As a new player, and somewhat new to gaming in general as previously noted, I can’t stress it enough how important it is to engage with the community. Well, I should say communities! Let’s start with the local community first, which is the most important thing.

You just picked up Legion, you need somewhere to play? Find local game stores. It’s imperative unless you have a good amount of friends looking to play, but that’s going to require multiple sets of Legion. Multiple tables of 3×3 or 6×4 and a ton of space. Your local game store should be a want and a need. Once you get in the door, now you hope you have a local community looking to play. A common theme right now is that Legion sells really well, but some people prefer to play at home, and the store won’t be flooded with players. Don’t get discouraged. I tried one store and it wasn’t happening. I got into another store where we have four of us dedicated and this past weekend we got another guy involved who had been buying but playing at home. Developing a local crew might be easy, might be difficult, but either way I think it’s imperative. Even if you only get the game on the table once a week, it’s better than no games at all!

Now that you have your local community gathered up, hopefully, this next step is important. At least for me it is, because I like to engage and keep up with what’s going on with the game a whole. This probably falls in the eagerness to play competitively category to borderline obsession with the game, and it may not be something everyone needs or wants to do! The Online community. As mentioned in my first post, the Star Wars Legion Facebook page is the easiest place to start. If you’re casual, you can keep up casually and look at cool paint jobs for inspiration and such. If you want to go competitive/obsessed there’s plenty of great questions people ask, and important posts to follow up on and keep up with the times. Fair warning, and I don’t want anyone to take offense to what is to come, but the Facebook page is a mixed bag. What I mean is that, and this goes for any Facebook page in my opinion, is that sometimes people won’t be as cordial as you may expect. When I first joined it, I kept saying “no way am I playing this competitively, geeze” after reading some comments on posts. That said, there’s still plenty of good with the bad, and Matt Stewart(he runs the page mostly) with help of some other admins have been doing a great job of keeping some of those bad posts/comments out of things whenever they can. Casually you can end there and go to the next paragraph if you’d like. Competitive/obsessed, continue reading because this is where the real fun begins. The Star Wars Legion Discord is the place to be if you are 100% invested in this game. There are many channels that will fill your needs. You can download the app on your phone or use your computer to keep up with whatever threads you want to, but fair warning: it’s hard to keep up, it moves fast. This is what has motivated me to want to play competitively, as opposed to the Facebook community, because everyone on there tends to be pretty awesome and cordial. The banter back in forth keeps you engaged and wanting more. You start to learn who’s who and figuring out who the better players are and see some of their insight. Haven’t had a bad time on the Discord since I joined, thanks to LJ Pena (Impact X-Talk Polite) for keeping it all together for us.

Speaking of, LJ and Nick Freeman run Impact X. An incredible blog they have put together with card database, articles with war-gaming tactics and battle report videos. As a new player, I find myself on there all the time just studying cards to memorize them. Further than that, LJ just ran the Las Vegas Open(You’ll see it as LVO all over the place) last month to a smashing success. He’s a big part of the community, if not the biggest. Another Discord member, Orkimedes, also has a website: Never Tell Me The Odds. Another great blog where he breaks down the game into….math. I work with numbers all day at work, but let me tell ya: that’s not math compared to what Ork presents for the community. It’s great stuff. He’s also involved in a podcast called Notorious Scoundrels. Podcasts are an awesome gateway into something new, and the Legion podcasts don’t fail. If you have a commute, or can listen at work, you have several great options. I personally listen to three at the moment, but I know of at least one other that I have yet to listen to and need to get on it! In no particular order:

1. The Legion Outriders
2. The Fifth Trooper
3. Notorious Scoundrels

The one other I didn’t mention, only because I haven’t listened yet, is Stabcast! I’m going to get on that today! These are great to listen to whenever you can, it will help you familiarize yourself with the game more and more, which is important! Not to mention, they all have their own identity and bring different things to the table, so no matter what new episode you’re listening to that week it won’t feel redundant.

There’s some other great stuff out there like the Imperial Discipline blog, WarCorgi’s battle reports and if you’re looking to make some quick, cheap terrain Tabletop Oddity’s videos are unreal….and I’m sure there’s even more out there! I’m still new to this, and here I am writing about it. I’m also not trying to step onto anyone’s toes and content! I’m just thinking a game that is young needs more content and new players need new player content! In fact, it was listening to The Fifth Trooper this past week where I just said to myself: “Man I wish I had a podcast or a blog”…a 17 month old son at home with a fiance that works the night shift and no podcasting equipment have led me down the blogging path. New players + content that speaks to new players = great for a hopefully ever growing community! Hope you enjoy and hope this is something I can keep doing!

