The Best Star Wars Tabletop and Board Games 2024

Star Wars has invaded every inch of our culture, including Star Wars toys, Star Wars LEGO sets, and even the tabletop. It may come as a surprise, but the slate of board and roleplaying games based on this popular intellectual property includes several absolutely killer options.

The diversity here is strong. There are smaller, less complex options, as well as sprawling games with mounds of miniatures, each its own compelling experience that captures aspects of this beloved film series. All of these are currently available and can be picked up and played right now.

TL;DR: The Best Star Wars Board Games

Short on time? Click the links above to check out each game on the list. Read on for details about each one.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian Adventures Board Game

If your love of Star Wars got refreshed by the namesake TV show, you can now put your own personal spin on the best episodes with this excellent tabletop adaptation. Players take the role of heroes from the show, including IG-11 and, of course, Mando himself, and select an episode to play from the ring binder of maps. You’re all cooperating using a novel action system whereby a buildup of action cards will eventually trigger enemy responses, ensuring everyone needs to plan together to control the pace of events and counter threats. With lots of narrative references to the series and envelopes of surprising variants to add replay value, each play through The Mandalorian: Adventures is a whole new adventure to enjoy.

Star Wars: Bounty Hunters

If you’ve ever wanted to play as the villains and delve into the role of one of Star Wars’ iconic bounty hunters, now’s your chance with this simple, frenetic drafting game. You draw cards from four decks: hunters, targets, contracts and the Jawa Market which contains droids and other goodies. Then you play one and, to mix things up, pass the reminder to your neighbor. The aim is to have enough hunters, which cost points, and droids on a target to match its shield values and take it down, earning you points, with contracts earning you a bonus for particular combos. Fast, fun and full of your favorite characters, it’s a great chance to explore your dark side with some scum and villainy.

Star Wars: Shatterpoint

Shatterpoint is the newest Star Wars tabletop design. This comes from Atomic Mass Games, the studio that took over X-Wing and Legion, and which conceived the exceptional Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures game. Atomic Mass is fully behind this new release and has already released many additional miniatures with shiny new content.

Following in the footsteps of Crisis Protocol, Shatterpoint focuses on a small number of units with players fielding squads from the Clone Wars era. Aesthetically, it’s a more vibrant and focused experience in comparison to Legion. The larger-sized 40mm miniatures are impressive and offer a striking presentation. Gameplay is dynamic and swift with several unique flourishes. It is rather detailed, however, and offers plenty of tactical fat to chew on. This comes at the cost of complexity, which can occasionally bog down play. For those looking to engage in this exciting new title, you will find a rather sophisticated game full of modern touches.

Star Wars: Unlimited

Following the success of 2023’s Disney Lorcana, the trading game format has found new life. Disney wants to keep the cash flowing, and that’s arriving courtesy of Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars: Unlimited. This one hit the market in March 2024 to a great deal of buzz. With a little focus, you can hear the millions of wallets crying out in terror.

Gameplay is relatively straightforward and leans into concepts common to the TCG format: Spend resources to put new equipment, characters, and vehicles into play. One novel concept is alternating actions, following a pattern common to miniatures skirmish games. This establishes a unique cadence to play that offers some distinction from its peers. Veering away from Decipher’s old CCG, they’ve opted for new illustrations as opposed to stills from the films. This helps to bolster the game’s personality and enhance its attraction.

Star Wars: Jabba’s Palace – A Love Letter Game

Love Letter is the popular card game that made serious waves in 2012. It’s seen a large amount of spinoffs since, including Star Wars: Jabba’s Palace. This functions much like the other variants, taking the core framework of Love Letter and adding a twist to freshen up the experience.

Players choose between two cards to play each turn. Each has a different effect and includes iconic characters from Return of the Jedi. For instance, Boba Fett allows you to take a card from another player, while Salacious Crumb lets you look at their hand. The goal is to outlast your opponents by using a degree of intuition and bluffing. This particular edition adds a new Agenda mechanism which changes scoring each round. It’s a solid changeup that adds some variety and tactical nuance to play. This is a simple game, one that is appropriate for a wide age range. Better yet, it’s incredibly cheap.

Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game

If you and a friend or family member want to duke it out in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars: The Deckbuilding Game is an excellent choice. Rather than making you buy booster packs to assemble a deck, this standalone game comes with all the cards you need to pit the Reble Alliance against the Empire. It's a great pick for newcomers to deckbuilding games, but it has enough depth and strategy for diehard fans.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

If you've played Pandemic (and not just by living through one!), you know the basics for how this game works. Set during the Clone Wars era of Star Wars, this board game pits the Jedi against Count Dooku and the Sith Lord's forces. It comes with four scenarios to play through, giving it lots of replay value.

Star Wars Villainous: Power of The Dark Side

Following on from 2018’s very successful Disney Villanous, this amped-up version lets you pilot some of the most famous villains from the Star Wars franchise to succeed in their evil plots. You’ll need to shepherd resources and cards wisely as you pursue your character’s unique objective, such as Darth Vader turning Luke to the dark side. But beware: other characters can draw from your fate deck and play pesky heroes and deleterious events onto your board, setting your plans awry unless you can deal with them. With new resources and the potential to move into deep space, this is a more complex and challenging game than the original, but it pays off with crunchier strategy and more engaging theme.

Star Wars: Outer Rim

Star Wars games tend to focus on the epic struggle or the details of one battle. Outer Rim fills the wide gap between with a strategic story of the lives of the scum and villains who ply their trade on the galaxy's edge. Except since they're your scum and villains, it's up to you how villainous you want them to be.

As you fly missions and smuggle cargo from system to system, your choices will shape your character. The cleverly linked mission cards give each game a cohesive but unique narrative. You'll upgrade your skills and ship along the way. But whether you choose to be a heroic rogue or a sky bounty hunter is up to you. Why not both?

Star Wars X-Wing (2nd Edition)

The success of this tactical space fighting game has spawned imitations across the hobby. But X-Wing has two things its mimics do not. First, it's Star Wars. Second, the figures are pre-painted to a high standard, so you can have amazing-looking games for zero effort. And if you collected Star Wars toys as a kid, the nostalgia appeal is impossible to ignore.

The game became a victim of its own popularity, bloated with confusing expansions. But a second edition has cleaned things up and added a bunch of cool rules tweaks. Now, as well as the squad building and hidden movement tactics of the original, you can deploy force powers to aid your cause. Existing players can get upgrade kits with new dials and cards for their collection.

And the core game remains fantastic fun, a fast-paced snapshot of movie action. There are ship lines not only for Rebels and the Empire, but ones from the prequels and newer films, alongside iconic rogues in Scum and Villainy.

Star Wars: Imperial Assault

Spaceship combat in Star Wars is spectacular, but it's not where the real heart of the films is. That's in the unfolding story, the Jedi powers, the blaster battles. It's in Han and Leia, Luke and his father. If that's where you are with the movies, Imperial Assault is your game.

Borrowing heavily from the mechanics of dungeon-crawling game Descent, this is a grid combat game. You set up a map of interlocking tiles and play out a battle between Imperial and Rebel forces using plastic models of film characters. Turn by turn you need to position your models and use their abilities to best effect in order to win an edge over the opposition.

That's only half the story. This is two games using similar mechanics. One is a battle game where you pick your models and fight it out. The other is an ongoing adventure where one player controls the Imperial forces and the other plays the Rebel heroes. Over the course of many sessions – and with a vast number of expansions to extend your game – your own Star Wars saga will unfold.

Star Wars: Rebellion

If controlling Star Destroyers or AT-AT's isn't big enough for you, how about a Death Star? In fact, how about several Death Stars? That's what's waiting for you in this grand board game, which lets you replay the entire rebellion on your dinner table.

