Star Wars Unlimited: Twilight of the Republic Set Review

A few weeks ago, Asmodee Canada sent over another review box for the latest release of Star Wars Unlimited. This release, Twilight of the Republic, is focused on the Clone Wars, with the “focal” characters being General Grievous and Ahsoka Tano. The cards within are beautiful as always, featuring characters and scenes long time Clone Wars fans will instantly recognize. For some, the characters might seem odd and there is an inability to place them in the Star Wars timeline – for those who have binged the Clone Wars like me? You are in for a real treat!

I love Fantasy Flight Games taking this approach with the latest release. There is so much within the Star Wars universe to explore, but I’m glad to see the Clone Wars getting treatment into the game so early in this game’s life. The Clone Wars is wildly popular, and has been at the forefront of Star Wars toys and games for a couple years now. Even Star Wars: Shatterpoint, the wildly successful table top miniatures game from Atomic Mass Games started with the clone wars first and foremost.

I want to touch on a few things quickly. GameGenic continues to produce fantastic accessories for Star Wars: Unlimited. While I wasn’t able to use some of the more premier deck boxes – which are very cool, by the way, be sure to check them out – I have been using the very affordable, yet high quality vinyl deck boxes, sleeves, and mats.

All of the items I got for review are priced really well, and for less than 50 bucks you can snag your own playmat, deck box, and sleeves for your favourite deck. The mats, particularly, are incredibly detailed and come in two different versions. You can get mats that are just images or various characters from this set – I have Yoda and a battle droid, but I’ve seen Clone Troopers and Darth Maul as well – and you can also get mats that have printed areas for where your cards are supposed to go. This includes areas for your deck and discard, ground units, space units, leaders, bases, and more.

While I love the uninhibited artwork that comes on a plain play mat, the usefulness of having all the zones of your player area mapped out is too much to pass on, especially for new players. I love that they have released some of these mats in the past, and continue to do that with this latest release. I still prefer the much larger 2-Player mat, but these single mats are fantastic as well.

So what makes Twilight of the Republic different this time around? You didn’t expect Fantasy Flight Games to just go with the status quo, did you? You’d be correct, something new is afoot in this release, and we will specifically be looking at the keywords Coordinate and Exploit.

Coordinate is pretty simple – it provides you bonuses to characters or other cards based on the number of units you have in play. For example, giving a specific unit an extra attack value if there are three total units in play. This new keyword forces your opponent to attack you more often than they might want. They might be wasting turns taking out low-level units simply because of the bonuses they provide other cards. This builds into strategic deck building in a really positive way I think and also allows for new and more complex deck builds.

Exploit is also pretty simple to understand. It allows players to defeat any units and lower the cost of playing a card by a certain amount per unit defeated. You can already tell that an Exploit deck will work well against a Coordinate deck as killing enemy units is the name of the game here. Again, like with Coordinate, this opens up more possibilities when constructing decks, and if the chips fall the way you want them too, you could be playing higher level characters much earlier in the game.

Overall, I do love what Fantasy Flight Games has done with Twilight of the Republic. I enjoy the small, seemingly unimportant tweaks to the game with new keywords and cards, but also melding it well with what has come before it. A lot of care and thought has gone into these Star Wars Unlimited sets, the order they are getting released, and how much new “stuff” they add. This is a team that knows how to build a trading card game. After a couple sets, it is my current go-to TCG right now, and that’s saying a lot!