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Finishing missions will enable players to then upgrade their respective ships with powerful alien technology, thereby allowing them to take on more ambitious tasks. Players will also be able to earn medals they can use to promote and train their crew – thus making them even better at their jobs. As their reputation for success spreads throughout the galaxy, players will gain connections with three separate factions and acquire even more benefits. Whichever player becomes the most celebrated starship captain wins the game.
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. 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. In addition to their ships each player begins the game with a tech board. These have slots for tech cards which players can obtain from a row below the game board. 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. Missions are the heart of the game’s scoring. If you aren’t taking actions on a turn, you are completing missions—there are always at least five missions scattered across the universe to choose from. Flying to a planet before anyone else arrives ensures that the player will have first dibs on completing that mission. As a turn’s main action, you will have to assign crew members to the mission (never more than one of each of the game’s three ensign colors) and try to complete them.After using your crew to activate a room or complete a mission, they slide around the path and form a queue. When a new round begins you slide everyone towards the ready area and leave 3 again at the starting positions.
Each turn, you will either assign one of your active crew to a room in your ship (letting you do all those actions we mentioned) or completing a mission card at your current planet. Each mission card is worth a certain number of points, and also depicts multiple lines that correlate to both positive and negative effects. Captains can complete missions (thereby scoring them) by assigning the appropriate number of crew members to the mission card. Any crew member, including your inept cadets) can be assigned to any line, but if the crew you assign matches the color of the line (or is one of those universally-capable androids), then you can optionally take advantage of the effects of that line, which could result in all kinds of bonuses…and sometimes penalties. 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.
Bullet Points
Each player in Starship Captains gets their own ship and crew to command. Each crewman will be focused in one of three areas (movement, shooting, or research) or be a lowly cadet who’s only good at repairing your ship. You can load up your ship with a variety of tech. At the bottom of your ship is a cargo hold with limited slots to hold treasures (and damage) you will receive throughout the course of the game. As the game progresses these spaces will fill up, with either defeated pirate ships or artefacts you collect. 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 The basic blue action is to research technology, and the variability of the tech market is the game’s best feature. Taking a technology from the market of eight cards doesn’t cost a thing, and the tech is added to a tech board with six available slots. Over the course of play, adding technologies gives you three different options: 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.)
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