Legion!

Space Marine Legions?  Unfortunately, as much as I dream of playing games set in WH30K's Age of Darkness we are actually here to talk about Star Wars Legion today.  Fantasy Flight's tabletop miniatures game is a great entrant in the field, a lot of fun to play and beautiful looking models.  The same friend who first introduced me to playing the X-wing Miniatures game a few years ago got the miniature painting bug earlier this year after buying and playing Star Wars Imperial Assault with his kids.  He started out paining the miniatures in that game, using some great YouTube tutorials and asking a lot of questions.  It was fun to have another person locally to talk miniature painting with and his skills progressed at an impressive rate.  Working in a methodical fashion rare among those of us who love plastic crack he painted everything in the Imperial Assault box before moving onto to his Star Wars Legion starter set that he had acquired in the middle of last year. 

Not quite the forest moon of Endor but it looked pretty good for a first game in a new system.

What's a Star Wars game without an epic Luke vs Vader confrontation?

I was itching to get to play Star Wars Legion, especially since I got to see many of the models in progress when playing X-wing at his house.  However I respected his rare desire to paint everything before we played the first game of Legion and I have to say it was worth the wait.  Having only painted for one year, I find my friends skill level to be very remarkable.  The Stormtroopers and character models look movie accurate and quite good, but the Rebel troopers really stand out.  It's probably hard to see from the quick pictures I took while we were playing, but the shading and highlights he achieved on the line troopers from the two Rebel squads look really beautiful.

The walker is a cool model and the highlights on the pilot look sharp.

The game itself was a lot of fun to play and scratches an itch that any tabletop gamer who loved Star Wars action figures as a kid probably has.  There are cards for each unit that can have upgrades added to them for a corresponding points cost similar to X-wing ship upgrades.  Also affecting gameplay are cards you can play to buff the units with different effects as you play your turn.  The game uses alternating activations to avoid the "I play my turn, you play your turn" nature of WH40K and it's hard to not see our beloved grimdark game going this way sometime in the future.

I've wanted to play with speeder bikes ever since I was six and saw Return of the Jedi in the theaters.

Overall it was a excellent game with easy to understand mechanics and some great looking miniatures.  I can't wait to play again and looking forward to playing with some different units as my friend expands his army collections.  Also trying to exercise peak self control and avoid buying units and painting them considering I don't have the Core Set.  Although they have a Clone Wars version now and I have always wanted to paint some clone troopers...

My fast and amateur camera work does not do justice to these fine looking models.