Review: THE MANDALORIAN: ADVENTURES is a fun Legacy Lite board game

A few months ago, Asmodee and Unexpected Games released a new board game by Corey Konieczka AND Josh Beppler called The Mandalorian: Adventures.

The game has you and your friends playing the roles of Din Djarin and other beloved characters from The Mandalorian playing through four story missions to protect The Child. A huge thank you to Asmodee for providing me with a review copy. All thoughts below are my own.

The Mandalorian: Adventures allows players to experience the thrills of the hit Disney+ series on their tabletops. Navigating unique maps and missions, players must cooperate to achieve their goals and avoid defeat.

Recognizable characters and enemies bring the action to life, and an optional hidden traitor mode ensures that no two plays of The Mandalorian: Adventures are ever the same.

Featuring a new gameplay system that will be intuitive for players and easy to teach, you can dive into the world of The Mandalorian and start playing right away!

To prepare for this review, I played the first two missions to get a feel for the gameplay and feel. The best way I can find to describe it is a legacy-lite board game.

There’s a story that progresses through missions with new aspects of the game unlocking along the way, just like your typical legacy board game. However, the missions are much shorter (under an hour) than other legacy games I’ve played, and there are only four story missions to complete.

That said, the development team has provided a set of rules for the sandbox game that adds a lot of replayability, which I feel most legacy games ignore. It also feels easier overall than other legacy games because the missions actually feel doable.

That said, there are rules provided if you want an easier or harder experience. Another thing I’ve noticed is that I haven’t had to destroy any pieces of the game so far, which, again, adds to the replayability.

Another nice touch for The Mandalorian: Adventures is that before each mission there is a short comic to set up the story of the mission. That said, if you’ve been watching The Mandalorianyou know the story.

From what I’ve seen, the game simply follows the story of the show’s first season. It’s still fun to play, especially when you want to play in sandbox mode as you can imagine various “what if” situations using other characters you might love.

I also want to highlight this The Mandalorian: Adventures has a different approach to advice. Instead of a standard folding cardboard rectangle serving as the game board, the book that houses the story comics also includes game boards for each mission.

This not only creates a good experience as you read the comic and then turn the page on the game board, but it also helps with organization in the game box, which I appreciate with one less piece while still allowing for more variety in board layouts for each mission.

As you may have gathered from other board game reviews, I have become very adamant about inserts. Game inserts are an underrated aspect of board game design.

Many would say that it doesn’t matter what the insert looks like, but those who know understand that a good gaming insert makes the game so amazing and refined. The Mandalorian: Adventures It has a game insert and it’s good. It’s not an amazing insert by any means, but it works well and is organized well.

One thing I would have liked would have been perhaps further separation of the pockets to better separate the disruption tokens from the damage tokens, but it’s not a big deal.

One aspect of The Mandalorian: Adventures what concerns me is the player count. On the box it says that the game supports 1 to 4 players, which is true. The problem is that for the first two missions there are only two characters to use, which creates a less than ideal situation unless you use the sandbox mode.

There are rules about playing with more players than characters, but it involves sharing characters, which seems a lot less fun to me. Looking ahead, I saw that the last two missions have four characters to choose from, alleviating this problem, but I wish there were options when you have 3-4 players in those first two missions.

On the other hand, if you play alone, there are rules for playing with two characters instead of just one. I haven’t tried it, but it seems like a decent set of rules for solo players.

But what is the actual gameplay like? Ultimately, this is probably the most important question for any game. Honestly, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed playing the game The Mandalorian: Adventures.

When I read the rules, I was worried that it wouldn’t be very fun nor worth the $50 as it seemed to be just another legacy board game. During your turn, you perform two actions by playing skill cards. Actions include Move, Attack, Information, and Planning. However, some skill cards have special abilities that can be used when the card is placed on the indicated action.

Often, this results in a stronger/different approach to the action, such as the Mandalorian’s Whistling Birds activating during the Attack action and allowing you to deal 5 damage spread across different enemies instead of a standard action amount against one single target.

Another aspect of this action system that I like is that the ability cards have different numbers that essentially determine how strong the action is when played. If you play an ability card with a 2 in Move, you can move two spaces, but a 4 allows you to move four spaces. It’s simple and allows you to strategize since you don’t always want to play with only large numbers.

The way this is all balanced is that when the total power of the ability cards (and ailment tokens) is five or more at the end of your turn, then you have to resolve an Event card which is how enemies interact with you.

Additionally, if the total is six or more, then you must first deal with the mission-specific crisis (listed on the board) and then resolve the event. You never really want events or crises to resolve themselves, but they are inevitable and so it is up to you and your group to determine how best to play your cards to handle the negatives while working towards the mission objective.

At the end of the day, I’m having fun The Mandalorian: Adventures. While I wish there was a better attempt at dealing with player counts in the early missions, it was fun playing 2 player.

I think this legacy Lite format is actually really nice with the rules for a sandbox mode and no permanent alterations to the game pieces really helps more casual players feel like the $49.99 price is more justified.

They also have additional content on their website! I’d like to see more games apply a similar model. If you want The Mandalorian and board games, I think you will like this game very much.