Star Wars: Outer Rim

Category: Pick-up and Deliver

Designer: Corey Konieczka with Tony Fanchi

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games

Year Published: 2019

Players: 1-4

Playing Time: 2 - 3 Hours

To Play or Not To Play: Play

Several months ago, I mentioned to some friends that I was working on a review of Star Wars: Outer Rim. They stared me, slack-jawed. "You haven't written one already? What's wrong with you?!"

They have a point. Outer Rim easily sits in my top 5 board games of all time, and it's a strong contender for number 1. It's no secret what my recommendation is going to be. It's right there are on the screen! Go play this game!

Oh, you enjoy reading my thoughts about board games? Alright, fair enough. Star Wars: Outer Rim is set on the fringes of galactic society. Far from the politically important core worlds, scoundrels of every sort jockey for fame. It's a race against time to reach 10 fame before any of your competitors. There are lots of ways to gain fame: maybe you'll be a smuggler delivering illegal cargo, a criminal mastermind planning and executing intricate heists, or a vicious bounty hunter relentlessly tracking down and eliminating targets across the Outer Rim. Opportunities abound, if you're up for the challenge!

Four scoundrels face off to become the most famous criminal in the Outer Rim! From left to right, Jyn Erso, IG-88, Han Solo, and Ketsu Onyo prepare to race to the top.

Outer Rim is a highly thematic pick-up and deliver game. You start the game with a basic ship and an initial objective. You'll acquire a host of upgrades and new objectives as you rush to amass fame quicker than your opponents. Most of the methods for accumulating fame require you to go to a location to acquire something and then bring it somewhere else. Your task is to plot out routes that accomplish your goals as efficiently as possible.

The basic flow of the game is relatively simple. On your turn, you have three phases: Planning, Action, and Encounter. During Planning, you have a simple choice between three options: move, heal damage, or don't move and collect 2000 credits. Then in the action step you can do any number of "Actions," but you cannot do any of them more than once. The most common actions are purchasing a card from the market or delivering cargo, but many cards will enable other Actions ranging from reloading a weapon to gambling with your ship's crew to win some extra cash. Your turn ends with an encounter, which could be combat, attempting a criminal job, or drawing an encounter card.

Two bounty hunters and two masterminds

Two bounty hunters and two smugglers.

Outer Rim is a highly thematic game, and this is best represented by the character cards. At the start of the game, each player selects their character. The characters have a variety of critical traits: combat strength, hit points, a unique character power, a unique character goal, and two or three skills to aid in encounters. Each character's personal goal grants 1 fame if you complete the written task. Some of these are easier than others. For example, Han Solo just requires that you own a ship that costs 15,000 credits or more, while Jyn Erso requires you to sabotage Lothal and Naboo by testing Stealth, a skill that she doesn't start the game with.

The combination of abilities and goals will often dictate how you play the game. Boba Fett can secretly look at contact tokens on the board, which can make finding bounties easier. And his personal goal is to collect the rewards from two bounties. Thus, if you're playing as Boba Fett, you have a strong incentive to chase bounties. Each character also begins the game with a starting objective. Some characters start with an easy bounty, others start with some cargo to deliver for easy cash, and others start with a simple criminal job. These starting cards give some indication of what your character is best at so you can plan your strategy. But just because Boba Fett is encouraged to be a bounty hunter doesn't mean he can't pivot if his luck changes.

Here's a close-up on the Han Solo player's starting situation. The character card specifies, in small text just above his skills, his starting card and starting faction reputation adjustments. Han's had some trouble with the Hutts, so he starts with negative Hutt reputation and neutral with everyone else. Han is more of a Smuggler character, so he starts with one of three possible cargo cards. Each starting card specifies which planet the player begins the game on, and this one places Han on the Ring of Kafrene.

No scoundrel is going to get very far without a good ship. Each player starts with a choice of basic ship: you can get a slower and stronger one, or a faster and weaker one. Later in the game, you'll have the opportunity to purchase bigger and better ships, from the Moldy Crow and the Arkangel to the Millennium Falcon and Slave 1. These ship cards are double-sided. When you first purchase them, they are just generic versions of the ship model. But they come with a "ship goal" you can try to fulfill. If you do, you gain one fame and flip the ship card over to the upgraded side featuring the ship's iconic name.

