Tabletop Star Trek. Starship Captains Review

“HANNNNNNNNN!!!!”

 This is one of my favorite moments from my favorite Star Trek movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; Kirk (William Shatner) grits his teeth and yells from the bridge of the Enterprise at his old nemesis Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban, who sadly isn't nominated for an Oscar for his work here).

 As a teenager, I was stuck watching Star Trek the other day.

 You know who else is a Star Trek fan? Peter B. Hoffgaard, designer of the new CGE game Starship Captains. From the cover, to the Enterprise-like player fields, to easter eggs like the mission called "Roddenberries," everything about Starship Captains screams "play this if you like Star Trek." As an addict, I was delighted to play this game.

CITY

 Starship Captains puts players in control of Enterprise-like ships that work together in a faction known as the Co-op (partly because I assume the Federation has been taken over!). Newly promoted to captain, each player leads a small team of specialists from around the universe.

 These specialists are your employees and you will place them in various departments of your ship and your technical board to perform actions. (However, I won't call this a worker placement game, since these spaces are available to all players on their various ships, and then spaces are vacated at the end of each turn.)

 Your workers are cadets (gray figures that represent unskilled workers who can only do repairs after the first hire) and ensigns. Flags are specialized by color: red flags control the ship, yellow flags coordinate weapons systems, and blue flags are your technical experts.

 Starship Captains' shared main field presents a galaxy with a slightly larger selection of field locations, designed for just four players. (The flip side is for 1-3 players.) Using one crew member to perform an action, each turn allows players to activate a compartment (known simply as a room) or complete a mission on the planet where their ship is currently docked.

 Starship Captains is easy to learn thanks to the color coding of the actions (and symbols for each action to help with accessibility) and the simplicity of the moves. You'll take a crew member from the "readiness room"—the ship's bridge, in one of my favorite parts of the game's production—and do something to activate the room for many of your turns. Yellow and Red are very simple actions available so that you always have the option to take out any pirates on routes related to your current location or move.

 The main blue action is technology research, and the volatility of the technology market is the best feature of the game. Taking the tech from the eight card market costs nothing, and the tech is added to a tech board with six available slots. During gameplay, adding tech gives you three different options:

• Omega technologies are late game scoring conditions, only three of them are available at the beginning of the game
• Technician rooms can later be activated as regular rooms by the appropriate crew member, and each of these unique cards gives your team better options than the four basic rooms you have on the bridge of your ship.
• Ability techs are permanent powers that activate during gameplay

 To start the game, four of the six slots on this tech field are unavailable because they're damaged (your promotion to captain only gave you a "freshly repaired" ship, according  to the manual), so you'll have to spend some of your damage-removing actions on it on board and from the cargo space of the ship. The cargo area is used to store pirate tokens you've defeated in previous turns (perhaps prisoners being brought back to Co-op HQ?) as well as artifact tokens that can be used to activate crewless rooms.

TECHNOLOGIES WITHOUT THE TECHNOLOGY TREE

 The tech panel is my favorite part of Starship Captains because it changes the course of every game. It's interesting to try to capture the Omega techs to increase the results in the endgame.

 Having room options can be key. Some cards break the idea that only red flags can control a ship, so in the game when I added a Jump Drive card to my field, it gave me more options for my yellow flags. Ability techniques enhance all other actions, so combining some of them resulted in different approaches to missions.

 Missions are the heart of the game. If you're not doing actions while you're on the move, you're doing missions—there's always at least five missions scattered around the universe to choose from. Flying to the planet before anyone else arrives ensures that the player will have first priority after completing this mission. As the main action of the turn, you will have to assign crew members to a mission (never more than one of the three colors of the game's flag) and attempt to complete them.

 If you have a crew member color that matches the color of the mission line, you will receive a reward (and possibly a penalty) for that line. For example, a mission may require a red flag and a yellow flag. You can use the cadet and the yellow flag to complete the mission, but you will only get the bonus for the yellow line. This also means that you will avoid any punishments that may correspond to the red part of the mission.

