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Starship Captains is a worker placement(ish) and resource management(ish) board game that will have you trying to earn points over the game’s four rounds. This light euro game plays from 1-4 players and takes about an hour or so to play. Gameplay Overview:
The tech board and large number of tech cards help give Starship Captains high replay value. Combining this with the mission and event cards and you’ve got a game that you can keep playing without the fear of it growing stale. Overwhelming Choice This allows everyone to gain an extra cadet, redistribute any bonus planet tokens and refresh their crew members.
To complete a mission, you have to be the first player on that planet. You’ll then need to spend a crew member for each line of the mission. If the crew member’s color also matches the color line, you gain the bonus from said line. Afterward, the mission goes into your score pile. You’ll be flying your ship around the map to complete missions. With limited actions and only 4 rounds, finding little boosts and combinations which grant you extra rewards present themselves so often. Something as simple as fighting a pirate, combining it with a tech card so you don’t take any damage and gaining another artefact. Then using 2 matching coloured artefacts on the next turn to move to a mission card then use an android you acquired to gain extra rewards is so satisfying. Final Score: 3.5 Stars – A well-produced game with a fun theme, but it’s hard to pin down what it excels at.
Yellow: Kill a pirate on a route adjacent to your planet. You take a damage but also gain a reward. After three multiplayer plays and four solo plays (I was able to do two of those solo plays over a recent lunch hour), I’ve seen all that Starship Captains has to show me until expansion content hits in a year or two. (CGE has not confirmed this, but let’s just say I have a sneaking suspicion.)Those familiar with Czech Games Edition’s previous hit euro game; Lost Ruins of Arnak, will understand this point easier. These specialists are your workers, and you will place them in different departments of your ship and your tech board to take actions. (I won’t call this a worker placement game though, because these spaces are available to all players on their various ships, then the spaces clear at the end of each turn.) Medals allow players to train any of their cadets or ensigns to another color; pay three medals and you can upgrade an ensign to a commander, which allows for the commander to do double actions or command a crew member of the same color to come out of the waiting area onto the ready room of your ship. Your workers are cadets (gray figurines which represent unskilled labor, only capable of taking repair actions when first recruited) and ensigns. Ensigns are specialized by color: red ensigns fly the ship, yellow ensigns coordinate weapons systems, and blue ensigns are your technical experts. The small coloured ships consist of 3 small cardboard pieces that need to be folded over and clipped together. Folding these small cardboard bits over and sliding them together can be risky as they could be damaged rather easily.
One of the weird things about Starship Captains is its playtime. The game plays over 4 rounds, and at first, that felt too short. I felt like I wasn’t getting enough time with my ship. But as I thought about it more, I realized that the playtime is pretty on point. The actions you’ll be doing are pretty much the same each round, so while a 5th round would have given you more time to earn points, you are still doing same thing in round 4 that you were doing in round 1. There isn’t really any kind of engine building here. So I think the game would have gotten repetitive if there were more rounds. At 45-60 minutes, the play time felt about right. Starship Captains is an engaging and exciting euro game with a fun, accessible theme. It combines some of the best elements of the genre with an innovative crew management system.Ensigns can be promoted to commanders by spending 3 medals. These upgraded units can be used to activate a room twice or bring across a matching coloured ensign from the queue into the ready room, allowing for more actions on future turns. You know who else is a Star Trek junkie? Peter B. Hoffgaard, the designer of the new Czech Games Edition title Starship Captains. From the cover art, to the very Enterprise-looking player boards, to easter eggs like a mission called “Roddenberries”, everything about Starship Captains screams “play this if you love Star Trek.” As a junkie, I was thrilled to give this one a spin. Another example: five commander rings are available to each player. These rings signify when you’ve achieved a promotion. The highest total number of commanders I’ve seen promoted by a single player is three. In that game, one player had a tech which allowed them to train a certain color of commander with only two medals, instead of the normal three. Do you have what it takes to deftly command your crew and become the best captain in the cosmos? We'll see! But that would be a miracle. Why are there so many rings slotted on each player board for a miracle scenario like this?
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