Your character, and their starting ship, aren't very strong. You'll be able to handle some initial challenges, but you'll need upgrades to tackle the later ones. That's where the Market comes in.

The six market decks arranged in the center of the table. Top row, left-to-right: Ship deck, Luxury deck. Bottom row, left-to-right: Cargo deck, Bounty deck, Equipment deck, and Jobs deck.

There are six decks in the market, each containing a different type of thing to purchase. The cargo deck offers cargo you can purchase to deliver to a destination. Most cargo provides credits upon delivery. Illegal cargo offers greater rewards, including fame, at the risk of running afoul of the local authorities. The bounty deck lets you accept bounty missions against targets throughout the galaxy, or against other players, to earn credits and fame. The equipment deck has gear and mods to upgrade your character or ship in a variety of ways. The job deck has criminal missions you can undertake to gain fame and credits. The ship deck lets you purchase bigger and better ships. And the luxury deck has a wide assortment of different cards, all very expensive, that will gain you fame in a variety of ways.

During your action step, if you're on a planet, you get to take a "market action." There are a few parts to a market action. First, you have the opportunity to discard the top card from any deck and reveal the next one. If you don't like it, that's fine, you don't have to buy the newly revealed card. You can choose to buy the top card from a different deck instead. When buying a card, you pay the cost in the upper-left corner of the card. Costs are fairly standardized: bounties and jobs are usually free, cargo is usually 1000 credits up front, gear and mods cost anywhere from 1000 to 8000 credits, ships cost 5000 - 25,000 credits, and luxuries range from 10 to 20,000. But we're in the Outer Rim, and credits aren't the only way to make a purchase. You can also barter other items to get discounts. So if you have some cargo that cost 1000 credits, you can choose to trade that in to get a 1000 credit discount on a 10,000 credit ship.

Once you've purchased a card, you then flip over the next card in the deck so everyone can see what's new in the shop. Most cards will also have a symbol for one of the four factions in the game as well as a number. For example, you might see the Rebel Alliance symbol and a three. This means that the Rebel patrol moves three spaces closer to you.

IG-88 begins the game on Cantonica, rather close to both the Rebel and Syndicate patrols.

At the start of the game, each faction has a level 1 patrol that starts at the very edge of the board. The Rebel and Syndicate patrols start at the edge nearest Cantonica, while the Imperial and Hutt patrols start near Takodona. These patrols represent the faction's presence in the galaxy, and your character's reputation with the faction will determine how the patrol affects your movement through the Outer Rim. If you have a positive reputation with the faction, they will not interfere with you at all. If you have neutral reputation the patrol will halt your movement for a routine inspection if you try to move through their space, but they won't interfere in any other way. And if you have negative reputation, they will force you to stop moving and then fight you during the encounter step!

Level 1 patrols are relatively weak: the stronger of the two starting ship options is equal in comabt strength. Defeating a level 1 patrol merely earns credits, and also decreases your reputation with that faction. This also causes the faction's level 2 patrol to enter play. Like before, it starts at the edge of the board and moves inward according to the market cards. But these patrols are much stronger, and are worth fame when defeated. The level 3 patrol is a little stronger still, and also worth fame. Then the level 4 patrol is a massive capital ship that your freighter has no hope of defeating: if you encounter one, your ship is automatically defeated.

This is a modern game, though, so defeat is not the same as elimination. If you take more damage than your character or ship can sustain, you simply lose 3000 credits, any "secrets" you may have (more on those later), and you move the patrol one space away. When defeated, you must spend your next planning step healing, which means you do not get to move. On the bright side, when you heal, you get to heal all of your damage to your ship and character, so you don't have to waste more than one turn recovering. And you can still take actions and have an encounter after you recover, so it's not a fully wasted turn.

The encounter card for the "Rooting Out Spies" job on Takodana. This job has a small branching path: if you successfully pass your Influence test, you skip to the stage where the spies try to run away and you test Knowledge to cut them off. If you fail, you get into a fight with an information broker and her minions, resulting in a combat you have to resolve before you continue the job. Many jobs will damage your character or your ship if you fail tests. As long as you aren't defeated by the end of the job, you succeed and collect the reward! If you fail, you'll have to try again another time.

