Calo Nord

Calo Nord was supposed to be the Boba Fett of his day, 4000 years before Boba was a twinkling in his father’s genetic material. Compared to any version of either Fett, however, Calo falls rather short. He shouldn’t feel too badly, though; almost everyone falls short of the illustrious Fett family.

For 31 points, he has decent damage output, with Bounty Hunter +4 helping to compensate for his mediocre Attack value. He also has a respectable Grenades 20, which is helpful as a Bodyguard deterrent.

The problem with Calo is his survivability. With only 60 hit points and a lowish Defense of 18, he’ll only take two or three shots from your opponent’s main damage dealers. He does have the Avoid Defeat ability, which generally means that he will take a third or fourth hit to kill about 25% of the time. This is cute, a neat nod to how the character worked in Knights of the Old Republic, but nothing to plan for.

So is he worth 31 points? Maybe, but you should definitely be planning to compensate for his weaknesses. Consider teaming him up with Rodian Black Sun Vigo and keeping him in the back, well away from legal targets. For an interesting build, try him with the original Yoda, who will let him reroll his Avoid Defeat saves, bringing that 25% to a whopping 56% or so (assuming I’ve done that math right; probability class was a long time ago for me).

The bottom line is that Calo Nord isn’t the best choice around, but he’s certainly not the worst. As a Fringe piece, there are lots of choices for his squadmates, and there just might be some great combo out there that I haven’t thought of. Happy hunting.

Overall rating in 100: 2 (not enough room for support)
Overall rating in 200: 3 (exactly average, really)

Boushh

Poor Boushh. Saddled with a name that no two Star Wars fans pronounce the same, posed like Princess Leia, and only a 2:1 hit points:cost ratio.

I'd like to say that, like Zuckuss, Boushh rises above middling-to-bad statistics with terrific abilities, but it's just not the case. Grenades 40 sounds great on paper, and Paralysis is great, but we're dealing with an exceptionally fragile Melee Attack piece. Most competitive damage-dealing pieces can kill Boushh reliably in a single activation, and he doesn't even have Stealth or anything.

You're pretty much always better off spending those 20 points on something else, including six Ewoks.

Overall rating in 100: 1.5
Overall rating in 200: 2

Bossk, Bounty Hunter

Bossk, Bounty Hunter is less a sequel to the original Bossk than the completed draft of the character. Rebel Storm Bossk was extra dangerous up in melee, but had no special way of closing, and was too fragile to reliably get there by the usual means.

Enter Bossk, Bounty Hunter, who adds more hit points and Regeneration to help with the fragility, Momentum to give additional incentive to close, and Rend to make the close attacks that much more dangerous. He also has Flamethrower 20, because the first 100 bounty hunters through the gates on the release date for this expansion got Flamethrower 20.

So the new Bossk, at only eight points more, is substantially better than the old, and can be considered a complete replacement for him. Even vastly improved, though, he's only okay, due mostly to the low hit points that typify the Bounty Hunters set. His damage output potential is very good for the cost, however, so if you've got the means to get him into a good position, he might be worth your points. As a Fringe follower, he can benefit from many good support pieces. Good team-ups include Tarfful or Admiral Ackbar to help his Attack rating, R2-D2, Astromech Droid or Grand Admiral Thrawn to get him in position, or any Bodyguard to help him survive his travels.

Overall rating in 100: 2.5
Overall rating in 200: 3.5 (as the cheapest source of Flamethrower 20 there is, he's worth considering here)

Ayy Vida

The night life on Coruscant is apparently deeply, deeply dangerous. Besides obvious threats like shapeshifting bounty hunters and weak-minded death stick merchants there looms the ever-present threat of poisonous exotic dancers. Ayy Vida is one such toxin.

For 19 points, Vida is a steal. While she is a melee piece, she does have Stealth to help her get close to the target (and Stealth itself can be enhanced in a few ways these days). She has a respectable +11 Attack, with Cunning Attack to help her boost it further, and both the benefits of Cunning and Poison +20 to compensate for her low Damage score. Oh, and her 50 hit points put her solidly in the high end for durability at her price range.

Yes sir; female miniatures in negligible clothing have come a long way since Princess Leia, Captive. Consider Vida in a squad with Nom Anor, Rodian Black Sun Vigo, or Bith Black Sun Vigo to get the most out of her Stealth. Properly enhanced, she can sneak around the side of the map to do some commander assassination. This is key, because she has better combat stats than most pieces in her price range, and virtually any support piece. Ayy Vida won't go toe-to-toe with Lord Vader, but she can beat the tar out of Wat Tambor, and has a good chance against Grand Admiral Thrawn. She also comes in under the magical 20-point mark, allowing her to be brought into your squad with Lobot's Fringe Reinforcements or the aforementioned Rodian Vigo's Fringe Reserves.

