As a new player, and somewhat new to gaming in general as previously noted, I can’t stress it enough how important it is to engage with the community. Well, I should say communities! Let’s start with the local community first, which is the most important thing.
You just picked up Legion, you need somewhere to play? Find local game stores. It’s imperative unless you have a good amount of friends looking to play, but that’s going to require multiple sets of Legion. Multiple tables of 3×3 or 6×4 and a ton of space. Your local game store should be a want and a need. Once you get in the door, now you hope you have a local community looking to play. A common theme right now is that Legion sells really well, but some people prefer to play at home, and the store won’t be flooded with players. Don’t get discouraged. I tried one store and it wasn’t happening. I got into another store where we have four of us dedicated and this past weekend we got another guy involved who had been buying but playing at home. Developing a local crew might be easy, might be difficult, but either way I think it’s imperative. Even if you only get the game on the table once a week, it’s better than no games at all!
Now that you have your local community gathered up, hopefully, this next step is important. At least for me it is, because I like to engage and keep up with what’s going on with the game a whole. This probably falls in the eagerness to play competitively category to borderline obsession with the game, and it may not be something everyone needs or wants to do! The Online community. As mentioned in my first post, the Star Wars Legion Facebook page is the easiest place to start. If you’re casual, you can keep up casually and look at cool paint jobs for inspiration and such. If you want to go competitive/obsessed there’s plenty of great questions people ask, and important posts to follow up on and keep up with the times. Fair warning, and I don’t want anyone to take offense to what is to come, but the Facebook page is a mixed bag. What I mean is that, and this goes for any Facebook page in my opinion, is that sometimes people won’t be as cordial as you may expect. When I first joined it, I kept saying “no way am I playing this competitively, geeze” after reading some comments on posts. That said, there’s still plenty of good with the bad, and Matt Stewart(he runs the page mostly) with help of some other admins have been doing a great job of keeping some of those bad posts/comments out of things whenever they can. Casually you can end there and go to the next paragraph if you’d like. Competitive/obsessed, continue reading because this is where the real fun begins. The Star Wars Legion Discord is the place to be if you are 100% invested in this game. There are many channels that will fill your needs. You can download the app on your phone or use your computer to keep up with whatever threads you want to, but fair warning: it’s hard to keep up, it moves fast. This is what has motivated me to want to play competitively, as opposed to the Facebook community, because everyone on there tends to be pretty awesome and cordial. The banter back in forth keeps you engaged and wanting more. You start to learn who’s who and figuring out who the better players are and see some of their insight. Haven’t had a bad time on the Discord since I joined, thanks to LJ Pena (Impact X-Talk Polite) for keeping it all together for us.
Speaking of, LJ and Nick Freeman run Impact X. An incredible blog they have put together with card database, articles with war-gaming tactics and battle report videos. As a new player, I find myself on there all the time just studying cards to memorize them. Further than that, LJ just ran the Las Vegas Open(You’ll see it as LVO all over the place) last month to a smashing success. He’s a big part of the community, if not the biggest. Another Discord member, Orkimedes, also has a website: Never Tell Me The Odds. Another great blog where he breaks down the game into….math. I work with numbers all day at work, but let me tell ya: that’s not math compared to what Ork presents for the community. It’s great stuff. He’s also involved in a podcast called Notorious Scoundrels. Podcasts are an awesome gateway into something new, and the Legion podcasts don’t fail. If you have a commute, or can listen at work, you have several great options. I personally listen to three at the moment, but I know of at least one other that I have yet to listen to and need to get on it! In no particular order:
The one other I didn’t mention, only because I haven’t listened yet, is Stabcast! I’m going to get on that today! These are great to listen to whenever you can, it will help you familiarize yourself with the game more and more, which is important! Not to mention, they all have their own identity and bring different things to the table, so no matter what new episode you’re listening to that week it won’t feel redundant.
There’s some other great stuff out there like the Imperial Discipline blog, WarCorgi’s battle reports and if you’re looking to make some quick, cheap terrain Tabletop Oddity’s videos are unreal….and I’m sure there’s even more out there! I’m still new to this, and here I am writing about it. I’m also not trying to step onto anyone’s toes and content! I’m just thinking a game that is young needs more content and new players need new player content! In fact, it was listening to The Fifth Trooper this past week where I just said to myself: “Man I wish I had a podcast or a blog”…a 17 month old son at home with a fiance that works the night shift and no podcasting equipment have led me down the blogging path. New players + content that speaks to new players = great for a hopefully ever growing community! Hope you enjoy and hope this is something I can keep doing!
-GrandAdmiralThrawn
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