Playing – Starship Captains

Another game found at a liquidation store that was well worth the price!

The Pitch

You and up to three other friends are newly promoted captains of mostly undamaged ships, out to patrol the sector, complete missions, and deal with pirates with your crew of raw cadets and newly promoted ensigns. You have four rounds of play before your final evaluations (a.k.a. scores) to determine who the best best starship captain of the sector is!

The Mechanics

On your turn, you assign crew to a job for an action. Most jobs can only be completed by an ensign (represented by three brightly colored figs, each with a different specialty) or an android (represented by a shorter, gold fig) but some like repair can be done by anyone, including a lowly cadet (gray figure). Actions can include moving from planet to planet, shooting space pirates, upgrading ship technology, repairing damage, and completing a mission. Missions might take up to three crew to complete, with bonus rewards if completed by crew of the correct specialty, but most missions could be completed even if you only had cadets. Once you complete your action, the crew are placed back into the ready room lineup, best described as a rotary dial set up. Then the turn passes on to the next player / captain. Once you have no more crew left to assign, you must pass. When everyone has passed, the round ends and upkeep is done to reset the board and gain additional cadets. Repeat three more times and that’s the game!

There’s a few more things you can do beyond actions.

• You can use acquired medallion tokens to promote a cadet into an ensign or three medallions to promote an ensign to a commander who effectively gets to take two actions or take an action and order another ensign back into action.
• You can gain renown with the three factions of pirates, androids, and the “not the Federation”. At certain points of the faction track, you gain victory points and additional rewards.
• Some technology upgrade cards provide more options, and if placed in the right spot of your ship’s tech track, you can gain extra benefits.

There are plenty of extra things you can do by spending resources like captured pirate ships and crates, depending on the mission, technology, or the resource used. The more damaged your ship is, the fewer resources and technology upgrades you can have.

What I liked …

I liked this game a lot. I happily named by officers as they got promoted and made starship noises as I took actions. The art nicely evokes the Starship Captain Series and the pieces are good and chunky. I was even pretty happy with the effective use of the cardstock in all the bits to be punched out and clipped together. The ships did need some assembly and there is double sided tape included but I suspect I’ll be using a more robust adhesive eventually. It’s a neat mechanic at the beginning of your turn of sliding your crew through the rotation until only three are left at the ready. The weird bit on the right side is crew assigned to a mission, slightly bigger to allow androids for the mission but their base is too large to slide down the track as they are but one use only.

The mission replacement procedure is not bad either. As one mission is completed, a numbered tile is placed on that planet and the next mission placed where the numbered tile once was. Once all numbered tiles have been moved, they get flipped to reset and randomly drawn pirate ships are once more replenished on the space ways.

Overall, it feels like there is a lot going on, between multiple resources and workers and different ways to get points and keeping an eye towards what new technologies are available, but honestly once you get playing it isn’t bad at all. Interaction with other players is minimal, found primarily when another ship has swooped in to take a mission or resource you were planning on grabbing, but there are plenty of missions to seek out.

With this I take issue …

Honestly, the worst thing I can say is I kind of wanted a few more rounds of play but four is a good amount for time and its enough time to work towards a few goals. I might try suggesting we play to six rounds in the future (or even a ‘five round mission …”) but I do have a fondness for games that have a finite endpoint. The other low point was that the bags they included (yay!) were of a poor quality plastic (boo!) but that’s easy enough to upgrade at a dollar store.

---

TLDR – Fun game, short, sadly only four players but it can be also played solo.