After a year of anticipation and excitement, the 2026 Galactic Champion has been crowned, friends from across the galaxy were seen again, new friends were made and thousands of porg tokens found a new loving home.

There were a lot of questions after last year.  Would FFG fix the line problems? Would they fix the prize wall issues?  Would we need a sherpa to get to the VIP lounge?

The good news is, much of this was fixed and was a significant improvement.  That’s what we want to see.  There will always be issues, but FFG has generally shown a willingness to accept constructive criticism and make changes where necessary for a better player experience. 

Good…

Thousands of players once again made the trek to the surface of the sun…I mean, Las Vegas in late July.  The venue is great and Vegas is easy to travel to.  We know that is changing for next year, but the Venetian worked well the first 2 years.

Logistics

The biggest improvements were on the logistics and space utilization side of things.  

Line management was so incredibly better than the prior year, it’s amazing that it was even the same type of event.  There were clearly marked line areas and none of them ever seemed to get overly large.  This included every aspect of queuing up for things, whether side events, prize wall, or even just getting into the event space each morning.

The overall space utilization was significantly better as well.  By having the side event pod space separated into the other hall from the scheduled event space made things entirely less cramped.  It had a weird side impact of making the event feel less attended just because the people were more spread out, even though that was not the case.  

What helps with prize wall lines?  Having two prize walls of course.  One prize wall in each hall and there was basically zero line until the very later half of Sunday.  Also, having a separate line for showcases so people could grab those quickly helped a lot.  These were all great changes that made the experience much better.

Side events

These were only about a billion times more organized than the prior year.  FFG clearly learned some things.  There were clearly marked separate queues for each of the pod types.  The lines were not overly long at any point during the event, even on Sunday when people were grinding out the last prize wall tickets they needed.  The lines were longer on Sunday, the waits never got to be more than 10 minutes to fill a draft queue.  

The other awesome part of the side events is that games were played.  For any not at the 2025 event, there was no check on how a pod was being played and in a room full of gamers, people gamed the system to just sit and “play” pods as quickly as possible to just farm the prize wall tickets.  It created a situation where actually playing the game we all like was secondary and not actually being done.

Having judges record the start times of a draft pod, and then the times after each round completed with the prizing coming by round, made playing the game of Star Wars Unlimited matter.  Frankly the playing part is the entire point of a game generally, so it was nice to see it happening.  Don’t get us wrong, the playing sometimes happened very quickly, but games were indeed still played.

Now granted, some people will potentially see the inability to game the pod system as a bad thing, but because the changes worked to incentivise actually playing the game we’re calling this a check mark on the good side of the ledger.

Panels

Having the panels much much closer to the rest of the event space was great.  The prior year when the panels were on another floor about half a mile away it seemed to be a pain to head over that way to attend one.

Other Things

The Porg Depot team was fortunate enough to score some of the Prestige VIP passes for the event.  One of the highlights for us was a designer draft with Ryan Serrano.  He is a great person, very insightful and fun to hang with during the draft portion and the playing.  There were not many questions that he dodged and generally gave us good answers.

The only real question that Ryan did avoid answering was when asked why we could not yet pull an R2-D2 leader from a pack.  His reply was that “there may be exactly one in Ashes packs so keep opening them and maybe you will hit it.”  Obviously a joke on his part and did not expect him to answer with any amount of fact.  Glad he rolled with the intended humor of the question.  It was also prior to the announcement of System Overload for 2027.

Ryan did mention that he had worked on set 11 (which is System Overload) and that it was locked and that he was currently working on set 13.

Bad…

While the second iteration of the Galactic Championship was significantly better in many ways from last year, everything was not all sunshine and sand, as they say on Tatooine.  These items are not meant as a massive dig on FFG and the event crew, but rather as potential constructive feedback.

Prestige VIP

The initial prestige vip registration badge pickup line was interesting.  It was super nice to have a separate line for the group paying way more for their ticket.  However, when the normal line was moving much faster because there was only one person checking in the PVIP people it seemed a little odd.  The event team did pivot relatively quickly and shift additional check in staff over to the PVIP line so that eventually helped.  Until then, people had made it through the entire standard line while we were halfway through the PVIP line.  

One very nice advantage of the VIP badge in 2025 was the ability to get into the hall early.  This was nice to queue up for the merch store, pin passport, prize wall and other things.  The 2026 iteration did not seem nearly as beneficial to get into the space early.  All people competing in the LCQ got in at basically the same time on Friday, and the people in the Open got in at basically the same time on Saturday.  There were also simply less reasons to want or need to be in the space early.

Another weird one was that the PVIP breakfast was all lunch food.  It seemed very strange to have turkey sandwiches for breakfast.  Who requested Beef Bourguignon for breakfast?!

