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The Game of Life: Star Wars: A Jedi’s Path: Pt. 2
In LIFE®, you occasionally stop at red spaces representing major life events (getting married, buying a house), each of which introduces some new element to gameplay. This game does that too by providing you with a master and a lightsaber. Your master comes first; you draw yours from a deck containi a Jedi from the prequels and, as you can see from the picture… well, some are better than others (sorry Depa, but I’d rather be mentored by Samuel L. Jackson himself). Also you can lose them and their bonuses eventually if you become a Sith, part of how Sith get screwed. You get a master roughly a third of the way through the game and afterwards start getting Mission cards. Building your lightsaber marks the two thirds point and requires you sacrifice either one of each skill or three of one skill before drawing the card. After getting one the track gets a little looser and you have more options for routes to take.
A couple shots of the final area (pardon the blurriness, I had to lean over the board to get a good shot). When you get within the last dozen or so spaces of your final destination, you enter the Jedi Trials section; you go either Jedi or Sith depending on how many Dark Side tokens you have and face a series of honestly really brutal challenges. The Jedi path is much longer but less risky while the Sith path will fuck you up if you don’t plan carefully or get very lucky. Once you get to the end you take the obligatory skill token rewards for getting there first (the first Sith gets a bunch and the rest don’t, the Jedi get a declining number of skills based on finishing order). Once everyone gets to the end you start the first part of the scoring process; if everyone went either Jedi or Sith, the one with the highest skill total wins, spinning against each other for ties. Simple enough. However, if you have at least one of each, the most skillful Jedi and Sith face off. The Sith picks three skills and they spin against each other in any order, once for each skill. If the Jedi wins one of these spins, they win the game. In theory, the huge bonanza of skills Sith get by running down their paths balances it out, but it doesn’t.
Final note: here’s the rulebook in all its glory (plus a wayward Fighting tile). Pretty solidly written and it has a bunch of fluff at the end, but it suffers from some serious rule ambiguities. Biggest one? It doesn’t clarify what a Sith losing their master means. I can see someone convincingly arguing that just means discarding their master card and not the skills it gives them, even though that’s probably bullshit. But hey, it tells you what kind of Jedi you are!
To illustrate how this thing works, I’ll be running two characters through a sample game. The purple guy (Ki-Adi-Mundi) will be our sample Jedi; given the size of that cranium, I’ve decided to name him Sixhead. Our Sith will use Chewbacca's cutout; as a reference both to his appearance and the long tradition of Sith Lord names that are misspelled words about violence, we’ll call him Furry. Players start with two skills of their choice and I laid them out in the picture above; Sixhead (whose skill pile will be represented by the adjacent green figure to make keeping track easier) has one Logic and one Energy, while Furry (represented by the yellow figure) chose two Fighting.
Above we have the position of our two new padawans and their skill totals after passing their first trials. In the background you can see how, like LIFE has both college and straight to work tracks, A Jedi’s Path here has three, each of different lengths and each named after a Star Wars animal. They represent which clan you grew up in. In theory, the longer the path, the more opportunities you have to pick up skills, but since failing that first trial sends you back to the start where you get two new skills of your choice, it ends up usually averaging out. Being a calm and measured Jedi type, Sixhead took the long path and got there a bit later, while Furry took the shortest path in part because he’s the type to take shortcuts to power but mostly because it’s named after a mammal. He likes furry animals, but he’s never been a fan of scalies. On the rights you can see their current skill totals, still equal at 6 each.
The game when Sixhead picked up his master, Yaddle. Furry’s totals are much higher (14 to 10), partly because he spun two 9s in a row and shot ahead, partly because he’s already taken one Dark Side route, landing once part way through and once on the red square at the end. He's had his master Saesee Tiin for much longer. You actually want to advance slowly, though, since landing on more spaces will probably net you more skills than reaching the end first. Given how Dark Side paths tend to take shortcuts past big chunks of the board, that’s another hidden mark against the Sith.
Two thirds of the way through now; Sixhead has caught up with Furry and they both have their lightsabers now. Furry had the misfortune to land on a couple Redemption spaces that took away as many Darkside tokens as he earned, taking one skill token away each. He’s starting to catch on to how unfair this game can actually be and has started to mutter about Furry persecution, but there is still enough space left for him to mount a comeback. Skill totals sit at 24 for Sixhead and 20 for Furry.
They both reached the final area at about the same time. Sixhead actually lost a couple skills, having failed a couple missions and lost a few tokens to Furry via Darkside spaces. Furry, in the process of becoming Darth Furry, lost his master and the appropriate tokens, but he’s still substantially stronger than Sixhead (25 to 21). That’s a strong lead, right? Wrong.