-GrandAdmiralThrawn

About a year ago I walked into a gaming store that was in my friends town, honestly just on a whim and to kill time, and ever since that day my life was changed. I knew card games(most importantly MTG) and miniature games(I had heard of Warhammer before but didn’t know much about it) existed, however, my thoughts on the subject were somewhat skewed. I have been a nerd my whole life, Star Wars being the main reason for that, but I always thought MTG and miniature games were just TOO nerdy for this nerd. Especially a nerd with friends who don’t share the same interests as passionately, at least. That was until I walked into this store and saw Star Wars plastered all over the place. From that moment on, I realized I had been ignorant for twenty seven years and it needed to change.Seeing as this is a Legion blog, well what I intend to be a Legion blog, you would think it starts there, but it doesn’t. I want to start from the top and show that Star Wars fans who don’t know about war-gaming need to find it like I have.

I asked the store owner where I should start. Looking at the prices, I knew I had to start on one, not all of them. I mean, as we all know, it’s expensive. He recommended Legion at the time, because it was new, I ended up going with Imperial Assault because of my fiance. The thought process was that she likes Star Wars and I can convince her to play a board game: voila Imperial Assault. News flash, it didn’t work out that way. The first few months I tried getting campaign off the ground but with a newborn baby that was difficult. Then I found out about Skirmish, and some podcasts, we had lift off! At least, for a little while. Finding the online IA community(which I already have a post in the making after this post about how important it is to find the online community! and local, of course) was massive for me, partly because my local community doesn’t have much going in terms of Imperial Assault. Shout out to Zion’s Finest and their Slack app channel because finding them got me engaged in the community and wanting to play. However, the writing was on the wall for me, personally: the game was dying. I only played online, I was painting (I have a painting blog already planned, too!) but for what end, and Spectre Cell entered the fold and decimated the competitive aspect of OP.

Enter: Star Wars Legion

I had been teetering on the fence for a while with Legion. As much as I loved the IA crew, I heard them bashing Legion a lot. Which I kind of get, still, to this day. That said, they couldn’t be more wrong about the game itself. I happened to buy Boba Fett for a local painting competition(I’m not that good but I wanted to have some fun) and from that point on I was all in on Legion. The model quality and size was so much better than Imperial Assault, I made the switch right then.

Here’s where joining the online community is tricky when it comes to Star Wars Legion and I plan to write about this more later but here’s a start: at first glance, it can be somewhat intimidating. I joined the Facebook groups, without even owning anything more than Boba, to just get a feel for the community. (Again, props to the IA community for getting my foot through the door, awesome people.) The thing with Facebook is that there can be a bit of negativity, and at first it was a turn off. I already had a bunch of stuff on order, and I was starting to find a local crew to potentially start playing with.(shoutout to the Derry, NH guys) But I still wanted to connect to a larger section, and that’s when I decided to join the Legion Discord channel. Without going into it much and saving it for a later date: The Discord is awesome. Join it.

Now, here’s my point to all of this: Star Wars Legion is incredible if you are just a Star Wars fan looking for something more (I’ve read most of the canonical books) or if you love games and want to toss some dice. (Put down the video games, I have) The models are great, with some exceptions, and they’re getting better. (i.e Pathfinders, Jyn) If you love Rebels, you have a lot of the original trilogy characters to choose from now and it’s AWESOME. With even more great characters on the way overall with Sabine and Bossk coming soon. Speaking of, those are going to be Legions first interchangeable models, which is fantastic!

The game itself is rather simple to learn and so thematic to Star Wars as a whole, especially if your store has terrain or if you become bold and make your own. You want to run Vader with a bunch of Stormtroopers? You got it! Palp and the Royal Guard? Heck yeah. Rebel heroes with troopers? Yep! The opportunities are endless, and going to keep getting better. Casually, the options are vast. Competitively, there’s what they call a “meta” somewhat brewing. I intend to play it both casual and competitive, but no matter what you choose: have fun!

I’m twenty seven years old and for as long as I can remember I’ve loved Star Wars. It’s been an obsession for most of my life. I always wanted to be Luke Skywalker/a Jedi. Now I get to be Luke. Is it on a game board? Absolutely. Is it any less fun? It’s more fun! I’m telling you a Star Wars fan in a War-Gamer’s world: Don’t miss out for 27 years old like I did!

-GrandAdmiralThrawn