We explored strange new worlds and battled space pirates in Starship Captians, the next game in our A-Z game shelf play-through.
Starship Captains
Players: 1-4
Time: 40-100 Minutes
Designers: Peter B. Hoffgaard
Artists: Roman Bednář, Mergen Erdenebayar, Alena Kubíková, Jiří Kůs, Jiří Mikovec, Radim Pech, Jakub Politzer, František Sedláček
Publisher: Czech Games Edition
Starship Captains is a game where players each command a ship on its space adventures. In an effort to become the galaxy’s best captain, players will employ their crew to upgrade their tech, battle pirates, effect repairs, and complete missions while forging alliances with factions across the cosmos.
Game play
The game is set up with the board in the center of the table. Space stations and missions are dealt out randomly on the various planets, and pirates are placed on the marked starting spaces. The tech cards are shuffled, and a market of three game-end scoring techs and five alpha techs laid out. The faction boards are placed nearby, and a random card from each faction deck placed on the corresponding board. A supply of medals, crew members, pirates and artifacts are placed near the board.
Players each take a ship board, tech-slot board, five command rings, two red, blue and yellow crew members and a gray one, a medal, and seven damage tokens. The starting crew are placed on the ship as indicated (three in the slot near the ready room, and one of each color in the ready room). The damage is similarly placed on the indicated places. Players also put their cardboard ship piece on the Home Station on the board.
The game is played over four rounds. Each round players will take turns activating rooms in their ship or completing missions.
To activate a room, the player can either do this with a crew member or an artifact. To activate with a crew member, they choose one from their ready room and tap that character on a matching color room (or the gray spot), and then place the crew member to the end of the line of crew. To use an artifact, the player discards two artifacts, each of which must have the matching color to the room they’d like to activate.
Each player’s ship starts with four rooms that can be activated. The red room allows them to move their ship up to two spaces around the board. The yellow room allows them to take out a pirate that’s on a path adjacent to their ship on the board. The blue room allows them to take a tech upgrade from the market and add it to their tech board. The gray room will repair one damage on the ship or tech board. However, players may obtain new rooms they can activate as they take new tech into their ship, and these will have a variety of additional effects.
Alternately, if the players starts their turn with their ship on a mission, they can spend their turn completing it. they must have enough crew in their ready room to complete the tasks, however. To complete a mission, they take the mission card and place it next to their ship board on the indicated spot. Then they assign crew to each of the tasks, and resolve them from top to bottom. If the crew member matches the color of the task, the player gets the benefit of that task (which can include bad things like new pirates, but always also has good things). The the crew is pushed back into line with the other crew waiting to get into the ready room. Oh, and the player can use an android to complete one of the tasks — they match any color, however, they leave the ship after completing the task (their base doesn’t fit in the slot where the crew lines up, which helps players remember that they leave the ship instead).
The types of rewards the player will get include artifacts, medals, movement on the faction board (which can trigger other rewards), androids, and additional actions. The mission itself will also have game-end points.
On their turn, a player can use medals to train an ensign (or gray cadet) to be a different color or they can promote an ensign to a commander. Once a crew member is promoted, they get a white ring around their base, and they can do extra work on the “activate a room” turn or they can claim a task reward twice, if they match the color of the task.
Finally, if the player doesn’t have any more crew or artifacts to activate … or they chose not to use them … they can pass. At this point they are out for the round. The other players continue until everyone has passed.
At the beginning of the next round, players will get move their waiting crew into the ready room until there are three waiting in line. They will also get either a medal (round 2) or another cadet (rounds 3 and 4), and then play continues.
The game ends after four rounds. At that point, players will count up points from their completed missions, faction tracks, and game-end techs (omega techs). They also get one point for each commander, android, and pirate on their ship. They get half a point for each medal and artifact. And they lose a point for each remaining damage to their ship. the player with the most points is named the best new captain in the fleet.
My Thoughts
We first played Starship Captains at a convention a couple of years ago, and finally picked it up earlier this year in a charity auction. It turns out we had both been thinking that we wanted to add it to our collection, but hadn’t told each other — I’m glad we finally got together on this!
First and foremost, I’m drawn in by the theme of Starship Captains. This is clearly created by a team who loves Star Trek and other sci fi series. The art is so charming, and pokes fun at those beloved series with a lot of neat touches. But a theme isn’t going to keep me coming back — I really enjoy the game play, here, too. There are a lot of deliciously agonizing decisions to make. You need to decide carefully how to use your various crew members. Do you use your red ensign to get you to a planet with a very valuable mission? But then you might not have another red ensign or commander to actually complete the mission itself. And, you get fewer turns the more missions you complete, because these often take two, or even three, crew members. If the rewards are great enough, though, it’s entirely worth it.
Three Quick Questions
How is it as a 2-player game? Starship Captains plays well at two players. We find that often we’re on different sides of the game board … but it is still possible to snipe a mission that the other player had been eyeing. However, there’s always something else that you can do.
How about the art and component quality? The art is amazing! I love looking at all of the different mission cards as they come out because they have a lot of fun touches that poke fun at some of our favorite sci fi tropes. The components are equally good, with the double-layer board that gives you a that path to push your crew members through as they make their way to the ready room.
My only complaint — and this is a nitpick — is that the game was shipped with some double-sided tape strips to adhere the two sides of the double-sided boards together. When we received ours, those strips had been shaken all over the box and stuck to different components. I had to remove them from the placed they didn’t belong and use some adhesive from my scrapbooking supplies to adhere the ship boards.
Will this stay in my collection? Yes, that’s an easy yes. We’re still having a lot of fun with this one!