Here’s the thing about the final area: the Jedi and Sith tracks work very differently. Jedi get three red spaces: spin against Logic 14, Intuition 14, and any skill plus Energy 20, each of which sends you back to the previous red space upon failure. Another ambiguity here: I THINK failures just sends you back to the last red space, bur the rules have nothing to say about what happens when players are moved back without ending their turn. The board has no mechanics that move players to other squares without spinning except the first Jedi trial back when they leave the clans, and if you fail that you take the action the space tells you to. The rulebook says nothing. It’s entirely possible that a string of failed spins can send you all the way from the final trial to the beginning. On the other hand, successfully spinning on either of the first two gives you three skills of your choice, so if it does, you have the chance to farm skills in an area already generous with the skills it gives out. Sith only get one trial, but it’s a doozy; spin against Fighting 20 and if you lose, not only do you go back to the beginning, you lose four skill tokens of your choice. Even one failed trial can cripple a Sith, especially given how success gives them nothing and how high they need their skills to hope to beat a powerful Jedi without extraordinary luck.
As expected, Sixhead picked up a bunch of skills on the way to the final battle and Furry failed his trial once, obliterating his Intuition. Furry got to the end first, becoming Darth Furry; Sixhead caught up several turns later. Above are their final skill spread: 36 for Sixhead, 23 for Furry; bit more dramatic a discrepancy than it usually is, but Sith often end up with a lower total. In theory, it doesn’t matter as long as the Sith stays competitive in three, but that just isn’t practical. As Master Sixhead finally faces off against Darth Furry in a climactic duel, Furry picks Fighting, Energy, and Logic. They don’t bother spinning for Fighting; Furry is so far ahead he wins by default. However, when Sixhead spins for Energy, his 13 Energy and result of 6 add up to more than Furry could possibly get. With that, Darth Furry finally meets a suitable end and Sixhead is declared victor.
A solid third of the rules pamphlet is devoted to fluff text: you can find out what kind of Jedi you are by identifying your first and second highest skills (choosing in case of ties) and reading a relevant paragraph. For instance, for Sixhead (whose Logic, Intuition, and Energy are all tied), I choose Intuition, then Energy:
The Game of LIFE®: A Jedi’s Path posted:
To you the galaxy is a mesh of possibilities, linked by the force. You see billions of beings, each making thousands of decisions daily – a giant web. You can trace this web, almost unerringly, to see into the future. Although this is tiring to the utmost, the Force acts as your anchor, giving you strength and serenity as you probe the futures of the Republic. You can find the one thread in a galaxy-wide conspiracy and follow it to its heart. You are a counselor and teacher, a year and a visionary.
In other words, a Jedi Consular. If Darth Furry had dropped the Darth, he would have been Fighting, Then Energy:
The Game of LIFE®: A Jedi’s Path posted:
You are a warrior unsurpassed. Between your skills with a lightsaber and the energy the Force brings you, you can leap, jump and twirl beyond what the eye can see. Your connection to the Force allows you to push an enemy from afar and your lightsaber construction will be studied by Padawans for millennia. You are often sent on dangerous missions where a quick lightsaber and battle instincts are not only an advantage, but are necessary for survival.
So Furry’s a conventional Jedi Guardian. However, he actually became a Sith Lord:
The Game of LIFE®: A Jedi’s Path posted:
Although powerful, you have fallen to the dark side of the Force. Your access to the Force is through anger, fear, and hatred. Your skills come easily to you, although do not bring you peace. Your power is great, but somehow unsatisfying. All fear you, though none respect you. You bring destruction to the galaxy, using others for your own purposes.
And there you have it. That’s the entire game.
The game suffers from being easily broken, especially at the end. While a well-designed game should have multiple paths to victory, a savvy player here really only has one: avoid the Dark Side paths, take the longest routes, and put most of your skills into Logic and Intuition first, Energy second, and Fighting only enough to get you past relevant Lessons and Missions. There’s still a lot of luck involved, but you could write an algorithm that follows those rules and will beat human players more often than not. But if you DON’T try to break, this game is a hell of a lot of fun; there’s enough strategy to figure out before cracking the riddle that you can squeeze a lot of entertainment out of it, and there’s enough chance involved to make sudden defeats and dark horse victories possible (if unlikely). If you’re a Star Wars fan, especially of the Prequels (and as time goes on more and more people are willing to admit they are), this game practically writes you a self-insert fanfiction; a Master Jedi (all of whom show up in the movies and have Legends stuff written about them) chooses you to be their Padawan, they take you on missions to places you’ve seen in other media to do cool things, you struggle through your Jedi Trials (which seem harder than they are because of how long they take), and finally take your place as a full Jedi Knight. It’s the daydreams of countless children across the world made real. That’s pretty good!