‘The Mandalorian: Adventures’ Board Game Coming From Corey Konieczka
The Mandalorian: Adventures, a new cooperative board game based on the first season of The Mandalorian is coming from legendary board game designer Corey Konieczka, who designed Star Wars: Rebellion and Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game among others.
According to Polygon, The Mandalorian: Adventures is a card-based action game where players will take control of characters from The Mandalorian‘s first season, like Din Djarin and IG-11. Each mission is based on events from the series itself, so naturally the first mission will have Din Djarin and IG-11 teaming up to rescue Grogu. While the missions are based on the events of the show, they can be played in any order.
In order to complete each mission, players will need to work together by playing cards from their hands into several action slots on the table, allowing them to move, attack or gather information from the environment. For example, a card with a value of 4 may allow a player to move four spaces on the table. Some cards have other special abilities, but those are linked to certain actions on the table.
If a stack of cards reaches a total value of 5, it triggers an event. This can see enemies move around the environment or trigger a thematic story element, forcing the players to react to the changes on the board or risk failing the mission. To make things even more difficult, if a stack of cards goes over 5, it will suffer a “crisis”, introducing new changes to complicate matters. In the first mission, this means more enemies will be introduced, but crises get more varied in later missions.
Konieczka offered some insight in how the game mechanics work in the early missions, mentioning how he wanted to emulate the reality of the series.
Enemies don’t tend to survive very long [in that first mission], as you’d expect from the show. They walk into town, IG is firing his guns, two of them, in different directions at the same time, taking guys off the roof.
There’s often a push and pull on your turn. I really want to do this action, but maybe I’ve got this special ability in my hand, so I might want to play it over here.
They all have their own flavor that you need to kind of learn and play around. There’s a lot of […] cooperating with your team. You’ve got to make a lot of judgment calls, because you’re the only one who can see the cards in your hand. You need to decide: Is this really for the better of the group? Or am I going to be hurting us by doing this?
Thankfully, Konieczka and co-designer Josh Beppler say the game will come with a streamlined manual to help onboard new players, particularly those unfamiliar with board games in general.
Beppler: You have the basic rulebook [for your first game]. You’re going to be able to learn the game at its most basic level, so that you can get started really quickly. Then we introduce new rules through that guide deck.
Konieczka: Our hope is that if there is one hobby gamer in your group who can read the rules, they can teach it to anybody. Our hope is that we’re going to attract people that are hobby gamers, but also people who just watched the show and were like, Oh, there’s a game about this? I want to play! […] We want people to hit the ground running and just be able to dive in and play.
The game also comes with additional modes, one of which is Mercenary Mode, which adds different rules and objectives to existing maps to make them more challenging. These missions have a feature called “Hidden Motives”, which sees each player receive a card at the beginning of the game which tells them if they’re working with or against the Mandalorian (Din Djarin himself is always “good”). This is similar to a feature from Konieczka’s Battlestar Galactica game.
Konieczka felt this feature was integral considering how often the Mandalorian’s allies turn on him in that first season.
Especially in season 1 of The Mandalorian, there are moments when he gets betrayed. There’s the prison break episode, ‘The Prisoner,’ where there’s three other characters with him and they all betray him. But there’s also moments where Greef Karga backstabs him, where IG-11 tries to assassinate the child that he’s trying to rescue. We felt like that was an important part of the story, but we didn’t want it to get in the way of the core conceit, which is that this is a cooperative game. And so we kind of offered both.
The Mandalorian: Adventures is available for pre-order and will cost $50 on release.
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
