Crafting a narrative: War of the Ring vs Star Wars: Rebellion

On the surface, Ares Game's 'War of the Ring'  and Fantasy Flight's 'Star Wars: Rebellion' are somewhat similar, (the first edition of WOTR was in fact published by Fantasy Flight.)

Both aim to create an epic and sprawling narrative, with an inferior and outnumbered force of good attempting to defeat a far superior evil enemy. Both succeed in their aims but achieve them in different ways.

There are two divergences in the games' approaches: the use of characters and the use of the overall grand strategic map.

I'll briefly describe the core objectives and some of the mechanics of each, though intimate knowledge won't be needed and I won't be able to go through every relevant system.

The primary win conditions for WOTR are:

1. For the shadow player to capture 10 vp's worth of points from free structures around the map

2. For the free people's player to destroy the one ring at mount doom

3. For the shadow player to corrupt the ring bearer

4. For the free people's player to capture 4 vp's worth of shadow structures

Rebellion has just two win conditions:

1. For the Empire to conquer the Rebel base

2. For the Rebellion to earn enough reputation and survive long enough to cause a general uprising

The core action of Rebellion is assigning a leader (essentially a worker) to an event card, then later assigning them to a planet where they will attempt to fulfil that event, possibly opposed by an enemy leader. At the end of each round all leaders return to their owner's leader pools, ready to be reassigned in the subsequent round. If a player chooses not to assign one or more of their leaders, at the beginning of a battle, one of these leaders can be sent to contribute their skills to the fight.

In WOTR, however, characters are (with a few exceptions) essentially permanently on the board from the beginning of the game until the end, excepting their early deaths. Broadly speaking, they move with or without an army, they rally nations towards war and they contribute towards battles.

The end result in this is that the characters in WOTR have a little more permanence than in Rebellion.  Gimli and Legolas splitting from the fellowship, rallying the Dwarves of Erebor to war and then defending the lonely mountain against hordes of Easterlings creates a more effective continuous narrative than can be found in Rebellion's characters.


The big downside of this system, however, is that the characters have less focus than Rebellion. There are a handful of contextual systems that players can use: Gandalf the Grey can be resurrected as Gandalf the White, Aragorn can be crowned king of Gondor etc. But the focus is largely not on the characters but on the overall board state. In Rebellion, everything the players do to affect the game board is initiated by moving a character somewhere. In WOTR, the opposite is true: the characters are an ancillary system, not the primary one.

The benefit of this, however, is that it shifts the focus of the narrative as much onto the board state as the characters. The VP based objectives on both sides encourage a greater awareness of the state of the entire board. A combination of this and the larger board means that armies and agents are far more restricted in their movements. As such, each movement bears far more weight for the player. When the player cannot influence just about anywhere, at any time, as in Rebellion, long term board state becomes more important

As a result, the board state has far more narrative weight for the player: each action contributed crucially to the unique makeup of the board. Sometimes a great focus of that game may be on a swift Strike on Minas Tirith, sometimes the war shifts further north towards the Elven and Dwarven realms or east towards the Shire. The important thing is that this varying and emergent state is slowly developed by player impetus over the course of the game.

In contrast, Rebellion's characters have little permanent board presence, persisting only until the end of the round. As a result the system lends itself far more to emphasising individual moments, rather than creating a more coherent arc for characters and board state

As an example of this, a few turns of Rebellion could go something like:

1. Chewbacca incites a rebellion on Kashykk, killing some imperials before his own troops are killed

2.  The Empire player, fearing another uprising, moves more troops to Kashykk to reinforce the garrison

3. Luke Skywalker travels to Kashykk in order to infiltrate the Imperial garrison.

4. The Empire, sensing an opportunity to perhaps capture and turn Luke, send Darth Vader to capture the young Jedi. However, because Chewbacca is still on Kashykk after his failed rebellion, he is able to assist Luke and fend of Darth Vader

This is the true strength of Rebellion. While still important, the war game style battles fought between good and evil take a back seat compared to the individual struggles between villains and heroes. Ultimately it is less of a war-game than WOTR, allowing these characters to be the focus rather than the greater struggle.

However, although important from a gameplay perspective, from a narrative one the board meant far less in Rebellion than WOTR. With the exception of the dread of an imperial fleet drawing close to the hidden base, there were few benefits gained from it. Characters were never vulnerable in the same way as WOTR, as if they lose a battle, rather than being killed and removed from the game, they suffer no narrative consequence, other than potentially vulnerable to an imperial capture

Overall, I don't believe the approach taken by either game is inherently superior and I like them both a great deal. The memorable moments from Rebellion involve specific characters and situations, not planetary battles. WOTR on the other hand instead lends itself towards remembering the greater board state, of battles won and lost and the desperate military struggle of the Free Peoples. In Rebellion, I remember how the Galactic population rose up after Darth Vader was defeated in an assault on Hoth, triggering the return of the Jedi or when Wedge, the sole surviving fighter in a daring attack on the death star, used the stolen plans to destroy it and retreat to tell the tale. Whereas in WOTR, I remember the people of Dale retreating in the face of an overwhelming Easterling attack to the dwarves of the lonely mountain, while Aragorn was crowned king even as the hordes of Mordor broke through Osgiliath towards the White City.

That's the difference between the two games, both creating a unique narrative but in very quite different ways.