Star Wars: Legion is a two-player miniatures game of ground battles from the Star Wars galaxy — squads of troopers, heroes and vehicles clashing over objectives. Rather than plain numbered dice, it uses custom symbol dice in different colours, which gives its combat a distinctive feel. Rules and unit cards change over time, so read the following as the durable core rather than exact current wording.
What dice Legion uses
Legion has two families of custom dice, distinguished by colour:
- Attack dice come in red, black and white, in roughly descending order of reliability. Their faces show hit, critical, surge and blank results. Red dice hit most often; white least.
- Defence dice come in white and red (red being the sturdier). Their faces show block (a shield), surge and blank, used to cancel incoming hits.
The surge face is the clever part: each unit’s card tells you whether its surges convert into hits (on attack) or blocks (on defence), or do nothing. So the same die can be better or worse depending on who is rolling it — a unit with an attack surge chart squeezes far more out of its dice.
The attack sequence
An attack resolves through a clear chain of custom-dice steps:
| Step | What you roll |
|---|---|
| 1. Roll attack dice | Gather the coloured attack dice shown on the unit’s weapons and roll them, reading off hits, crits, surges and blanks. |
| 2. Convert surges | Apply the attacker’s surge chart — surges may become hits (or nothing). Crits are special: they typically ignore some defensive help such as cover. |
| 3. Apply cover & defence | Cover can cancel a number of hits before defence rolls (crits usually bypass it). The defender then rolls defence dice, converting their own surges, to block remaining hits. |
| 4. Assign wounds | Each unblocked hit or crit wounds the target, removing miniatures as the unit’s wounds are used up, and adding suppression. |
That interplay — hits softened by cover, crits punching through it, surges swinging both attack and defence — is what gives Legion’s dice their tactical depth.
Suppression, cover and command cards
Suppression is a signature system: as a unit takes fire it gathers suppression tokens, which can reduce the actions it may take and, if it piles up, force the unit to panic and flee. Shooting therefore matters even when it doesn’t kill — it pins the enemy down. Cover reduces incoming hits and is set up by positioning, so terrain is a defensive resource you manage constantly. Each round begins with both players secretly choosing a command card, which sets who acts first (the bid for initiative) and how many units they can order directly — a small hidden-information game layered over the dice.
How a round plays out
After command cards are revealed, players alternate activating units one at a time, each unit typically moving and attacking or taking other actions. Because activation alternates, order and tempo matter as much as raw firepower. Games run several rounds and are decided by the objective, deployment and condition cards drawn at setup — holding points, completing tasks — rather than by simple annihilation.
Winning and effective strategy
- Play the objective. Legion is scored on the mission. Suppress and screen your way onto the points rather than hunting kills across the board.
- Weaponise suppression. Even non-lethal fire piles on suppression and can panic a unit out of the fight. Sometimes the goal is to shut a unit down, not destroy it.
- Fight from cover. Cover cancels hits before defence rolls. Ending a move in heavy cover can halve the damage you take.
- Know your surge charts. A unit with attack surge is far deadlier than its raw dice suggest; one without defence surge is more fragile than it looks. Point your best dice where the charts favour you.
- Win the command-card game. Bidding for initiative and choosing which cards to hold shapes every round. Learn the standard cards and plan a few turns ahead.
Beginner tips and common mistakes
- Crits beat cover; hits don’t. Remember that cover reduces hits before defence rolls, and criticals usually slip past it.
- Don’t ignore suppression on your own units. Rally where you can — a suppressed unit is a unit doing less, and a panicked one is out of your control.
- Colour equals reliability. Red dice outperform black, which outperform white. Learn the rough odds of each so you can judge an attack before rolling.
- Position before you shoot. Cover, range and line of sight are all set by movement. A good position is worth more than an extra die.
- Cards and units get updated. Points and rules change; always confirm current unit cards and the latest rules reference before a tournament.
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