Ok, this one has been making the rounds and a lot of people have been saying they like it.  It's been compared to the WEG Star Wars game and that got me intrigued.  I'm happy I picked up this little gem.  I'm reviewing both books as if they were a single product.

Mechanics

The core mechanics are simple and rather ingenious.  It's a 2d6 roll and your target is always 9.  Rolls are improved or made more difficult by adding more dice and one positive and one negative die cancels each other out.  If you are left with bonus dice, you pick the two highest value dice for you roll results and if left with a negative die, you take the two lowest values.  Additionally, if you succeed, any other 5s or 6s that you roll beyond your success can do additional damage or progress to an effort.  It's an elegant way to use d6s.

Stats and skills give a static bonus to some actions and circumstances, gear, and other things can grant bonuses as well.  The stronger the opponent or the harder a task is, the more negative dice there are. 

It's player facing, meaning that the players do all the rolling.  Instead of the GM rolling an attack, the players roll defense. 

Each PC starts with 7 Resolve points.  These are a combination of hit points and meta currency to buy re-rolls and conditional successes.  Honestly, this is the only part of the mechanics I really don't like.  Even then, it's not terrible.

The Black Star Companion has a few optional rules for tweaking how the game plays.

It is self described as a rules lite game but it doesn't suffer from the shortfall that so many other rules lite games do.  It has enough variety that it's unlikely that any two PCs are going to be the same, even across multiple games.  It has lots of room for PC growth and lots of options for players to develop a PC in different ways.

The Setting

It's Star Wars.  While the author is very careful to keep clear of any IP conflicts, it would take a very naive or obtuse reader to not recognize it as Star Wars.  I like Star Wars.  Lots of people like Star Wars.  This does a really good job of giving just enough detail that you can go right to your source books from other systems (or just your collection of Star Wars coffee table books) and drop it right in this game.

Warm up your light sabers and jump on your speeder bikes, it's time blow up the Death Star.

Layout and Presentation

I bought the dead tree version of these books straight from Lulu.  Both books together are about 100 page, quarter sized.  They aren't very big but they pack a lot into them.  The writing is clear and concise; they read like board game rules to me.

Black Star is the core book and has the bulk of the rules.  By itself, it's enough to play the game.  It also has sample characters, a variety of gear and vehicles, and some adventure outlines.

Black Star Companion has three pages of optional rules that I think adds a lot of value to the game.  The core book gears everything more towards player success and these optional rules tighten it up a bit.  It offers more PC classes (called archetypes), gear, vehicles, skills and attributes, and adds capital ships to the game as well.

There's very little in the way of art.  Aside from the covers, the only art in the books are pictures of characters on the sample character sheets.  Everything else is simple black text on white paper.

Given the low cost of the books and the added content, I would strongly recommend picking both up at the same time if you get Black Star.

Odds and Ends

While the mechanics are very different to the old WEG D6 system, it holds the same feel.  Looking at some of my old WEG books and playing with the dice a bit, conversion to Black Star is easy.  Not everything is one to one but it's similar enough that an experienced GM will have no trouble at all.

This game lacks a beastiary and doesn't have a lot of defined enemies.  It also doesn't have any random generating tables to work with.  As it is, you will either have to be a very creative GM or acquire material from another source.  Fortunately, Star Wars specifically and scifi in general has a lot of available material.  Stating bad guys is easy and scaling for more challenging opponents is easy and linear.

It lacks the granularity of more complex games but has enough to make it function.  There's variety in player choice and room for PC development. 

Final thoughts

If I took this game as is in a vacuum, it doesn't have it's own fleshed out setting nor does it give you tools for the GM to flesh out a setting.  However, it's a Star Wars game and it heavily relies on being a Star Wars game and it does it very well.

The game engine is designed for fast action and high adventure.  It's well suited for that.  It would take some work to adapt it to other styles of play.

It's a great value.  It's $8.95 per book on Lulu or $4.95 per PDF on Drivethru.  This is an easy purchase if the product appeals to you.

All in all, I give Black Star a solid 8/10 if you get both books.   

This is a great game. I ran it a few weeks ago as a one off, and everyone had a blast.

About the only thing some players had a problem with were that some of the gear talents seemed a bit unbalanced. But it was a minor quibble.

We also liked how you did not have to be a Force user to have a lightsaber.  (We decided immediately to drop the "off brand Star Wars" and just run it as Star Wars.)

There's a third party rule set expansion called Mecha Star that's a neat add on.  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/448088/Mecha-Star  If you wanted to play a fast and fun version of Mechwarrior, I think this is the best available.  It does a really good job of being a solid bolt on by capitalizing on the strength of the system while taking the genre in a very different direction.

Quote from: Heavy Josh on October 14, 2023, 08:15:49 PM
(We decided immediately to drop the "off brand Star Wars" and just run it as Star Wars.)

When I went through this game for my review, I go the impression that "just run it as Star Wars" was what was intended from the start. 

I'm glad your table enjoyed it. 

I think that there are a few minor flaws with the system (balancing some bonuses like you mentioned) and I think long term PC development might have some technical complications a GM would have to iron out after a while but it's over all an excellent game.  I generally don't like rules lite systems as they tend to lack granularity and have very bumpy PC development but this game threads the needle between being very easy to use and having enough meat to be a solid game.

Quote from: BadApple on October 19, 2023, 02:21:46 PM
There's a third party rule set expansion called Mecha Star that's a neat add on.  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/448088/Mecha-Star  If you wanted to play a fast and fun version of Mechwarrior, I think this is the best available.  It does a really good job of being a solid bolt on by capitalizing on the strength of the system while taking the genre in a very different direction.

Yeah, I picked that up when I ordered the core rules, due to my obsessive need to run Heavy Gear with a different rules set. It looks good, but I haven't tried getting the vehicle rules down just yet. I imagine it would work fine for fast anime style mecha combats where the PC vehicles and their pilots are much more resilient than NPC mecha.

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I think that there are a few minor flaws with the system (balancing some bonuses like you mentioned) and I think long term PC development might have some technical complications a GM would have to iron out after a while but it's over all an excellent game.  I generally don't like rules lite systems as they tend to lack granularity and have very bumpy PC development but this game threads the needle between being very easy to use and having enough meat to be a solid game.

I really like this sweet spot. A bit more playing would solve these problems. Definitely a great and cheap game.