Star Wars: Legion Rules Update Preview – Movement

Hello Star Wars™: Legion players! Today we wrap up our preview series looking at the upcoming release of the very first Star Wars: Legion Core Rulebook, launching January 16, 2023. If you haven’t read the previous articles in this series, you can find them here, here, and here. In today’s transmission we are going to be looking at some important changes and updates to the movement rules.

While the basic mechanics of movement in Legion will be quite familiar to veteran players, there was one item that throughout our observation and playtesting we found to be quite unintuitive in how it affected gameplay. By the letter of the current rules, when a miniature moves, it is required to move down the movement tool with its base centered on the tool. Through strict interpretation and application, this system meant that more often than not units would be “trapped” when hugging tight to terrain like building corners or barricades, because the placement of the tool and the requirement of moving the base down the center resulted in the miniature not being able to round the corner of the building. Instead, the movement rules would require the miniature to take a wide turn to ensure its base did not contact the side of the building. In our observations both internally and externally, no one applied this rule correctly, and instead moved their miniatures based on a common sense approach, assuming the intent was to allow a miniature to move tightly around corners and other areas.

Therefore, we have altered the rules on how small based miniatures interact with the movement tool so that the moving miniature is simply picked up and placed centered over the movement tool instead. This not only allows for intuitive movement, it also maintains the importance of the movement tool placement as in the original rules with the tool itself being a strict guide to the miniature’s final position. The movement of miniatures on notched bases remains unchanged.

There was another part of the movement rules we knew we wanted to address to make the battlefield more dynamic and exciting, while eliminating cumbersome and unintuitive rules language. Navigating vertical terrain has changed to allow players more freedom to explore and bring elevation to their games of Legion, even for units that don’t have the Jump keyword. Clambering has been eliminated from the game, and abilities or cards that involve climbing or clambering like Expert Climber or Scale have been revisited. Units may now move over obstacle terrain shorter than the height of their silhouette with no penalty. If the terrain is taller than their silhouette, the unit must use a climb movement to move up, onto, or over it. A climb is a speed 1 move that allows the unit to also move a vertical distance up to height 1.

In our playtests, opening the “High Ground” to all armies allowed for some very exciting tactics and emergent strategies, as well as really unleashing players’ imaginations to create and utilize exciting new terrain setups that added to the game experience rather than hindering it.

And with that, our preview series detailing some of the key highlights of the upcoming Star Wars: Legion Core Rulebook comes to a close. Now all that’s left is to count the days to the official release on January 16, 2023. Until then, stay tuned, as there’s plenty more Legion content coming your way as we take our first steps into an exciting new year!