Getting started with Star Wars: Shatterpoint

In a market filled with great miniatures games, Star Wars: Shatterpoint stands out as a slick high-action skirmish game packed with beloved characters from the franchise. Whether you want to pit Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader against each other or see what happens when Moff Gideon goes toe to toe with a bunch of murderous teddy bears, Shatterpoint has you covered. After more than a year of releases, there’s a Death Star’s worth of content out there, so we’re here to help you get started.

The core set for Shatterpoint is the best way to get started and brings a lot of gameplay value straight away. Not only does it include the rules, measuring tools, tokens, and dice, but it also has enough miniatures to field two strike teams, meaning two players can share one core set. Multi-level terrain is really central to Shatterpoint‘s gameplay, so the core set contains a starting set of modular plastic buildings and walkways.

Once you have the core set, you need to choose your squads. Squads are at the heart of Shatterpoint‘s list building: strike teams have two squads of characters, with more powerful characters leading their squads as primaries, while other characters and unnamed fighters take secondary and support roles. Within a squad, the characters all have to share an era such as Clone Wars or Galactic Civil War, but beyond that, they can be part of the dark side, light side, rebels, bounty hunters — anything you like!

The Shatterpoint core set has a great set of miniatures, with Mandalorians, Clone Troopers, Droids, Jedi, and Sith. They play well in their colour-coded sides (red and blue) as ready-made strike teams, but you can also mix and match to see what happens if Lord Maul teams up with Bo-Katan or Ahsoka leads a squad of Mandalorian Super Commandos. Trying different squads of core set characters is a great way to start learning how to list build, as there are very few bad combinations.

While Shatterpoint games usually play out with two squads per side and three struggles, you can absolutely get a feel for the game with one squad and a single struggle to learn the basic rules. The character cards have a lot of information, so starting with a single squad gives you a chance to familiarise yourself with how to apply their rules. Shatterpoint‘s excellent alternating initiative keeps games flowing as each unit is activated when their card is drawn from the player’s deck of order cards. The Shatterpoint card, also shuffled into the deck, allows players to activate any character they want to, even one that has already been activated.

Unlike many traditional miniatures games, Shatterpoint focuses on objective control rather than taking enemy models off the table. Each character can potentially have all their health removed multiple times before they leave the table, which is a big relief when you’ve spent hours painting them. Instead, models vie for control of points on the table that change over the course of two or three struggles. The winner of the overall game is the person who won the most struggles, so even if you have a bad first struggle, you can still pull it back as the game goes on. In fact, the loser of a previous struggle gets advantages in choosing the position of objectives for the next one, meaning that players on the back foot always have a chance for a comeback.

Once you’ve tried out some full games and become familiar with the core set characters, you can start to think about which characters support them well from other squad packs. Perhaps you got on so well with Lord Maul’s high damage output that you want to bring the Witches of Dathomir to support him, or maybe you feel that your Clone Troopers could do with Obi-Wan Kenobi to lead them rather than Anakin. Some characters like Admiral Thrawn introduce more complex rules, while others like the Bad Batch work really well together out of the box. Every squad pack introduces more options but the strictly limited squad sizes mean that it rarely feels like rules bloat is becoming an issue.

Whether you’re tired of frustrating miniatures games that never seem to fulfill their promises or excited to see what your favourite Star Wars character can do, Star Wars: Shatterpoint is well worth a try. With four squad packs released this month and a packed release schedule for 2025 including beloved characters from Rogue One and The Clone Wars, there is no better time to squad up and give it a try.