While not the centerpiece of your squad, Ayy Vida makes a solid backup combatant. She can also do exactly what her job description implies, and sneak around the back to assassinate someone important to your opponent's squad. Hire her for an evening and try her out.

Overall rating in 100: 2 (she's not ideally suited to this format, which generally lacks the support pieces she's good for killing)
Overall rating in 200: 4 (the 200-point squad without some support pieces is a rarity, and she'll probably have no trouble justifying her cost here)

Defel Spy

The Defel Spy is... unextraordinary. At 14 points, he's just a little too expensive to be a grunt, but he's also not a powerhouse by any means. He's sort of a piece without a home; let's look at why.

As a Fringe piece with Stealth, one of my first thoughts has to be teaming him with Nom Anor. The problem with this is that he's not hugely better than an Abyssin Black Sun Thug in this role, costs almost twice as much, and wastes points on Evasion (which is completely useless if you're under the super-stealth Commander Effect). With the combination of Cunning Attack and Loner, he can theoretically shoot with a +14, which is extremely respectable in such a low-cost figure. Unfortunately, Loner is harder to use than it seems, as having all of his allies more than six squares away means that help is also more than six squares away. A canny opponent will separate and eliminate him. Cunning Attack is pretty cool, if you've got initiative control and/or Accurate Shot to make sure he hits unactivated enemies. This naturally brings us to the Imperials, who have Thrawn and Veers to give you both. While this is great for the Defel Spy, the Empire has the best grunts in the game, and doesn't really need help from the Fringe for their cannon fodder.

The only other commanders I can come up with to help out the poor Defel are Clone Strike Yoda, who lets him reroll Evade saves (and if Mas Amedda is involved, Yoda doesn't have to screw up the Defel's Loner by hanging around nearby), and Prince Xizor, who gives him Accurate Shot from any distance. Now the only problem is that these are both rather expensive commanders, and you don't really want to use Defels en masse (as you would usually try to do when using a specific CE/ability combo, so you can get the benefit over and over), because using a bunch of Loner pieces means you're trying to get all of your pieces more than six squares from each other, and usually means easy points for your opponent.

This is the Defel Spy's problem: he's a standalone piece. He might be some filler at the end of your squad (especially if you're using one of the above commanders), but he's just not worth building a squad around because he synergizes poorly. Personally, I don't much care for standalone pieces unless they're also powerhouses in their own right, because competitive squad-building is an exercise in synergy. If he works for you, more power to you, but I won't be quaking in my boots to see him across the table from me.

Overall rating in 100: 2
Overall rating in 200: 2

P.S. The question has come up a few times on the WOTC message boards, so it's probably worth addressing: the Defel Spy, despite his total lack of apparent armament, is not supposed to have Melee Attack. There has been no errata, and there isn't likely to be. Just assume that, as a spy, he has access to a wide variety of Bondian weapons disguised as wristwatches and the like.

Tamtel Skreej

The next time you watch Return of the Jedi, watch for Tamtel Skreej. He's the guy in Jabba's palace who looks suspiciously like Lando, but apparently belongs to some species that sees through its facial hair. My evidence is that when we get our first close-up on Tamtel's face, he pulls his visor/facemask thing down a little, apparently just to let his mustache look around. I know they needed to make sure we understood that this was Lando, but I defy you to explain the character's motivation in the moment for this bit of exposition.

In the miniatures game, Tamtel Skreej represents another piece of evidence that Wizards of the Coast wants you to use exactly one version of Lando, and that version is the Hero of Tanaab. After the dramatic upgrade between the original Rebel Storm Lando and the HoT version, I was wondering what strange new direction they'd take the character in his third incarnation for the game. As it turns out, they took him in the Melee Attack direction, which was a suboptimal choice.

To be fair, they didn't just tack Melee Attack on the Hero of Tanaab and try to charge you the same number of points for him. They also lowered his Attack and Hit Points and took away his Mobile Attack and Commander Effect. And, technically (if you want to be extra super fair), they also increased his Damage and added Stealth and Cleave.

I'm oversimplifying, of course. Tamtel is a 23-point piece that can theoretically do 90 points of damage in a single activation (Double Attack with Opportunist, and Cleave to get a third attack in against another target). Unfortunately, that's not going to happen all that often, as Skreej suffers from the eternal melee problem of getting to the fight alive.

