Last weekend I got to play this board game for the first time with three other friends. I played as IG-88 and wound up winning by a single point due to some bad luck on my friend's part - he was playing as Lando.
In this free-for-all game for up to four players, you play as your choice among a number of bounty hunters of varying degrees of fame for the series, and it largely seems to take place in between order 66 and the fall of the first death star, given the cast of NPC and player characters involved. As a bounty hunter, you get a basic ship to begin your journey traveling between the planets of the outer Rim - the large cardboard arc containing most of the rest of the pieces. Much of the game is randomized at start or randomized when you try to resolve what happens to your character in a situation, but most of setting up your plans or your preparation is deterministic. There is some very minor hidden information in that you sometimes have access as a player to "secret cards" that you may draw from communal piles. Besides these, the game is played almost fully out in the open, which means that the only thing keeping players from figuring out your next move is how much the information complexity of the game masks your intent. If players are reading cards or ship abilities, they may not be focused on your plans.
The goal of the game is to become the most famous bounty hunter by collecting fame through a number of options. There are jobs where you roll dice and your and your crew's competencies can help modify those rolls to make them easier. There are bounties where you have to find and overpower another named character (usually NPC) to either kill or capture them before delivering them into the group that was looking for them. There are also ways to smuggle illegal goods, personalize your ship, individual ship and player character goals, and lots of other customizable circumstances through event cards and infractions with the characters you meet that can themselves lead to more fame. With all these options, you have plenty of archetypes you can lean into with your playstyle: if you want to get into combat often, you can go exclusively for bounties. If you want to avoid combat completely, you could go for only jobs (skill checks) or only moving illegal cargo (mapping ship movement).
In addition to fame, there's money (credits) and four trackers for your reputation with the various factions: Rebel, Hutt, Empire, and Syndicate (as in the Pike Syndicate). As you use your ship to move around the outer rim, you have to navigate between planets and along routes to avoid patrols from other factions, or else you risk being stopped, or worse: having to fight. This leads to some interesting situations where you know you want to get somewhere because a player reveals an NPC that you have a bounty on and were looking for, but you can't get there safely with where the current patrols lie. Patrols move whenever a player makes a purchase in the market, so sometimes it can pay off to make purchases to draw certain patrols away from the route you want to take.
It's pretty convoluted, and there's a lot of options each turn to consider, but ultimately the game does eventually get into a groove where you focus less on the immediate moment to moment and realize that your play is telling some (probably Alternate Universe) story of this character running around being a bounty hunter. This is at once both a heavily themed board game, and a surprisingly in-depth system of interwoven mechanics that largely support that theme. It's clear the folks who designed this game had either a good idea or plenty of access to Star Wars lore consultants, or both.
That being said, there's a few different levels of interaction with the fiction, and while I understand and respect the choices the game makers made here, I think my personal preference would have been for a game that took place in this universe but had less of an emphasis on putting in all the various "glup shittos" you know and love from Star Wars. I find the game is too focused on letting the player cosplay as their favorite bounty hunter rather than trying to make a new character become famous. For me, playing as characters like Han or Lando or Jyn Erso feel too distracting in terms of allowing the story that's told through the game to breathe. Sure, there's some interesting beats where the player with Han finds a bounty for Chewbacca and denies it because of the fiction - that's fun - but I found myself wishing the characters were less focused on trying to let you show off how much you know about Star Wars and more about letting you empathize with what it would be like to be a bounty hunter.
I was also a bit annoyed that Cassian Andor and Din Djarin weren't included. If you're going to make it character cosplay focused, let me live out Mando or Rogue One or something! Jyn is cool, but I longed for Andor, especially with how good that show is. Note this game came out in 2019.
The mechanics of the game, despite feeling overwhelming, do wind up being fun and interesting and supporting the fiction. There are times when you have a bounty and learn that your target is on a specific planet due to the actions of another player, and it's up to you to find a way to get to that character before they become part of someone else's ship's crew. There are events and jobs and all sorts of cards that may look or feel familiar if you've watched the movies or TV shows. I happened to watch some of Rebels after playing the game and realized that one of the characters I had seen was included in the game because they were a main character of Rebels.
A lot of the game design mirrors what the characters are known for in Star Wars. Lando gets certain cards or crew for free and his player gets to cheat a little at rolling dice in-person. All of this is at the cost of not being able to fight much at all. IG-88 is able to cheat at combat but lacks most useful skills. I really appreciate how dedicated the designers were to thinking about the characters and each of their stories and how to represent a core facet or facets of them from the fiction into the mechanics of the game. Overall, once the many action options and systems all click, the design of the game does follow directly what you'd expect. For example, if you're looking for illegal goods, you know to be searching for them in the cargo pile of the market. By making the market only actionable from planets, the routes you take to maximize your options each turn require planet hopping. Buying from a market on a planet leads to patrols closing in on you, and they'll stop you if you're not on great terms, and force you to encounter them if you wind up in their space while on bad terms. I begrudgingly accept that the game doesn't let your characters actually die. While this limits the stress of moving about the patrols, it keeps you from losing what winds up being a long game just because of bad luck.
Overall, the game took multiple hours to play and we didn't even have to account for setup or cleanup, so that would have easily added another 30 minutes at least. As a game to play over an afternoon with friends who are even marginally into Star Wars, this game is a great option. It's a little too focused on my opinion on trying to relive classic moments rather than just existing in-theme and letting you tell your own stories. I find that that misalignment on how to focus on the game narrative means that this game does not have much interest in helping players grapple with the underlying themes of what it means to be a bounty hunter so much as helping you generally feel cool because the game thinks bounty hunters are cool. The mechanics are complex and may take a while to fully understand on the first playthrough, but it seems like there's plenty of replay value in terms of how much the moment-to-moment options for a player are randomized at setup, and given what a huge difference your character, ship, and crew all make in how you approach the gameplay.
This game fulfills the classic role of Star Wars media for me: it's not the best - there are parts I enjoy and parts I think could be improved - but I know I'll be coming back to it in the future.