While the planning and action phases tend to be the most time-consuming parts of your turn, the real fun happens during the Encounter step. This is when the you get to do something super-thematic and hopefully earn some fame! Encounters look very different depending on what you're trying to do. If you are trying to complete a job, you draw a specific card from the encounter deck which provides you with a small narrative of the criminal operation. It is broken up into 3-5 steps, each of which requires you to pass at least one skill test (or possibly fight a combat).

Skill tests in Outer Rim are simple: roll two dice and check for a certain result based on your skill level. If you are testing a skill that you do not have, you need one critical hit to pass. Each die has a 1/8 chance of a critical hit so you've got just under a 25% chance for success on that roll. Oof. If you have the skill, then you only need one regular hit or one critical hit to pass: 4/8 chance on each die, for 75% total. Yeah, it pays to have the right skills under your belt when you're attempting a job!

You can also gain crew members who have skills that stack with your character's skills when doing a skill check. Boba Fett may not have Tech, but that Astromech Droid you purchased sure does, so you can treat the skill check as "skilled" instead of "unskilled." And if you have a crewmate that has the same skill as your character, or two crewmates with the same skill, then you become "highly" skilled. This means you pass a check if you roll a critical hit, hit, or focus symbol on at least 1 of your 2 dice. Each die has a 6/8 chance of rolling one of those symbols, giving you a 93.75% chance of success.

In other words, if you have a skill, you can usually expect to pass the skill test. If you're not skilled, you need to get lucky. Once you complete all the skill tests, or if you fail some less important skill tests and survive the mission, then you complete the job and gain the rewards.

Each contact token has a matching encounter card. If you reveal a contact token, you reveal the card and resolve the text at the top. Most contacts can become crew members if you fulfill their conditions.

Most of the time, you won't have a Job to complete on the planet you're on. Another option is to encounter a contact token on that planet. Contact tokens come in three levels: white, green, and yellow. Many of these contacts will join your ship's crew for the right price. White contacts are pretty unimportant: they will join anybody and generally only cost 2000 credits to hire. For example, Lando's assistant Lobot is a white encounter. Yellow contacts are more expensive or require specific faction affiliations or skill test results to hire. For example, Saw Gerrera, who will hurt your character if you're affiliated with the Empire, and will only join your crew if you pass an Influence skill check. If you don't (or can't) recruit a contact you revealed, you leave the token face-up for someone else to potentially recruit.

The Empire is sick and tired of Saw Gerrera's terrorist attacks, and so they're using the criminal underground to deal with the nuisance once and for all!

But contacts aren't just potential crew members. Players can pick up Bounties for many of the contacts scattered across the galaxy. if you have a bounty card for a contact you're encountering, you can choose either to try and recruit them onto your crew, or fight them for the bounty. All bounty cards either have the ground combat symbol or the space combat symbol, indicating what type of combat the encounter will be. Ground combat uses your character's combat skill (usually 3, sometimes 2), plus any modifiers from your character's gear. Space combat uses your ship's combat skill (initially 2 or 3, but better ships reach 5 or 6) plus any ship mods you've purchased. Your strength (character or ship) determines how many dice you roll, while the number printed on the bounty card determines how many dice your the target rolls.

Combat is very simple. As the attacker, you roll a number of dice equal to your combat skill plus any modifiers from gear, mods, or crew. Next check your gear, mods, and crew for any bonus effects and total up the number of hits. Critical hits are worth two hits, and "focus" symbols are the same as blanks unless you have gear, mods, or crew members that let you use the focus symbols for another effect. Then the defender rolls their dice and totals up their hits. Players may have effects that let them re-roll or alter the deender's dice, so those take effect before determining the final total. Finally, compare the total number of hits on both sides. If the attacker rolled equal to or higher than the defender then the attacker wins and gets the reward. If the defender rolled higher, then they win. Regardless of the outcome, the attacker takes damage equal to the number of hits the defender rolled. This means the attacker could win the fight while also suffering enough damage to be defeated. It happens pretty frequently.

Most combat in this game is "Player vs. Environment." This means that the attacker is a player, but the defender is just a token on the board. Another player at the table rolls the dice for the defender, but doesn't suffer any direct penalty or reward. A few cards enable "Player vs. Player" or "PvP" combat, though. The mechanics are still the same, the only difference is that both players have access to gear, mods, and crew that can affect the outcome of the battle.