To help with this, he has Stealth. In the competitive game, Stealth, in and of itself, just means that most scrubs can't shoot you, because most of the real shooters have Accurate Shot (one of the primary indicators that they're a real shooter, in fact). What Stealth does for you is allow you to be enhanced by the Stealth-enhancing Commander Effects. Specifically, either of the two Vigos or Nom Anor will improve Tamtel's survivability dramatically, and he probably shouldn't be used without one.

Okay, so we know how to make him survive. How do we make him deal his impressive (if purely theoretical) damage? This is tricky, because Double Attack and Opportunist on a melee piece mean that you sort of need the enemy to walk up to your unactivated Tamtel, and most opponents are not this accommodating. You can walk up to them, but then you'll only get the one attack (or possibly two with Cleave). You can base them at the end of the round, then attack next round, but Opportunist means that you want the enemy piece to activate before you attack it. Hmmm.

When trying to solve a transportation problem in Star Wars Miniatures, your answers are pretty much always R2-D2, Astromech Droid and Grand Admiral Thrawn. Either one of these can transport Tamtel where he needs to go to hurt people, but both of them are in factions with far more powerful melee beatsticks. Probably the best that can be said for Tamtel is that he's a reasonable backup melee combatant, especially for the Empire. Since almost all of the Empire's melee powerhouses are versions of the same fallen Jedi knight, it can difficult to get a couple of melee characters together for them. Think of Tamtel Skreej as a Dark Side Marauder that trades some hit points for better damage potential and Stealth. It's not much, but I told you that the Hero of Tanaab version was better right at the beginning.

Overall rating in 100: 2
Overall rating in 200: 2

Garindan

The sound designer for the Star Wars movies, Ben Burtt, is a personal hero of mine. If you want to know one of the reasons why, check out the speaking voice of Garindan, the Imperial informant that tattles on Luke and Obi-Wan in the first movie. I don't know how Ben created those sounds, but they don't sound like anything I've heard on Earth.

As for the Star Wars Miniatures piece, he's one of those one-trick ponies. His stats are fairly poor, but he has two abilities that make him playable: Stealth and Spotter 30. Yes, 30. Incredibly, Garindan's eyesight is so good that he adds one Heavy Stormtrooper's worth of bazooka damage to anyone with whom he might combine fire.

This sounds great, but Spotter only works when you're within six squares of the target, and combining fire uses your whole activation, meaning that Garindan needs to get fairly close to the enemy, than stand there for a while. When you have a Defense of 13, this is the sort of behavior that raises your insurance premiums. What's more, Stealth can't help Garindan against anyone he's spotting, since it stops working within six squares. What's a gutless tattletale with great eyesight supposed to do?

Fortunately, there are ways to help Garindan out. One of these is just to make sure that Garindan gets to go last and then win initiative. A high activation Thrawn-based squad can do this quite easily. Move Garindan up to the target last, after your opponent has moved all of his pieces, then win initiative with Master Tactician the next round, and Garindan can do his trick. Hopefully you're planning to kill that piece, however, because Garindan is still standing next to it afterwards (unless you're going to do something tricky like have Thrawn swap him with Vader).
Easier (and probably more effective) than the above strategy is just to put Garindan in a Nom Anor squad. Super stealth makes it much less of a problem to be hanging out near enemies, and Nom himself is a reasonable person to combine fire with.

Suffice to say, Garindan can be a fine support piece, but you should know before the fight how he's going to be doing his trick. You can't casually toss him in with your last 12 points, because you'll basically be handing your opponent 12 free points.

Overall rating in 100: 3 (3.5 with Nom)
Overall rating in 200: 3.5 (4 with Nom)

Boba Fett, Bounty Hunter

To be fair, in the era of the 30+ damage hitter, a character as inexplicably and tiresomely popular as Boba Fett needed an update, despite being one of the best pieces in the game already. It also wouldn't really have felt right if he just had 30+ damage himself. No, he needed Twin Attack and Disintegration in order to feel like the dangerous threat the fan community has decided he has to be, while still seeming like Fett.

Boba Fett, Bounty Hunter is a piece without weaknesses, which is what annoys me about him. He's ranged, has great numbers, a good mix of offensive and defensive abilities (including the devastating Accurate Shot), and a bargain cost for what he brings to the table. The only thing that the original Fett can do that the new doesn't do better is split his attacks between two targets, and this hardly matters. Generally, if you want to do that, it's either (a) because you're using a very expensive piece to kill fodder, which is dumb, or (b) because you Disintegrated your target on the first attack, so what are you whining about?

