Last year saw Atomic Mass release the first mission pack; Sabotage Showdown. At the time I thought this was a great, inexpensive idea to add some variability to the game. When I’m playing games now, we fluctuate between the mission pack and the one from the core, keeping each player (usually my son) on our toes. The pack doesn’t change the fundamentals of the game, but it does make us pause and think how we are playing. When it was announced that a new mission pack would be released for Shatterpoint, I was very eager to see if this beautifully simplistic way of varying the game could be done again with another pack. For something so small, my expectations shouldn’t have been high, but they were!
This pack is called Never Tell Me The Odds and – of course – has Han Solo and Chewbacca on the front of it. With a lot of the squad pack releases this year focusing on the Original Trilogy period, this front makes perfect sense. The RRP of the set is £19.99 but with some shopping around you can find it for below the £15 mark, which makes it a considerably cheaper alternative to buying a different squad for variability. It shouldn’t matter, but in the current climate, things are costing more money with less money for hobbies. It’s one of the reasons I think the mission packs are such a clever way for players to add something to the game at a more affordable price.
On opening the box, there is a leaflet that folds out into a poster for the full-size image of the box art. I was impressed with this in the last mission pack, and I am with this. You can see the Millennium Falcon much clearer as well as terrified Ugnaughts and a Jawa. The detail is exquisite. I think I said in my last review, and I’ll say the same again, my only disappointment is that it’s folded. There’s no way around it but it would be a great piece to frame if there was some way around the folding. Also included are tokens, Atomic Mass not assuming that you have the previous mission pack (which is certainly a good thing) and the cards themselves. Although there are a huge number of cards included, there are only ten needed for a given language, so expect a lot of spares.
So, onto the mission pack itself, what makes this different. Well for a start the layout of the mission is a lot different. This isn’t straight lines and an almost grid-like structure. There are a lot more objective points close to one another as well as some a lot nearer the edge of the board. I’ll come to why this is in a moment. What I do want to address is that while the board certainly looks a lot more interesting, measuring this all out looks a lot more of a chore then it does for the other two mission packs. Now, if the mission works well, then it will be time well spent. However, I can see that players might shy away from this pack if it’s going to take longer to set up than the others.
So why the change in objective spacing? For the ‘Challenging the Odds’ rule. What makes this mission pack different is that on each struggle card, one unit type will be ‘Challenging the Odds’. When a character from a unit of that type wounds an enemy, you move the struggle token one space to your momentum tokens if you pay a force. The card clearly says one space, so it doesn’t accumulate. Now this certainly changes things slightly as rather than some squads focusing on securing objectives, they are now focused on wounding. Having objectives closer together encourages more fighting, which certainly seems to be the drive of this mission pack.
I quite like the look of this. The board is laid out differently and there’s a bonus to a random unit type which you can’t plan for until the card is revealed. Not only that, but it’s also only a slight extra shift on the struggle track and that’s if you have a force to spend. There’s a lot to be sacrificed to get the benefit. It could be round changing, and I like that, but I don’t think it is at all overpowered. Very similar to the last mission pack, it’s a nice bonus if you can pull it off but it won’t massively shift the balance of play. What it will do is change how players interact with one another over other missions. I’m very eager to see how this plays out in practice, so I better get it to the table!
As expected, the set-up was a bit of a chore. It’s certainly the longest of the mission packs to set up. We also found that the objective cards didn’t quite seem to match up in scale to the board we’d created, which was a little jarring at first. So, off the bat, I was thinking this wasn’t a great mission pack, it was too finicky. Then my son and I played. The game play was intense. Having some of the objectives so close together made for some fast-paced battles. Shoving, movement within combat, it was all so much more crucial. We both had to sacrifice units to sit on points that were out of the way and both of us realized too late that we’d picked the wrong units to do that. But we kept coming back to the movement, the dashing to and froe, it was so fun to do, the fact that you could move quickly between the objectives, it was very enjoyable. The ‘Challenging the Odds’ never actually paid off for either my son or me. I think it’s a happy coincidence if you can make it work but the abilities of the units you are using to rush for the objectives are more crucial than trying to target a particular unit. I actually like that; it is a happy bonus if you can make it work.
This is a bit more of a set-up burden. If you are looking for a quick start, I wouldn’t pick this mission pack. That said, if you have the time to get the objectives set-up, I think I’d say this is worth the extra time. In fact, I think this is going to be my go-to mission pack for the moment. I love the rush, the chasing units and objectives around. It’s like George Lucas kept saying when filming, “faster and more intense”. This is certainly that. I heartily recommend this to players; I think you’ll be surprised just how much it changes the pace of the game.