After winning a bounty fight, you get to choose between eliminating and capturing the target. You can eliminate your target, murdering them in cold blood for an immediate reward. Or you can capture them and then deliver your prisoner to a destination for an even greater reward. Every bounty is different: some offer nearly identical rewards for capture or elimination, while others may even grant a bonus fame if you bring them in alive!

Bounties, Contacts, and Jobs are the most exciting encounters that you may have, but sometimes they're unavailable. You may be on a planet that you aren't targeting for a job, with no bounties, and a full crew. You could reveal a contact, but that could help another player find a bounty. What do you do instead? You draw an encounter card.

I clearly need a better lighting setup for photographing text-heavy games like this. If you can't read it, this is one of the encounter cards for The Ring of Kafrene / Takodana

Each section of the board has its own deck of encounter cards that depict two planets on the back: The Ring of Kafrene and Takodana, Cantonica and Ord Mantell, Nal Hutta and Tatooine, you get the idea. You draw a card and resolve the part of the card that references the planet you're on. Sometimes, you'll see the word "Secret" on your card, and then an up-side down text box. You get to read these cards to yourself and save them to use on a future turn. They often allow you to mess with other players, so they can be pretty tricky. But watch out! If you're defeated in combat, you lose all of your "Secret" cards.

I should also point out the two exceptions to the encounter card decks. The Kessel planet does not share its section of the board with another planet. Instead, the "Maelstrom" is a special space next to Kessel that forces players to stop moving and draw a "Maelstrom" encounter. Also, sometimes players won't have enough speed to get to another planet when moving, and so they'll end their planning step on a generic hyperspace navpoint between two systems. When this happens, the player draws a Navpoint encounter card which has two different encounters depending on if there is a patrol token sharing the navpoint with the player or not. The most common way for players to end up on a navpoint is because a neutral patrol is blocking their path, but there are times when you're just a little too slow to make it all the way to your destination.

And that's it! This game can look intimidating with so many decks of cards, unusual dice, and cardboard tokens. But it's actually not too complicated once you start playing. The player aid card smoothly guides you through your turn, and each market and encounter card does a solid job detailing exactly what needs to happen and when. As you learn the terminology, the cards become easier and easier to parse. And turns generally follow a pretty simple routine: Move somewhere during planning step, buy something from the market during the Action step, and then reveal a contact token or draw a card as the encounter. Everything else is just details. But those details are where this game truly shines!

As you're playing, you feel like a charcter from Star Wars. Familiar faces appear, sometimes as allies, sometimes as enemies, and the game draws from a whole host of different properties and series, from the original trilogy to the Clone Wars to Rebels to the Shadows of the Empire novel published in 1996! Yeah, Dash Rendar is in this game! DASH RENDAR!!

Obviously, these references and characters mean a lot to hardcore Star Wars fans, and if you're like me, you'll have just an absolute blast playing this game. But what makes Outer Rim shine is that you don't need to know all this stuff to have fun. It's a solid pick-up and deliver game for anyone with just a passing knowledge of the series. If you've only seen the original trilogy of movies, that's plenty. You can play as Han, Lando, or Boba Fett, you can buy the Millennium Falcon, you can attempt the Kessel Run after hiring Chewbacca as a crewmate, and you can even deliver a Rancor to Jabba the Hutt. It's the gritty underbelly of Star Wars with nary a Jedi in sight. No hokey religions, just a trusty blaster by your side.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, you should play this game. It's a fun way to experience the Star Wars universe in a comletely different way than what we usually see in other board games. But what makes Outer Rim truly special to me is that I enjoy playing the game in so many different ways!

Let me explain. I find that many games truly shine in a specific context. San Juan is a delightful card game that can play up to 4 people, but I only play it with 2, and usually only in a hyper-competitive tournament setting. Tales of the Arabian Nights (ooh, that's another game I should review sometime . . . stay tuned!) is technically a competitive game, but I play it as more of a casual exploration and storytelling game because if you get too competitive, it stops being fun.

