Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game – Clone Wars Edition

I picked up Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game – Clone Wars Edition because Clone Wars is the young one's favourite corner of Star Wars, while SWU has become complicated enough to tire him out. That is a perfectly decent reason to put a game on the table: familiar space adventure, without making a weeknight feel like an extra shift at work.

At heart, this is a deck-builder. You gradually build up your deck, trying to make the cards you acquire work more effectively together, while the Star Wars setting supplies the theme and shape of the contest.

The players meet through that contest between their growing decks rather than through some especially intricate system demanding that you hold ten things in your head. It is a lighter option than SWU for someone worn down by its increasing complexity, and that has real value; it simply is not enough, by itself, to make the game memorable.

It is a sweet game, and for the right young Clone Wars fan it may be precisely the gentle landing they need. I have rather overdone deck-builders, though, and now need something as distinctive as Mistborn to surprise me; this did not sweep me away, and I could not quite see the case for all the noise. Quietly likeable, not the revelation those glowing reviews promise.