Geekually Yoked

In juxtaposition with my last post about Star Wars Talisman, I want to talk about Outer Rim which falls squarely in the talisman genre even if it is not part of the Talisman brand. Both games see players move around a board, collecting gear, money, and followers while getting into fights and rolling dice to overcome challenges. They both give opportunities for players to get better and more powerful as they bounce around until eventually one is able to claim victory. Whereas Talisman is a kind of Purgatory where you just go round and round accepting the vicissitudes of capricious chance, Outer Rim and its Unfinished Business expansion offers a more engaging and robust experience.

In Outer Rim, players pick characters taken from the more scoundrelly side of the setting (Han Solo, Boba Fett, Doctor Aphra, Hondo Ohnaka, etc) and then choose a starter ship either going for speed or toughness. Depending on their character, they’ll draw a random starting mission which will either be cargo delivery, bounty hunting, or a job which will calm for a series of skill rolls to achieve. These three types of missions are the main ways players will earn money and Fame. Earning a set amount of Fame is how players win the base game.

Every turn, players will either move around the board, recover damage from previous misadventures, or collect a small amount of money. Then depending on where they are, they can deliver cargo, buy cards, or carry out any free actions they’ve accrued. Finally they’ll have an Encounter which will either mean drawing a card based on their location, choosing a Contact token which will either be hidden or revealed and gives them a character to interact with, fight another player or patrol ship in their space, or use a card with an Encounter action on it. These Encounters are the real dynamic part of the game and can give the players new gear or quests or go into combat.

The fiddliest action is the Market action where players try to buy cards from the various market decks. During set up, the decks are laid out with the top card visible so players have an idea what’s available. First they have an option to discard up to two of these visible cards either because it’s not what they want or to deny it to other players. Then they can choose to buy gear, cargo, new ships, or take bounties or jobs. If they buy, they take the top card and reveal the next card in the deck which might have certain symbols on it that immediately trigger some effect. Some let the player flip over hidden Contacts where others move the various patrols on the board closer to the player. These patrols can limit movement or force a combat. They patrols correspond to 4 different factions that players will have some sort of reputation with – Empire, Rebellion, Hutts, and Syndicate.

Missions are the best way to earn money and Fame and come in three main forms – cargo runs, bounties, and jobs. Cargo is available to buy on different planets and has a destination. If the player can get it there they earn the reward. Some cargo is illegal and requires a dice roll to either acquire or deliver and can get a player in trouble if they encounter patrols. Bounty hunting consists of running around flipping over the Contact tokens hoping to find your quarry and then winning a combat against them. Sometimes these bounties will be serving as crew for other players which makes chasing them down all the more interesting. Finally there are jobs which usually have a destination planet and then take the player through a flow chart of skill tests and combats. If the player survives and gets enough successes they get the reward, otherwise they have to keep trying until they do.

All players and ships (apart from starting ships) have personally goals that both give you fame and unlock new abilities. This is a more long term way to earn fame and can help give you direction for the early and mid game.

Skill checks are fairly simple although the game uses custom dice with particular symbols that you have to learn. Whenever you make a skill check, you roll two dice. If you don’t have the skill you need to roll a critical success. If you or a crew member has the skill, you need a regular or critical success. Certain gear and ships and player abilities can tweak these checks and make them easier.

The Unfinished Business expansion is a nice buffet of options you can take or leave. New characters are introduced with corresponding challenging bounties. It also lets players travel into the more Empire dominated core worlds which lets players have a short cut from one end of the board to the other. Its biggest addition is an overarching player career goal which changes how you win the game by giving you a series of challenges and achievements you have to overcome. This can be anything from getting obscene wealth to carrying out ever more dramatic acts of resistance to becoming a pirate queen.

Like all talismanic games, Outer Rim is big and ridiculous and if you want a more brainless, less fiddly experience you can just stick with Star Wars Talisman. However, if you want a big epic story of a game where Boba Fett teams up with Chopper and Lobot to take the fight to the Empire while trying to figure out how to offload baby rancors, then this is the game for you.

There are many games where players move armies around a map to seize and hold territory in order to secure victory. These games can have a King of the Mountain energy where obvious winners inspire other players to set aside their differences to unite in dragging them down or neck and neck players try to convince everyone else at the table that their rival is the real danger, not them. From classics like Risk to Diplomacy to big chunky wargames like Twilight Imperium or Game of Thrones, these games are often big, long, affairs where hours of planning and maneuvering are rewarded or not. War of Whispers by contrast is a fast game lasting only 4 rounds and around an hour and yet in that time it manages to capture a lot of the elements that makes those larger games so compelling while also subverting them.

In War of Whispers, players are not representing the different empires and kingdoms at war but rather the secret societies, cults, and conspiracies maneuvering in the shadows and manipulating these larger forces. They’ll share control of the kingdoms and try to manipulate the wars to their favour.

At the start of the game players randomly shuffle their ranking of the different kingdoms that will determine how many points they’ll gain or lose depending on how the war shakes out. In this way the game has more in common with gambling on a horse race or buying stocks than with just straight up trying to grab Kamchatka before anyone else. These rankings are secret and keeping that information privileged helps prevent your rivals from sabotaging your goals. However, empires fall and sometimes it pays to switch bets so between rounds, players can swap their rankings between two kingdoms but in so doing they flip over their tiles and reveal what their new rankings are.

Every round, players assign agents to the different officers tasked with running this war which gives them the ability muster troops, draw cards, and attack rival kingdoms. There are no restrictions on how many agents from which factions can be on any given kingdom so you can very well see a turn where one player raises an army and another player sends that army in the complete opposite direction of where the first player wanted. Combat couldn’t be simpler with armies canceling each other out, no dice needed. The cards allow players to swap out actions or move armies around unexpectedly or can even cause dramatic upheavals.

As the game goes on, more and more agents get added and control gets more complicated as everyone gets a better idea who is in favor and who isn’t. By the end some kingdoms will be mighty empires astride their conquered rivals or burnt out war zones, or colonized husks of their former selves. When the smoke clears, players reveal all their rankings and score based on how many cities the kingdoms control.

War of Whispers is a deeply clever game that plays remarkably differently every time we bring it to table. There isn’t a great deal of table talk because so much of the game is trying to misdirect and hide your intentions although it can be a lot of fun to roleplay the hapless kingdoms who just can’t seem to catch a break. If players have similarly ranked kingdoms they can be unknowingly working together. Similarly when one kingdom is everyone’s bottom pick that creates hilarious devastation. It feels almost like a meta-war game with the grand schemes and bold tactics being reduced to opportunistic sabotage and sudden betrayals. The cards create the most unpredictable chaos and I can see them frustrating players with the way they can upend things but I appreciate the threat they pose and the arms race of collecting one’s own cards to have on hand to even things out.

I have the deluxe version which comes with the larger pieces which makes the board pop and apparently makes reading the board state a lot easier. It also adds additional cards that provide more variety. Not a deal breaker but definitely adds to the game experience. Whichever version, I have had great success putting this in front of my friends and heartily recommend.