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May 8, 20225 min read

STORE INSIGHTS - EPISODE 1

Welcome to the first installment of a new series of blog articles which focus on Legion in a store near you. We will tour the globe speaking with stores who run Legion events, asking them for their take on Legion and why they enjoy hosting Legion events.


The first to respond to our call are Kirton Games - a store based in Devon, in the UK.


Tell us a bit about yourself

We’ve been running Legion events at Kirton Games for a few years now (global pandemics permitting) and one thing I really like about them is how it can help to build the local community and bring people together, all of whom have a shared love of Star Wars and miniature gaming.


We feel very honoured to have a regular group of people from around the South-West of the UK who attend our events, and when the lockdowns happened it was something that we very much missed. We feared we wouldn’t be able to replicate it again, but luckily our community is strong and I was pleased to see them returning post lockdown.


Why do you love Legion?

From a personal perspective I enjoy Legion as I’ve found that it strikes the perfect balance of being a good miniature wargame whilst not being overly complicated or bloated with rules. List building is easy and the alternating actions really keeps you on your toes and adds an element of real-time strategy to the game as your opponent activates a unit and you have to plan who to activate in response.


I prefer the Skirmish format of the game as its quicker play time appeals to my personal play style, especially as I play a wide range of tabletop and miniature games and prefer the ones that only take a few hours to set up and play. I also like how Skirmish requires less of a buy in, which means you can focus on smaller forces. I currently have two forces which I play; Republic and Galactic Empire (which is Scarif themed). I have a big love for Operative Vader so he is one of the standard units I try to fit in my list. In the Republic you can’t go wrong with a good old squad of Phase 2 Clone Troopers.


I love how open the game is to all players of any level, whether you’re playing for fun or you’re playing to compete, everyone in the wider Legion community is so welcoming and you can see this in the various social media groups and forums online.



Tell us about the events you run

We try to run two types of events for Legion at Kirton Games, full 800 points tournaments (Deploy the Garrison) and 500 point Skirmish tournaments (Make 10 Men Feel Like 100). We tend to alternate between the two every other month, which was proving popular. However we’ve seen Atomic Mass Games have leaned more towards narrative events for their organised play support, and we are getting fewer kits come though that support competitive tournaments, which can mean that official prize support can be very limiting.


We recently run an Unnatural Resources event, to try out the narrative format and found that, compared to a more competitive event fewer people attended, so this is something that we will need to monitor and see if there is a demand for this type of play or whether the community prefer competitive tournaments.


With prize support being less than it was when Fantasy Flight use to oversee Legion we’ve had to rely on producing our own trophies for events (as well as providing store vouchers). Our last 800 point event, before Easter had 10 people attend and was played over 3 rounds. We had some 3D printed trophies to hand out (A Din Djarin Mandalorian trophy for the winner and a Jar Jar Binks trophy for the spoon prize) plus store vouchers for 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize. We also had some alt art cards from the skirmish pack that we gave out. During our Narrative event we also had a bounty board for some spot prizes that players could win if they were the first to achieve certain conditions during the day (for example first to take out a heavy unit). For those prizes I made some Star Wars Lego art pieces, which were well received.


The Separatists are definitely proving to be the most popular faction being played, with 8 out of the 10 forces during our last tournament bringing the Droids! We’ve definitely seen a shift towards them as historically Clone forces tended to be the more popular faction but now they are very rarely seen.


We currently run our events to accommodate 12 players, with each table having a different theme, so you may find yourself playing on Hoth, the forest moon of Endor, Yavin Base, The Dune Sea of Tatooine or the streets of Mos Eisley. We tend to 3D print our own terrain and we have plans to produce some more so we can expand our collection and open up more tables at events, allowing more people to attend (we are aiming at being able to run events for up to 20 people!). We feel our Legion terrain is one of our big selling points for our events, so we take a lot of time and care to make sure it looks and feels right for a game set in the Star Wars universe.


To the best of our ability, we try and have a spare player on hand to pick up should we have an odd number of players, though we can’t always guarantee this as it can be tricky to TO an event whilst playing in it and also trying to run the shop floor.


We aim to stream our events on our Twitch channel, usually focusing on the game being played on the top table as this gives people an opportunity to see some Legion content. We have plans to do more Legion content on our social media platforms, and we’d love to get members of the community involved; whether it’s reviewing new products, recording games or doing commentary during events.


Our next Star Wars Legion event is taking place on Saturday 18th June, which will be a full 800 point event. We’re looking forward to that one as the Shadow Collective will have hit the shelves and we’re keen to see how they play. It will also be interesting to see if Bounty Hunters start to show up in more lists as well.


Where can people find you?


Online Store - Kirton Games




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