Review – Star Wars Roleplaying “Critical Injury Deck”

If you’ve read my review of the Star Wars Roleplaying “Citizens of the Galaxy” Adversary Deck then today’s review won’t come as a surprise. For use with any of Fantasy Flight Games’ three different Star Wars RPGs, the Critical Injury Deck* is a total of 31 cards in a clamshell and priced at $10. Unlike the Adversary Deck, though, this product could prove highly useful for all of the players during a session. You see, the character cards are only of use when the gamemaster is running an encounter using the adversary characters while this deck is intended to be used by the players.

Just what is the Critical Injury Deck*? The 29 game cards aren’t meant to be drawn during a game. Instead, die rolls for critical injury are rolled as per the rules found in Edge of the Empire*, Age of Rebellion*, and Force and Destiny* and only then do the cards come into play. The gamemaster can hand the appropriate critical injury card to a player, making it easier to track the effects and without the need to write down the specific injury.

Unfortunately, for the Critical Injury Deck* to be 100% useful during a game you’ll need one deck for each player. Without a deck per player, there’s always the chance that two or more player characters could suffer the same injury in a game session, leaving all but one player to resort to writing down the injury effects. That makes this a tad less useful than the Adversary Deck I reviewed a few days ago, but the need for redundancy is the only drawback I can find. And if a player buys his own deck then it simply becomes a tool he can access during a game session.

A cool product concept, but the Critical Injury Deck* is even more of a luxury than the Adversary Deck products. Still, as one of Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPG print-on-demand products I suspect there are more than a handful of fans out there who would rather buy this today than take a chance on finding the product several years from now.

You can learn more in this FFG website post from back when the product was first released.