, the leader, focus on coordinates. You want three or more units out at a time to do this, so it's all about working together. And if we have a bunch of us, we can do this thing. We can do it even better than before," Tabler said.
"You have, kind of on the Separatist side, we've shown what Assajj Ventress has, the Exploit keyword, which is new. Exploit has a number after it. If you defeat that many units, you get to bring down the cost of the unit you're playing by two for each unit you've defeated to do it," Tabler said. "So, Assajj has Exploit two, and she only costs four. So you could defeat two units, play her and play her for free. Which is really fun, it's sacrificing some of these droids and things to further your goals. And it's a really interesting dynamic between the two sides there. I think people will really enjoy the thematics of that.
And we've also announced that there's Clone Trooper tokens and Battle Droid Tokens, and Token Units is something we've been asked about from the very beginning. So finally, I'm glad that in set two we could add Smuggle cards that let's you play from resources and now we're playing Token Units, which is another thing people ask for. And you said we're kind of delivering on that promise of expanding and also moving towards what feels natural to players.
Staying Approachable
One of the welcome additions to the game came in Set 2 with the Smuggle keyword, which allowed you to bring cards with that keyword out of your resource pool into pool for a higher cost. It opened up even more options during a given turn, and I asked if we would see more cards that built upon Smuggle specifically in Set 3.
"So around the idea of keywords, I can't say specifics about Set 3, but as a general idea of moving forward that some keywords will be floating in and out within sets and it'll be something that as it goes It's with a keyword that makes sense. We don't want a set to have every single keyword ever done forever. We want to make sure that it makes sense. It feels good and it's easily picked up by new players too," Tabler said.
"We've talked about this since launch of hey, We want this to be easy to learn but difficult to master, And if you start adding a million different things that you have to learn before you start that kind of amps that difficulty up. And so keeping things moving, obviously when you start doing Premiere, you can throw those cards from different sets together and that's when it really starts to shine, some of those keywords. But within each set, there's not always a guarantee on each keyword showing up," Tabler said.
Twilight of the Republic lands in stores on November 8th, 2024.
Are you excited for the new set? You can talk all things gaming and Star Wars Unlimited with me on Threads and Twitter @mattaguilarcb!