Of course, as befits the movies, the Rebel player can't hope to hold a holo-candle to the might of the Imperial navy. But they don't have to: they have to fight a clandestine war of insurgency and politics, swaying planets to join them while poking thorns in the Imperial side. The Emperor and his minions, meanwhile, merely need to destroy the Rebel base to win. Except they have to find out where it's hidden first.

Rebellion takes a long time to play, but it's engrossing, strategic and surprisingly characterful. Players do get to control a lot of popular film heroes and villains, albeit relegated to a single card.

Star Wars: Destiny

In a move as bold as Obi-Wan confronting Grievous, Destiny resurrects the collectible card game. You begin with a fixed starter set, either Rey or Kylo Ren, and expand it with blind boosters. From this collection you build decks that span across space and time, featuring the likes of Count Dooku pairing up with General Hux.

The unique hook is that Destiny isn't only about playing cards – you’ll be tossing dice around, too. Each character in your deck brings custom dice to the fight, and rolling them partly dictates what you can do with your turn. While this might sound a strategic no-no, it keeps the game varied, fast and exciting, much like the battles it seeks to recreate.

Plus, the variety of the dice themselves help build tactical options. Dice that are more reliable are also less flexible, so it's up to you how you build your force.

Star Wars: Legion

Legion is the ground-based equivalent to X-Wing, a miniatures title with troops and tanks instead of spaceships. The miniatures don't come painted or assembled for this. But don't let that put you off. Publisher Fantasy Flight has learned well from other popular miniatures games and put out a doozy.

At heart, there's the measuring and moving, estimating and dice rolling you'd expect from a game of this type. Two clever tweaks to the formula catapult the game to the next level. First is the activation system in which you have to balance moving what you want against when you want to move it: you won't get both. Second is the card-based scenario creation which puts a tactical twist on making each game unique.

There are sculpts of all your favorite characters and vehicles from the movies to expand your collection. The fact they make up a varied strategic challenge to build an effective army is just a bonus.

Star Wars Board Game FAQ

What is a miniatures game, and how do the various Star Wars ones differ?

Miniatures games share a lot of DNA with board games which, confusingly, often have miniatures as playing pieces. The difference is twofold. Firstly, miniatures games have much higher quality figures and for many players, painting and converting them is an additional hobby in its own right. Second, miniatures games are generally played on an open table with scenery of your choice, on which you move pieces by measuring distances with a tool or tape measure, rather than a fixed board with spaces.

There are currently four different Star Wars miniatures games, a reflection of the franchise's popularity and visual appeal. The easiest one to get into is space dogfighting game X-Wing, which comes with fantastic pre-painted starfighters, like the iconic titular ship and TIE fighter. It has the simplest rules of the four, you don't have to do any modelling at all, the starter set is fun to play with by itself, and you don't even really need any scenery. Next up is Armada, which represents fleet level action with pre-painted scale models of huge capital ships like the Star Destroyer. Although it has a smaller range of models they're also more expensive and you'll need more than just the starter box to properly appreciate what it offers. Some of the expansion content comes with miniscule starfighter wings, and they won't look great next to your painted models unless you take the plunge and paint them up yourself.

The ground combat games, Star Wars: Shatterpoint and Star Wars: Legion are very different beasts, as both come with unpainted models and the expectation is very much that you'll paint them up yourself. You'll also need a collection of scenery although both starter boxes come with some for you to play with. Shatterpoint uses bigger models for smaller-scale action, skirmishes between famous characters from the Star Wars franchises. It's the most complex of all four games but rewards you with movie-like narrative action. Legion depicts bigger battles and is slightly more anonymous in the sense that most of your forces will be stormtroopers or rebel soldiers, with the occasional better-known character as a leader. But while its easier to learn, you'll also have a lot more painting to do to get those larger forces tabletop ready!

For more, check out our picks for the best '90s board games, as well as the best classic board games.

Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.

Charlie Theel is a tabletop games freelancer. You can follow him on Twitter @CharlieTheel.

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