While we didn’t start working on Jump to Lightspeed until late 2022, the seeds for its design were already planted during the initial design of the game line. The first three sets, we knew, had to be dedicated to building the foundations of the player experience, introducing core mechanics and play patterns while staying fairly simple and accessible. But we had some big ideas we wanted to explore, ideas so big they’d require their own dedicated expansion.

This is where Year 2 would come in: take the foundations laid by Year 1 and develop them in focused, exciting ways. The mechanical themes of Jump to Lightspeed and Legends of the Force arose from mechanics originally created during the Spark of Rebellion design process, each a top-down (theme-first) mechanic intended to emulate a certain iconic element of Star Wars™. For Jump to Lightspeed, that was pilots. We immediately put it down as a mechanic we wanted to explore, and the dilemma presented by Wedge Antilles (Star of the Rebellion) meant that we wanted to get to it sooner rather than later.