Table Numbering System

The ordering for the LCQ table numbers was bonkers.  They would be ticking up normally row to row and then suddenly jump by a few hundred.  Where were those missing tables?  Well often way on the other side of the planned event area.  The jumps did not seem to have any rhyme or reason to them and could have been laid out by 3-4 people not working on it together as a team.  It did not impact much, just added a little unnecessary frustration before rounds.

Pin passport

The 2025 Pin Passport was pretty fun.  Finding all the spots that had the pins and collecting the full set felt like a miniature side quest to the event.  There is nothing wrong with having side quests as part of the event as those things add to the enjoyment for many people.  However, locking many of the pins behind a paywall was a distinct choice.  Being required to spend $10 at the merch store when the lowest cost item was $20, and that item sold out early, felt predatory.  It also makes it something that small children cannot just do and need parents to assist.

There are absolutely ways to make it more like a quest without the extra cost.  Better ideas could have included things like “Take a picture in the Falcon”, or “Play in a side event”.

Prize Wall

While having two prize walls was great, and having non-foil versions of cards was a nice addition, the items on the prize wall seemed overall less desirable than the prior year.  This comment is coming from the point of view of players that do not jump into Twin Suns really at all, so the showcase options, while awesome art, don’t do much for a Premier focused player.  

The single cards that were available were all nice, and we picked up a few.  However, it would have been better for the single cards to have original artwork instead of the same standard set art with just a new border, similar to what they did last year.  The silver and black pack art for example is fun in part because it is new.  Added bonus for the future if there was a way to obtain non-foil versions of at least the silver pack cards.

Silver Packs

Last year, the silver packs had Darth Vader, which gave a great chase to those packs and made them desirable.  What were we chasing this year?  Based on the resale of those packs on the aftermarket, not much.  In our porgpinion, the prizewall should always have a Luke and Vader.  This is Star Wars afterall.

Good and Bad…

Panels

There were less panels than the prior year.  In 2025 the topics seemed a bit wider with many more of them run by content creators.  This could have been a casualty of moving the panel space into the main halls of the event space instead of in other rooms, so potentially just an unfortunate impact of improving the logistics.  FFG likely debated this one a bit and it could have been a decent trade off.  It could also be something that changes easily for future years just depending on different venues.  Having the fun-centric events was a great break last year.  Tired of grinding SWU?  Go play a round of trivia for an hour.  It was fun and a great way for players to interact in a different way.  We’d personally like to see more of that back next year.

On the topic of panels, attending a panel got you a token pack.  This was fun and also encouraged people to attend.  They were also at the prize wall this time around, but they were eventually pulled because no one wanted to pay for something that was free and easier to get last year due to there being more panels available.

Update 2pm EST…
We’ve been told that the token packs were in fact sold out by a staff member that worked the event.

Prize Wall Tickets

One side-effect of players not being able to grind tickets as fast was players often struggled to get enough tickets to go home with everything.  On top of tickets being harder to get, having 8 showcases that you could only get there meant many players needed more tickets but couldn’t get them.  This created a secondary market on tickets making them sell for twice what they were supposed to be worth.  People were paying $10 per 100 tickets so a silver pack was essentially costing $80 worth of tickets, but those packs were easily bought for $35 on the after market.  It threw the economy out of whack a bit.  We appreciate people playing for their prize wall tickets, but the economy probably needs a slight tweaking now that they have the data.

In some respects, this worked out great.  Being able to sell some of our tickets and to then buy a 2nd and 3rd Single Reactor Ignition, Max Rebo Band and Huyang promos.  We got what we wanted, and the other player got the showcases they wanted. Pretty certain that wasn’t FFGs intention for how things should work.

Time & Location

It was announced that the championship for 2027 will be moving to Anneheim, CA in Disneyland and also moved to earlier in the year, around May 21st.  While summer in Vegas isn’t ideal, the end of May can be tough for people.  Schools are letting out and students are graduating, family vacations are planned around the school year.  As far as location, Disneyland is a fun place, but we’re also getting as far as possible from everyone attending.  It’s closer to the 4 New Zealanders we met, but anyone not on the west coast of the US now has slightly farther to travel.  If they want it to be in Disney then Orlando feels like it makes more sense as it’s in the middle between the west coast and Europe. Of course, if you’re flying to Vegas you’ll also fly to Anneheim, but it feels like it could be more centrally located.

On the plus side, you can indeed bring your pet porg to Disney.  They have a play area and porg-sitters to keep an eye on them.

Conclusion

The 2026 Galactic Championship was once again an incredible weekend.  It’s great to play SWU for 3 days, and seeing people from all over the world that we only see at GC every year is incredibly fun.  It’s like a high school reunion we actually want to attend.  

Next year is sure to be even better and hopefully FFG can keep the momentum on what worked and make a few improvements to make it a premier event in the gaming community.