Joined in 2023 
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Turns go by in this manner until everyone passes. At the end of the round, you slide all but 3 figures forward in your queue to the ready room. At the start of rounds 2-4, players will earn a new crew member or a free medal (medals are used to upgrade cadets to crewmen, and crewmen to commanders). Do you have what it takes to deftly command your crew and become the best captain in the cosmos? We'll see! Manage a diverse crew of cadets, ensigns, androids, and officers—each with different special roles and capabilities. Your crew consists of ensigns and cadets. Ensigns are coloured in either red, blue or yellow and are used to activate matching rooms of their colour.
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:By obtaining these cards you can create your own action board. The more cards you have the more symbols can pop up. Instead of repairing once on your ship when you activate a room, you might find a card that lets you repair twice, or repair and move in one action. The technology board is my favorite part of Starship Captains, because it changes how each game will play out. It is fun to try and grab the Omega techs to boost endgame scoring. It’s one of my favorite moments from my favorite Star Trek film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; Kirk (William Shatner) is baring his teeth and yelling from the bridge of the Enterprise at his longtime nemesis, Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban, shamefully not nominated for an Oscar for his work here). Using your crew figures, players can perform actions on rooms such as move, fight, gain tech or repair. Rooms have a required colour so the right crew member is required. Tech cards can even let players have access to new rooms and grant extra abilities. And while our major criticism of Starship Captains (aside from the fact I can’t go live with the androids) is that it’s too short, dragging it out might not serve the overall experience. The puzzle of how best to use your limited crew, and how to do so in a way that will set you up for success on subsequent rounds, only gets more complex as your crew grows, your tech improves, and you get a couple of crew promotions under your belt. As cool as it would be to have a fifth or even a sixth turn to take advantage of your fully-repaired, teched-out ship and highly experienced crew, things might slow down too much, damaging one of the aspects of Starship Captains that makes it a lot of fun to engage.
The production is mostly a winner. The best tactile part of the game comes when you need to slide your crew members around a small, indented wheel at the top of your player board. Even better: only crew members fit in that wheel. Try to slide an android meeple around this wheel, and it doesn’t fit, a reminder that androids—a wild worker type—have to be discarded when completing missions. Love it! Starship Captains was created by Peter B Hoffgaard, with this being the designer’s debut title. Liv and Wheels chat about the board games they're most excited for in 2022.
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Starship Captains has clearly had a lot of love put into its production. It’s disappointing, then, that the overall experience doesn’t quite hang together. At the end of the fourth round, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins. Once you’ve used a crew member, they go to the end of your queue. Game Experience: Welcome aboard and congrats on the promotion! Your “new” starship is ready to embark on its first big voyage. Just scrape off some of the rust and she’ll do fine. And that crew? Might look a little green around the edges, but they’re your crew now. Make us proud. Think you can handle being the captain of your very own starship? Time to find out! In this new game from publisher CGE, players will take command of their own garden trowel-shaped starship that will have you thinking about Trekking across space.
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. And that’s one of the interesting things about Starship Captains. There is always something to do. From moving around the board, to completing missions, to upgrading your ship, I always wanted more crew to use. I did like the upgrade system that lets you spend medals to convert your cadets into crew members. This gave you some flexibility to get the right color at the right time. And once you upgrade them to commanders, they gain you double the bonus when taking actions. Only crewmen in your ready room can be used. PUBLISHERS: please, please, please, you’ve got to include player aids with your games if the iconography is even a minor challenge! Why are we still talking about this on the eve of 2023????? To begin play, four of the six slots on this tech board are unavailable because they are damaged (your promotion to Captain only provided you with a “newly refurbished” ship, per the manual), so you’ll have to spend some of your actions removing damage from both this board and the ship’s cargo area. The cargo area is used to hold pirate tokens you’ve defeated on earlier turns (maybe they are prisoners being returned to the Cooperative’s headquarters?) as well as artifact tokens, which can be used to activate rooms without a crew member.Another unique mechanic with these cards are the matching bonus symbols. At the sides of the tech cards are small icons. When placing a card down on the board, if an icon matches one next to it you can claim an instant reward. 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. 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. It’s a good design choice where if a player moves to a planet with a mission, they get to reserve it until they leave. This is great as missions can require specific colours of ensigns to gain huge bonuses. It’s even a great strategy to pass while you have a good mission card reserved so you gain your full crew to use.
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