Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes Vs. Villains review – board game conversion

Star Wars may be having trouble at the cinema nowadays but the video games keep coming, including this peculiar board game crossover.

Designed in 1903 and originally called The Landlord’s Game, the original point of the board game Monopoly was to demonstrate how appalling rentier economies are, and to underscore the importance of proper taxation. If that sounds a bit dry, that’s because it is; the game’s slow grind into insolvency, of all but one player, intended to mete out harsh real-world lessons to its players.

Against that brutal and utilitarian backdrop, it’s ironic that Monopoly has become the massive worldwide, centuries-spanning blockbuster that it is. Custom versions have been released in countless countries, each getting their own locally recognisable utilities, railway stations, and streets to buy out, before placing rent-seeking houses and hotels as cash generative caltrops for hapless opponents.

To add to its perennial appeal, it’s received innumerable variations, some of which – like Gay Monopoly, and Ghettopoly, where you build crack houses – are far from official releases. But Monopoly’s owner, Hasbro, has released plenty of completely legitimate remixes of its own, based on every IP imaginable, including South Park, Pokémon, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Call of Duty.

Inevitably, Monopoly has also had its fair share of video game spin-offs, which date back to just before the Sega Master System in the 1980s. In fact, there’s already been one Star Was Monopoly video game, back in the late 90s, although that was PC-only and a very low effort affair.

For the last decade Ubisoft has held the licence, and they’ve been no slouches in milking it for all it’s worth, the most recent welter of releases for PC and consoles including 2024’s New Monopoly, a fastidiously accurate recreation of the standard rules and some variants, played on a virtual board in a simulated suburban back garden.

That brings us neatly up to date with the addition of this month’s Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes Vs. Villains. Its ambitions go significantly further than New Monopoly’s intention of simply making the game playable with a controller. Instead, it seeks to build an entirely new set of gameplay ideas around the familiar board we know and love, adding in lashings of Star Wars lore, characters, and locations.

However, it doesn’t feature John Williams’ masterpiece score, which was clearly a licence cost too far. What it does have is narration from the actual C-3PO, Anthony Daniels, along with a number of other original voice actors, bringing its characters from both sides of the Force to life. That’s handy, because unlike conventional Monopoly, where everyone’s on their own, here you can only play in teams, either 2 vs. 2 or 3 vs. 3, with any deficit in human players filled in by AI-controlled teammates.

Unlike the board game, you win or lose based on the number of influence points your team has managed to acquire after passing Go a predefined number of times. The maximum, eight, takes just over an hour to acquire, and while shorter games are less demanding, they can feel a bit too dependent on chance rather than tactics, with too few opportunities for enemies to land on properties you acquire before it’s all over.

Each character’s turn involves rolling two tastefully animated dice, moving the requisite number of spaces, and then deciding whether or not to buy the property you land on if it’s neutral. If not, provided there are no buildings on it, you can choose to acquire it anyway by paying twice the face value, but once there’s an outpost or a base present (Star Wars equivalents of houses and hotels) you just have to pay the rent, provided you have enough credits available.

Given the relative brevity of rounds, we never found running out of money to be an issue, with plenty of opportunities to earn it, from landing on properties you already own, to finishing second in a Hutt beauty pageant, courtesy of the galaxy far, far away take on Chance cards. There are also Canto Bight squares where you can place bets on a die roll and use some characters’ skills for further grift.

For example, Rey’s special ability lets her pick a fight with a random Dark Side player, stealing 300 credits from them if she wins, which while mildly useful doesn’t seem all that in keeping with the Jedi code. Darth Vader can call in a stormtrooper to commandeer a nearby property, but all skills have a multi-turn cooldown to prevent spamming. It rarely seems particularly useful holding onto them to use tactically though, with most spent as soon as you can trigger them.

That’s convenient, because unless you’ve got a bunch of friends who own the game, it can be difficult sweeping together enough people for the minimum number of four players. That means you’ll be spending a lot of time watching AI-controlled characters’ turns play out, each using the exact dice rolling, property buying, ability activating interface that human players use, with practically none of the process being skip-able.

Playing solo means you’re a spectator for a minimum of 75% of play time, your AI partner and enemies making their own choices about when to purchase properties (always) and when to use special powers (as soon as their cooldown allows). With local human players it’s a lot more fun, the usual sofa banter and taunting adding immeasurably to the atmosphere and letting everyone call out the huge number of little Star Wars details that have been woven into the game.

Mayfair and Park Lane are now the Jedi Temple and Senate Building on Coruscant, while Old Kent Road and Whitechapel Road are a Hermit’s Hut and the Cave of Evil on Dagobah. In this edition, collecting a complete colour set means you’ve attained planetary dominance, at which point you can start upgrading each property with an outpost, then a base, a neat holographic image of the planet hovering above it on the board to register its ownership by one team.

There are various die rolling challenges, each of which has been given an on-brand Star Wars makeover, helping disguise their almost complete reliance on chance by distracting you with familiar settings and miniature cut scenes. It’s fair to say, it never it gets boring seeing different characters being sent to jail, where they’re encased in carbonite, something that now happens to Yoda, Chewie, Darth Maul, and indeed the entire cast, many of whom are drawn from the franchise’s TV series.

If you’re a Monopoly purist looking for a digital board game, New Monopoly is where your gaze should land. Star Wars Heroes Vs. Villains is more of a Monopoly themed interactive party game, both faster and less tedious to play, while also far less strategically involved. It scratches a very different itch and is unsurprisingly a lot less concerned with critiquing late stage capitalism.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Behaviour Interactive
Release Date: 30th June 2026
Age Rating: 7

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