As you've probably picked up, I'm grouchy about this piece, because he's nauseatingly efficient. He's a very solid (if not stellar) damage-dealer who has a 5% chance of removing the target from the board with every attack. When Jedi get close, he gets to move away without drawing an attack of opportunity and still attack twice. When he gets swarmed, he has Flamethrower 20. When he's shot at, he has Evade.

The only flaw I've seen in the new Fettness is how he gets played. The two major schools of thought on him seem to vary between protecting him like a precious treasure by keeping him in the back where he can't shoot anyone, and sending him forward, guns-a-blazing, to get hacked to death by the opponent's entire squad. The mark of a good player is finding the balance between these approaches. Remember that Fett is more powerful than most other pieces, but not more powerful than most whole squads.

For squad synergies, you have a number of options. Yoda can help him reroll his Evade saves, as can Emperor Palpatine (by lending him Force Points). Thrawn can teleport him around the map. General Windu or Gonk can give him Extra Attack (which turns into two more attacks, due to the weirdness of Twin Attack). Rebel Hero Han can give him Advantageous Attack. San Hill lets him position himself well.

In terms of competitive play, there are very few reasons not to play Boba Fett, Bounty Hunter. Probably the most compelling of these is that there is no way to fit him into a Black & Blue build without sacrificing the all-important activation count. In terms of your conscience and sense of self-worth, there are all sorts of reasons not to play him.

Overall rating in 100: 5
Overall rating in 200: 5

IG-88, Bounty Hunter

Much like Kevin J. "Baby-Eater" Anderson's ill-conceived short story about the character, IG-88, Bounty Hunter is over-thought, convoluted, and of little use to anyone. First of all, Iggy suffers from the same problems as all Unique droids, which is that they are extremely difficult to synergize with a squad. They aren't subject to any current Commander Effects, all the Separatists' special effects are restricted to non-Uniques, and there are consequently almost no ways to push them past their initial boundaries.

IG-88's initial boundaries are things like 80 hit points and a mere 19 Defense, with a shockingly low Attack value of +9 (which, admittedly, is mostly mitigated by his Bounty Hunter +6, but God help him if he tries to shoot a Thrawn-enhanced Stormtrooper).

On the plus side, he has Opportunist, one of the better abilities in the game. Unfortunately, if he's going to get to use it with his mighty Double Attack, he has to hold still until your opponent has moved a couple of pieces, at which point he might already be dead.

Flamethrower 20 is a nice addition, and he can use it on the move, which helps. Sonic Stunner is a strange choice, since the idea of using your short-lived 44-point cannon to maybe activate an opposing piece or two seems foolish in just about any circumstance. It would be terrific if there was some way to use Sonic Stunner and then capitalize on the enemy piece's weakness with Opportunist, but there just isn't any way to do it (droids can't be Dominated, and Pawn of the Dark Side doesn't work on Uniques) (Did I mention that I don't like Unique droids?).

Probably the best you can hope for if you want to get some use out of this version of IG-88 is teaming him with San Hill. San's "ability" to force/allow you to activate only one character per phase means that you will probably get to move IG-88 last, and therefore trigger Opportunist. Conveniently for IG, San is in the same faction as the best Repair piece in the game, Wat Tambor, so there's the core of a squad idea. Unfortunately, while these are probably the best options for IG-88, San and Wat have better options available to them, so I don't think IG will be competitively viable in the foreseeable future.

Overall rating in 100: 2 (Boba Fett, Bounty Hunter can only miss him on a '1,' and only needs to attack him twice) (he might help you against Bane, though)
Overall rating in 200: 2 (he's just not very good)

Mandalore the Indomitable

In my day (1/7/83), the word "indomitable" meant something. You were either domitable or you weren't, and if you weren't, brother, you were set for life. Mandalore the Indomitable is many things, but he's not indomitable. Not really. Not the way it used to be.

He is an interesting package, though. He's got a big Damage rating of 30 and the ability to use it twice a turn with a respectable-for-a-ranged guy Attack rating of +13. He'll be standing still for that Double Attack, but he does have Evasion to help him avoid counter fire, and the tantalizing possibility of Deadly Attack, meaning he throws criticals twice as often as most pieces, but still not very often.

Okay, so we've got his role clearly defined: he's a cannon that stays well away from the fight. Except for two things, one of them positive and the other negative. The good news is that he's got Momentum, so if someone's starting to sneak up on him, he has the option of hitting them extra hard once. This won't always be the best option, but options are good. The bad news is that he doesn't have Accurate Shot, and there's no legal way for him to get it, so until you clear out the fodder, that giant gun is going to be pointed at Ugnaughts if your opponent knows what he's doing. Hmmm.