Outer Rim is a game that I enjoy in any context. I have a blast playing it with 2 players and with 4. I play it as a hyper-competitive race in tournaments, and also as a fun romp in the Star Wars universe where I get to roleplay my favorite scoundrels. It has fun, flavorful moments and exciting strategic decision-making. It offers plenty of opportunity to roam and explore or to execute a tightly optimized race. You get to choose what kind of experience you want to have with this game, and it absolutely shines whichever way you go. As long as everyone at your table is comfortable with a 2-3 hour experience, you'll have a blast.

"Hold on there, Chris," you may be saying. "I get that there's plenty to do in this game, but those card decks don't look very large, nor does that board. This seems like the kind of game that could get stale really quickly!"

That's a reasonable concern. I thought the same thing when I first learned the game in 2019. The encounter decks only have 10 cards each, the encounters for all the contacts are the same every time, each job plays out the same way every time assuming you have the appropriate skills and roll decently. There's some variety in which encounters you have or which crew members you hire, but I wasn't sure about the game's longevity after more then 3 or 4 plays.

I got a copy for Christmas in 2021, and started playing it more and more. Over time, I noticed quite a few flaws. It was pretty clear that some characters were just better than others. The pool of available ships got pretty stale, and it was often better to dig for a specific ship rather than compromise with the next-best option. And the worst was when you were on one side of the board with objectives that all pointed to the opposite side. You knew that you'd spend at least a three or four turns just getting over there or digging for more convenient objectives. Outer Rim is good, and it's worth playing a few times. But a game like that doesn't quite sound like someone's favorite game ever. As you might guess, the story doesn't end here.

Three years after Outer Rim released (probably delayed because of the pandemic) Fantasy Flight published the Unfinished Business expansion in 2022. I got to try it shortly afterwards with the friend who first introduced me to Outer Rim, and then received a copy for my birthday shortly afterwards. And this expansion completely transformed my perception of the game!

Unfinished Business is a "more stuff" expansion. It adds to the game experience without dramatically changing the rules or shoe-horning in a fifth player. And, in fact, adding the expansion can actually make the game run a little shorter than just the base game alone! How rare is that?!

Outer Rim with the Unfinished Business expansion isn't dramatically different from the base game on the surface. This photo is pretty similar to the one further up the page. There are 5 major differences between the two photos, feel free to try and spot them all!

So what's in the expansion? More of everything. Literally, pick something in the game and there's more of it. Contact tokens? Yeah, how about 11 more contacts that are more difficult and more powerful than any others, including contact tokens for all 8 base game characters! Now if no one is playing as them, you can still recruit them onto your crew, chase after them for bounties, and incorporate them into your game's story.

Or how about ships? Unfinished Business adds five extra ships, which doesn't seem like a lot but it results in a lot more variety. And all the other market decks get a boost as well! New jobs, new luxury goods, new bounties, new equipment, new cargo . . . there is plenty more to discover in the market than ever before. That means that it takes longer for the decks to feel stale, and it also means that sitting and digging for a specific card is far less viable than it was in the base game.

That said, you still want to have some way of getting the sort of card you need so the expansion modifies the market action. Now you can cycle up to 2 cards from one deck before deciding what to purchase. This usually means you can find something helpful, even if it isn't the exact card you want. You can usually follow the general outline of your strategy, even if you can't necessarily find the specific card you want.

And it's not just the market deck that has more cards. The expansion practically doubles the size of the contact deck with 11 new contact cards (for those new orange contacts), some new starting jobs and cargo, special encounters for new illegal cargo cards, and a second Job sequence card for every base game job! That's right, now when you attempt the Kessel run, there are two different ways the job can go down, and you randomly pick one when you attempt the job. If you fail, you might get the same one again next time you try, or you might get a different one.

Naturally, if the Contact deck and the market decks have new cards, it stands to reason that the planet encounter decks also have a bunch more cards. There's twice as much to see in there, and all kinds of fun and weird encounters to experience. In addition to the new cards for each planet deck, though, there's also an entirely new deck of encounter cards. The Unfinished Business expansion replaces the two endcap pieces of the board with new ones that depict the "Core Worlds" closer to the center of the galaxy.

Unfinished Business replaces the endcap pieces to the board with new ones. Now the Rebel and Syndicate patrols start the game on the same space, but there's also a second path that leads to the Spinward Core system. The Spinward and Trailing Core systems function like any other planet, except there are no contact tokens to encounter.

