Star Wars Monopoly's Chewbacca Is So Broken He Ruins Matches

Monopoly: Star Wars Heroes vs. Villains launched today on consoles and PC, and by most accounts, developer Behaviour Interactive has done something difficult: it made Monopoly less boring. Character abilities, team-based play, and a win condition that doesn't require you to slowly drain the will to live from your opponents all sound like smart changes. There's just one problem. Chewbacca exists, and he breaks the entire game.

Here's how it works. Chewbacca can zip forward to the nearest enemy player on the board. Forward is the key word. If Chewie is ahead of both opposing players, his ability doesn't send him backward to meet them. Instead, he rockets all the way around the board to reach them, passing Go in the process. In Star Wars Monopoly, passing Go triggers a Go Event that awards a massive pile of Influence Points, the currency you actually need to win. So Chewbacca can complete a full lap, trigger a Go Event, and then use his ability to fly around the board again, potentially triggering another one. In a single turn. Matches end after a combined eight loops, so a Chewbacca player can chew through that counter at a pace nobody else can match.

The Wookiee Meta

Pair him with a teammate whose ability grants an extra die during fights, and Chewie becomes a wrecking ball on top of being a speedster. He barrels into shared locations, wins control through sheer dice advantage, and racks up even more Influence Points. If he rolls doubles on top of all that, he gets another turn entirely. I've seen broken characters in competitive games before, but there's something uniquely funny about it happening in Monopoly.

The rest of the package sounds solid. The $29.99 price point is reasonable, couch co-op supports up to six players, and the team-based 2v2 or 3v3 format gives Monopoly something it has never had: a reason to actually communicate with the person sitting next to you. Playing solo against AI is, predictably, miserable, but that's true of every version of Monopoly ever made. Nobody should be playing Monopoly alone. If you are the game's problems are secondary to your own.

What I find interesting is that Behaviour and Ubisoft clearly put thought into making Monopoly feel like a real strategy game, with counter-picking and team composition mattering across matches. That design ambition makes the Chewbacca oversight more glaring, not less. A character whose core mechanic can bypass the board's entire pacing structure needed to be caught in testing. Whether a balance patch is coming or players just house-rule a Chewie ban, the fix should be straightforward: cap his ability so it can't pass Go, or limit it to a set number of spaces. Until then, if someone in your lobby picks the Wookiee, you're not playing a strategy game anymore. You're watching someone speedrun it.