You and your fellow players just got promoted to Starship Captains, and your ships are ready to leave for their first voyage. With a new crew you’ll set off to explore space, complete missions and defend yourselves against space pirates. Prepare for adventure!
1-4 players, ages 12+
Playing time: 40-100 minutes
Designer: Peter B. Hoffgaard
Artwork: Mergen Erdenebayar, Jiří Mikovec, Radim Pech, Jakub Politzer & František Sedláček
Publisher: Czech Games Edition
https://czechgames.com/
🧑🚀 Each player starts the game with their own spaceship in front of them. The ship has 4 rooms which can be activated by one of the specialized ensigns, depending on their color.
Over the course of the game, these basic rooms will allow you to move the ship, navigate between the different planets and space stations, or help you battle the pirate ships that are obstructing your path. The blue room makes it possible to build new rooms, adding new actions and abilities to the ship, while the gray room can be activated with any ensign and allows you to repair the damage to your ship.
🪐 Instead of activating a room, if your ship is on a planet with a mission card, you can complete the mission by deploying the required crew members. These missions provide rewards like steps on the faction boards, medals to upgrade the crew members, artifacts to gain extra actions or repair actions for the ship’s damage.
🛰 At the end of each round, crew members in the queue will slide into the ready room leaving three members waiting for the next round.
🌌 After four rounds the captains are counting their successes to see who is the best new captain around. The sum of their success consists of the points on the mission cards, rooms which give points and the positions on the faction tracks.
👉 Starship Captains is a medium-weight eurogame, with a well implemented theme which clearly took its inspiration from Star Trek, when looking at the many puns and references.
💭 The rules are pretty straightforward, and once you know which ensigns can do which action, it plays very smoothly. The game comes with beautiful dual layer player boards and plastic crew members, and while component quality is certainly good, I think the spaceships which are used on the map could have looked a bit better.
➕ The game definitely requires some planning, seeing what actions or missions are possible with your available ensigns and keeping in mind that the three crew members you used last will not be available the next round.
⭐️ The folks at Czech Games Edition have once again succeeded in creating a solid and entertaining game!
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