If a player is on the Spinward or Trailing Core space, they can draw a card from the Core worlds encounter deck. LIke the other encounter cards, these are divided into two different encounters: a "Core Worlds" encounter, which is a generic encounter like any of the other planet cards, and an "Across the Core" encounter that offers a way to quickly jump from the Spinward Core to the Trailing core (or vice-versa).

This simple addition turns the game board from a semi-circle into a full circle, and makes it so much easier to get to destinations on the opposite side of the board. Now if you have a destination on Takodana while you're on Ord Mantell, that trip is a lot more viable! It will only take two or three turns to get there, instead of four or five. Navigation becomes simpler and the game becomes less about drawing the cards with the most convenient destinations. When I talk to people who have played the base game and ask if the expansion is worth it, all I have to do is tell them about this "Across the Core" movement mechanic, and they immediately run out to buy a copy!

And we're not done! How about 8 more characters?

Four new characters laid next to each other: Chewbacca, Maz Kanata, Hondo Ohnaka, and Dengar

Four new characters laid next to each other: Cad Bane, Hera Syndulla, Enfys Nest, and Black Krrsanta

Unfinished Business makes a host of characters playable who were merely Yellow or Green contacts in the base game: Chewbacca is an obvious fan-favorite, but also Hera Syndulla, Maz Kanata, Hondo Ohnaka, Dengar, and Black Krrsantan join the fun. And to keep things spicy, the game adds a couple more scoundrels to the mix: the brutally effective Cad Bane and the pirate captain Enfys Nest. With 16 total characters to choose from, there are plenty of ways to play this game!

Yeah, there's a lot of extra stuff in this expansion, but so far none of this is mechanically all that new. It just adds more stuff. And that's totally fine. Honestly, this is my favorite way to play this game: base game rules with the expansion components incorporated. But this expansion is full of stuff, and that includes some extra modules that actually modify the game.

The yellow-player's debt token ready to be offered in exchange for another player's assistance.

The first is the "Favors" module which makes a tiny modification to the base game. In the base game, it is possible for players to make deals with each other. Deals are not binding after the current turn, and players can exchange information, promises, and credits at will. The Favors module adds an extra layer to this. At any point before dice are rolled, a player can request a Favor from any other player. There are four Favors they can request: access to another player's skill for their next skill test, one extra die on combat, positive reputation with a faction that the player has positive reputation with for the rest of the turn, or +1 ship speed for a turn.

It's up to the players to negotiate how much a favor should cost. And players can offer each other credits to refuse to grant the active player a favor! But another thing players can offer as part their negotiations is their debt token. A player holding a debt token can return it to its owner for a guaranteed favor. Or they can trade the debt token to someone else in exchange for some other benefit.

Frankly, I've only used this module once, and I wasn't terribly impressed. I think that there are times when negotiatiation and deal-making is sensible in this game, but the majority of the time I'd rather just have a race against the other players. Spending too much time begging for favors doesn't sound fun. But if that's something that you and your friends really enjoy, then by all means include this component in your game!

Oh, is merely being famous not enough for you? You have grander ambitions, huh?

"Ambitions" is the other major module you can add to Outer Rim. This is a deeply flavorful addition that changes the way the game ends. Normally, Outer Rim ends when a player reaches the fame target, which is 10 for a standard game. With the Ambitions module, each player also has a set of goals they need to accomplish in order to win the game. The rules recommend setting the fame target to 8 when playing with Ambitions, and I wholeheartedly agree. Ambitions already make the game last about 20-30 minutes longer than normal. Keeping the fame target at 10 would easily push games beyond the 3 hour range!

Adding Ambitions to the game is simple. At the start of the game, players select an Ambition card and place it next to their player board. Normally the first player has less money than the others. With the Ambitions, starting cash is based on the selected ambition card, plus each player gets a piece of starting equipment, like a simple blaster, a ship modification, or even a different ship. Each ambition card has 2-4 requirements that must be fulfilled in addition to reaching the fame target.

