Wrestling with Assembling the Star Wars Imperial AT-ST

I’m a huge fan of Star Wars and board game and so when I first heard about Star Wars Imperial Assault, I was hooked on the idea. A vast campaign featuring an array of beloved heroes and villains that punctuate your own narrative in the Star Wars universe. I held out for a week before I purchased the base game which comes with a huge number of mini-figures, none of which is more exciting than the massive AT-ST, which dwarfs the other miniatures by comparison. In fact the AT-ST is so bewilderingly big (relatively speaking) it requires assembly – the source of this blog post’s problem. While the majority of the AT-ST assembly is straightforward its front facing cannon was a huge pain to attach. After purchasing the base game, no matter how much or how hard I tried I couldn’t get the blasted cannon to fit into its slot. After trying to fit the thing in at the start of a couple of campaign sessions and following a couple of punt attempts by my friends, I resigned myself to having a less threatening cannonless AT-ST and threw the cannon attachment in the box and forgot about it.

This Christmas, my buddy Joel bought me the General Weiss Villain pack as an addition to our game which comes with another AT-ST miniature which had the same issue. We hazarded a guess that there was either a problem with the design of the miniature or a problem with us. We Googled for an unboxing video and our hunch there was an issue was confirmed by Saipher.

Our solution to attaching the cannon differs from his. We didn’t have a sharp enough knife on hand and his solution felt a little too heavy-handed. By our reckoning, the cause of the issue is the two projections on either side of the inside of the cannon slot that are designed to fit into the dimples on either side of the cannon are too large making it impossible to push the cannon into the cannon slot. If you use a nail file to gently file down the two bumps on the inside of the slot your cannon should be able to fit into the slot and fix itself in place. You’ll know when your cannon is secured as it makes a rather sharp snap sound.

Hopefully this helps you assemble either your AT-ST base figure or your General Weiss figure.