Star Wars has been a part of our cultural DNA for more than 40 years. Many gamers have never known life without Star Wars. So many of us wish we could leave our workaday lives and fly off to a galaxy far, far away that game designers have tried to give us just that.
Many games try to capture the feeling of being inside the Star Wars universe, the epic space battles and the personal emotional conflicts. Some have even succeeded, whether they're set in the Star Wars universe or not. Here are the ten tabletop games that best capture the essence of Star Wars.
10 Star Wars Risk: Clone Wars Edition
There are dozens (if not hundreds) of Star Wars skins of classic games. Most of them aren't worth your time. However, it's worth it to try this version of Risk redesigned in the Star Wars universe. The gameplay largely follows the classic Risk mechanic, but the addition of ships and leaders gives the game more subtle dynamics.
The Clone Wars Edition is slightly better because it incorporates Order 66, which gives the game a powerful ticking clock that can flip the game at the last minute, with the same tragic feeling of the death of the Jedi at the end of Revenge of the Sith. Want a more epic Star Wars strategy game? Try Star Wars: Rebellion, which adds several layers of complexity.
9 Imperial Assault
Want to abandon the grand strategy and get really granular with close-quarters combat? Imperial Assault is your best choice. Imperial Assault is based on the same kind of dungeon crawling experience you might find in games like Gloomhaven, Descent, and The Legend of Drizzt. But in Star Wars.
But perhaps the best thing about the game is that you can play it in two modes. You can either play it as a series of one-off battles, or you can play it as a campaign, with different players taking the role of the Empire or the Rebellion. With all the expansions for this game, you can create a campaign as epic as the saga of Skywalker.
8 X-Wing
X-Wing is a game designed to capture the feeling of dogfighting in an x-wing or TIE fighter. It works really well for this, utilizing detailed movement rules to set these combatants against one another on your tabletop.
Although there are a significant number of rules and tools you have to use to make your moves, the game doesn't bog down but keeps a good pace. If you like it, you can expand or tweak your play experience by moving into one of the closely related tactical games. Star Wars: Armada focuses on large fleet actions by capital ships. Legion, on the other hand, is a collectible miniatures game, similar to Warhammer.
7 Star Wars Roleplaying Game
There have been several attempts to make a Star Wars roleplaying game over the years. After all, Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars rose to popularity at roughly the same time. With its expansive source material, the Star Wars universe seems ripe for an RPG.
However, previous efforts have not succeeded in getting the true feeling of Star Wars. Thankfully, we now have one that is fun to play, and rich with all the diversity of the Star Wars universe. And it has a quality beginner game: Force and Destiny, which helps if you're not familiar with RPGs.
6 Starfinder
Want an RPG that's in the same vein as Star Wars, but doesn't feel like you're treading over the same ground as the movies? Try Starfinder. Starfinder is the science fantasy game by Paizo, the makers of Pathfinder games.
The setting has many similarities to Star Wars (including sci-fi melee weapons in every variation just shy of a lightsaber), but it's a different place. If the setting has more gaps in it than the Star Wars universe, don't think of them as holes so much as opportunities for you to fill in the details of your own campaign.
5 Eclipse
Eclipse is a grand-scale space 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate). It has some incredible game dynamics, making space exploration more realistic and costly than in other examples of the genre. It has a mechanism that makes maintaining a large empire costly in and of itself. Plus, the game lets you use advanced technologies to customize your ships with special weapons, defenses, and abilities.
Unfortunately, as good as the game mechanics are, the design and components are lacking. This can make it hard to get excited about the game at first, but once you get swept up into the dynamic gameplay you will happily let the hours slip by as you wrangle for dominance in this galaxy.
4 Twilight Imperium
Twilight Imperium is also a grand-scale space 4X game. It doesn't have the same granularity as Eclipse, but it more than compensates for that by adding more dimensions to the game. Realistic trade mechanisms and a meaningful political component make this game much richer to play. Whether you loved or hated the Galactic Senate in the prequels, this game shows how significant that type of governing body could be, as players wrangle for votes to change the rules of the game in their favor. Plus, Twilight Imperium has beautifully designed components, including 17 vibrant and unique alien races to play.
While the third edition had a reputation as one of the longest games to play, the fourth edition streamlined the mechanics to cut playtime in half while maintaining or enriching the gameplay.
3 XIA: Legends of a Drift System
Wish you could turn your back on the grand conflict to live an independent life like Han Solo in A New Hope? XIA lets you do just that. Become a trader, smuggler, bounty hunter, scientist, or maybe a jack of all trades.
In this game, you start off with a small ship and little money to equip it. As you complete jobs, you earn money and can customize and upgrade your ship. Brush up on your Han Solo quotes because you're going to need them! If you're looking for a more explicitly Star Wars version of this concept, Outer Rim is a good game, too.
2 Space Cadets: Away Missions
Space Cadets doesn't try to capture Star Wars so much as it attempts to capture the source material that inspired Star Wars. Think Buck Rogers (the movie serial, not the 80s TV show) and This Island Earth.
Appropriately, the game components utilize that older aesthetic, which makes them look less polished than many other games on this list. This helps give the game its flavor. It's also appropriate that the mechanics are a little fiddly and crude. This is less forgivable, but it doesn't undermine the ultimate joy of this alien-fighting romp.
1 Black Angel
Some people say that Star Wars is as much the story of the droids R2-D2 and C3PO as it is the saga of Skywalker. If you are among the fans who find these mechanical people to be the most compelling characters of the Star Wars universe, you might find Black Angel especially engaging. In Black Angel, humanity has died out, except for our genetic material preserved in the titular starship.
Each player controls an AI who uses robot minions to attempt to safely guide the ship past dangers to a distant planet we hope can become humanity's new home. Encounter friendly and dangerous aliens, contend with space hazards and try to maintain the ship as the rigors of a long journey cause it to degrade.