These requirements come in three flavors denoted by different symbols. The "dash" symbol means it is a one-time task: achieve the requirement at some point during the game to place a goal token in that space. This is usually something like deliver some illegal cargo, fight a ground combat against a specific foe, or upgrade your ship. The second are ongoing objectives, and represented by an infinity symbol. You add the goal token as soon as you fulfill the objective, but if you stop fulfilling it for any reason, the goal token goes away. This will be something that can easily change, like having positive reputation with a faction, owning an expensive ship, or having a certain number of crew members.

The final objective on every ambition card has the "fame" icon, and it represents a task you can only attempt after you have reached the fame goal. It is the final task to achieve your ambition, and usually involves one final mission. That could be a long and challenging cargo delivery, a final bounty to find and turn in, or a difficult comat. If you succeed in your final task before anyone else, you win!

Like I said, the ambitions are deeply flavorful. There are some really fun moments to be had as Han Solo, the Hero of the Rebellion, or Pirate King Bossk. I find that the Ambitions are a great addition when you're playing with other Star Wars fans who just want to have a good time roaming the galaxy and seeing what the game has to offer. If you're less concerned about winning and more about storytelling, the Ambitions are a fantastic addition to the game.

That said, there are some issues with them. For one, they are deeply imbalanced. There are a couple that are really easy to fulfill, while others are quite challenging. It feels really bad when your final objective is to find, capture, and deliver a bounty for a contact that is still facedown, while another player just has to fight a combat against a level 3 Imperial Patrol. And there's one ambition I've tried a half-dozen times without winning. I've gotten close once or twice, but that's it. So if you're trying to play this as a test of planning and optimization, the Ambitions throw a wrench in the works. But if you're playing it as a narrative experience, where the journey matters more than the destination, then you'll have a great time with them.

I love the way the ship and ambition cards slot into the edges of the player board to form a control panel display. You've got your ship, your character, your faction repuations, and your objectives, all neatly arranged!

Essentially, no matter how you want to play Outer Rim, Unfinished Business makes it better. More stuff means more opportunities and more potential strategies. Favors let you lean into the negotiation aspects of the game, while Ambitions emphasize the storytelling and roleplaying elements. And the Across the Core components make the experience smoother no matter how you choose to play. But if you'll indulge me for a few more paragraphs, I want to share one more aspect of this game.

I am not a solitaire gamer. I play board games to spend time with people (virtually or in-person). If I want to play a game and I'm by myself, I'll just play a video game. But sometimes, the itch to pull Outer Rim off the shelf becomes unbearable, and that's when I'm grateful for Outer Rim's excellent solitaire mode.

That's right, Outer Rim can be played Solitaire, and it's really fun! The base game includes a special deck of AI cards that allow you to play head-to-head against a bot that will move across the galaxy delivering cargo and completing jobs. The bot is capable, though has a tendency to run into enemy patrols more often than a human player would. It's a relentless machine that will creep toward the fame goal and force you to play as optimally as you can to keep up. It's pretty solid, though not terribly exciting.

But then Unfinished Business came and cranked the solitaire mode to 11! First, the expansion adds a second AI deck representing a bounty hunter bot. So now you have two AI players to race against, one ocmpleting jobs and cargo while the other pursues bounties. Even better, it includes 16 unique AI cards, one for each character, that you can shuffle into the appropriate AI deck for that character. So now you're not just racing against a generic smuggler or bounty hunter, you're racing against Hera Syndulla and Dengar, or Lando Calrissian and Boba Fett. Those unique AI cards give the bot a hint of personality, and it genuniely changes the experience just enough to make every game feel different and exciting. I'm not a solitaire gamer, but I have played Outer Rim's solitaire mode over a dozen times. And I'm still happy to come back for more!

Outer Rim is a good game. Outer Rim with Unfinished Business is an excellent game. It's game I've played dozens and dozens of times without getting bored. It's a game I want to play all the time, and it's a game that many of my friends also enjoy playing. It features fan-favorite characters and deep cuts that people can enjoy no matter how much Star Wars media they've enjoyed. If you have the chance, give Outer Rim a try. But if Unfinished Business is also available, you should definitely play it with the expansion!

Thanks for reading! I'm sorry for the month-long gap between my last post and this one, this particular review took me a while to write, and in the middle of that I had a short vacation . . . anyway, we should be back on track now for a little while. Please continue to follow on the various socials, and join me next time for another new review!