The Mandalorians, however, were built to be an extremely synergistic faction. The Basilisk War Droid, with its Strafe ability, is obviously a great way to clear out any fodder in Mandy's way, and perhaps put some damage on the real targets at the same time. Throw in the fact that Mandalore's Commander Effect grants Momentum to the Basilisk, so that all of those lovely Strafe attacks are at +4/+10, and you can see what a loving, supportive faction these guys are.
The Mandalorians are so synergistic, in fact, that Mr. the Indomitable's CE works on every single one of them, including the Mandalorian Commander, whose Mobile Attack-granting CE in turn affects Mandalore. Neat. Mandalore's Momentum trick also does wonders for the Mandalorian Blademaster, who gets both of his Twin Attacks enhanced.

Mandalore is an oddity: he's the most expensive piece in the game who doesn't suffer from Melee Attack, so his stats are lower than you might expect at his cost. He's also one of the linchpin pieces for the most synergistic faction in the game (and the only one who didn't go to the same tailor as all the others).

Overall rating in 100: 2.5 (no room for the rest of his pals here)
Overall rating in 200: 3.5 (will require very careful and clever play, but potentially very powerful; not a piece for beginners)

4-LOM, Bounty Hunter

If you read my review of the Rebel Storm 4-LOM, you know that I consider him a tough act to follow. Unique Droids are hard to enhance with support pieces, so they have to be pretty self-contained little units in your squad, and I find the 21-point version of 4-LOM to be an admirable example. I’m still on the fence about this newfangled version.

In most ways, adding the “Bounty Hunter” surname to 4-LOM seems to mean slight upgrades to the same piece. He has 20 more hit points, one more point of Attack, 10 more points of Damage(!), and retains Bounty Hunter +4 and Careful Shot. These bonuses, taken together, are worth maybe 5 or 6 more points to me, but the new piece costs 12 more than his predecessor.

The ability that’s supposed to make up those last points is Paralysis, an ability we’ve seen on several pieces in this and previous sets. It’s a nice little stun effect, allowing you to shut the target down for the rest of the round if they haven’t activated yet, save 11. The key difference is that all the other pieces that have ever had it also have Melee Attack. Furthermore, every other piece in this game with a similar ability has, at most, a six-square range with it. 4-LOM, Bounty Hunter can activate Boba Fett from across the board, and that impresses the heck out of me. I just can’t decide if it impresses me 33 points’ worth.

It occurs to me that Grand Admiral Thrawn is about the best synergy you can hope for with 4-LOM, BH. You’ll almost always have initiative, allowing you to take a stab at activating the important piece before he can go, and you can give 4-LOM Force Immunity by just having him stand near Thrawn’s Ysalimiri field. Importantly, this would mean that any Force-users you try to Paralyze will only get the one chance to save, without any pesky Force Points ruining your fun. I may have to try this one out; I’ll let you know how it goes. The one thing to remember here is that 4-LOM lacks Accurate Shot, so a canny opponent is going to make it hard to target the piece you really want to hit. Bring crowd control pieces to clear out the fodder.

Overall rating in 100: 2.5 (a third of your squad, and hard to support)
Overall rating in 200: 3.5 (can possibly keep a much more expensive piece out of the fight)

Bith Black Sun Vigo

Okay, let’s just assume that we’ve all made the obligatory Matrix joke about the Bith Black Sun Vigo and move on. The BBSV, as he’ll be known by brevity-conscious players, is a fantastic piece who was recruited by Morpheus to be the Chosen One and deliver humanity from the clutches of the machines – dammit!

With Mobile Attack, Stealth, Evade, and a healthy Defense of 19 with 50 hit points, he’s probably the hardest 20 points your opponent will ever have to kill, especially since he’ll rise from the dead when Trinity declares her love for him – crap!

Advantageous Attack and Twin Attack mean he can actually put 40 points of damage on an unactivated target, despite his humble Damage rating of 10, and Micro-Vision helps him punish enemy Agents that try to get past his Stealth by taking over the code of other imprisoned humans nearby. Sorry; let me get a grip here. I can finish this.

As if all that wasn’t worth your 20 points, he is a Vigo after all, meaning a high-ranking member of the Black Sun criminal syndicate, and naturally has a crime-friendly Commander Effect. In this case, he helps his fellow Stealth units by granting them Evade and eventually dying in a transparent Biblical allegory.

Overall rating in 100: 4
Overall rating in 200: 4.5
Overall rating for the first movie: 4
Overall rating for the sequels: 2