Jabba’s Realm Expansion and Jabba the Hutt Villain Pack for Star Wars Imperial Assault by Fantasy Flight Games

I should preface this by saying that I don’t have the main Imperial Assault game yet, so I can’t actually play this or make any intelligent observations about the rules. I do intend to get it at some point when I find a good deal, but I don’t have the time to actually play right now, and in any case as a Jabba collector I am most interested in the models. The “Jabba’s Realm” expansion is a full expansion for the game, and includes quite a number of cards for the additional characters, skills and so forth that are introduced, plus cardboard floor maps that you play the game on. The “Jabba the Hutt Villain Pack” includes a Jabba figure and some cards/rules for using him. I’m going to be focusing mostly on the miniatures here, but here is a photo from the Fantasy Flight Games site that shows some of the cards, etc.

On to the miniatures… First we’ll take a look at Jabba.

It seems kind of odd that the “Jabba’s Realm” expansion leaves out Jabba himself, but in any case in the Villain Pack you get this plastic miniature that comes in 3 pieces (head/arms, body/tail and base). They fit together pretty tightly without the need for glue. I would say the sculpt is pretty good, but not fantastic.

The larger “Jabba’s Realm” expansion comes with 16 miniatures: 4 Gamorrean Guards, 4 Weequay, 4 stormtroopers and 3 character minis, plus the very large rancor. First I need to address some issues I had with these. 3 out of the 4 Gamorreans had broken force pikes (and the Weequays’ weapons were also pretty bent). Onar Koma’s blaster was broken. And perhaps most disturbing of all, one of the stormtroopers was missing the entire upper portion of his body! I understand that you can use this online form to request replacements for broken pieces, and I intend to do that, but this didn’t leave a good first impression. The miniatures are all just thrown into a plastic bag, and when you have such thin pieces on the weapons I think breakage is almost inevitable.

The rancor was undamaged, thankfully, and is quite large and impressive. The teeth seem a bit too long somehow, but that’s quibbling. He comes in several parts, plus the base, all of which friction-fit together. He seems to be about the right size relative to the humanoid figures, but I think maybe Jabba is a bit small.

I had been looking forward to getting these, but the breakage (and the flimsy thin plastic on some of the figures that caused it) kind of took a bit of the shine off of it for me. I’d say these are pretty good figures though, and I do look forward to being able to actually play the game at some point.