 Making the missions so easy to do—in terms of learning how to do them—is what made Starship Captains enjoyable. All actions are clear. This is aided by stellar player aids, which reminded me a lot of the aids included in Lost Ruins of Arnak, another CGE product. Almost everything in Starship Captains is covered in the player help, including crew definitions, medal options, and all the iconography shown on maps and faction routes.

FORWARD, BUT NOT SO BRAVELY

 I would argue that games like Starship Captains, like First Rat, and other very accessible recent developments are fantastic ways to introduce gamers to the hobby. The concepts of Starship Captains are easy to understand, but there is still a lot for experienced gamers to enjoy at first, trying to lower the min/max of each turn.

 Playtime matched the information on the side of the box: my first solo game took 30 minutes, and that was because I had to keep going back to what each icon on the solo cards would do. (Solo? That's fine. Use it as a learning tool and then move on.) My next two three-player games took 75 minutes and 60 minutes. My only two-player game took an hour, including training. For someone new to gaming, I could see a three-player game lasting 90 minutes; with experienced gamers changing moves quickly, the entire journey will take less than an hour.

 The production is mostly winning. The best tactile part of the game comes when you have to slide your team members around a small indented wheel at the top of the player board. Even better, this wheel only fits crew members. Try to slide a meeple android around that wheel and it won't fit, a reminder that the androids—the feral workers—should be discarded during missions. I love it!

 The moves are fast, so the downtime is small. The player's help has everything you need. It's fun to plan a move, as the game is definitely a mission competition, but there are still plenty of fallback options if another player beats you to the most coveted planet.

 Medals allow players to train any of their cadets or ensigns of a different color; pay three medals and you can upgrade an ensign to a commander, allowing the commander to perform double actions or order a crew member of the same color from the waiting area to your ship's readiness room.

IT'S A POINT CALCULATION AT THE END

 Now, as much as I love Starship Captains, I have to admit that I've already played it.

 After three multiplayer games and four solo games (I was able to do two of those solo games during a recent lunch hour), I've seen everything Starship Captains has to show me until the expansion content arrives in a year or two. (CGE hasn't confirmed this, but let's just say I have a sneaking suspicion.)

 The first two rounds of the game usually look the same because you won't have many ensigns to work with yet. All players follow the same tactic I do when looking at the board: if there's a 6 or 7 point mission in range, I'll move my ship there and complete it next turn. (Seven points is the maximum for any one mission.)

 The topic interested me, but the gameplay is less impressive. It's always nice, but never exciting. You can have a turn where you do a mission that pushes you to maybe two different tracks and those separate bumps will get you one repair and a medal. That's fine, but you'd be looking at another player swinging their fist at the end of such a move.

 Replayability is limited, so guide your expectations accordingly. I enjoyed the first two installments much more than the last two.

 I was more intrigued by the scoring in Starship Captains.

 The game manual has some fun text for each specific possible score from 21 to 75. 0-20 sums it up with something like "you're terrible at board games" and I agree - it feels like it's almost impossible to score below 25. The lowest score I've seen is 28 points, but the highest score in seven games is 39.

 Those worries about points go further. The game's faction tracks, which are pretty boring to begin with, offer a way to level up and trigger in-game events, events that are pretty minor. In this game, it's almost impossible to go at least one track at a time, and I've only seen this happen when players specifically do missions just to go up one track.

 But there is a bonus of 5 points available to any player who goes around the same track twice. I don't know how you can go up the same lane twice in the short four-round format of this game.

 Another example: each player has five commander's rings available. These rings mean you've been promoted. The highest total number of commanders I've seen promoted by one player is three. In this game, one player had a technology that allowed him to train a commander of a certain color with only two medals instead of the usual three.

 But let's play out a perfect-world scenario: you can pick up, say, a Security Suit tech that allows you to raise yellow flags for two medals. You get this technology on the first turn of the game. Even if you manage to collect a few medals during missions and build a tech lane to get bonuses on your tech board, you probably won't get ten medals in the entire game.

 Also, you only get this discount on yellow flags, and you never add new flags by color, only cadets. So you still need one of the techs that allow you to train cadets with yellow ensigns (blast phasers) for free. So if you get the gold and add both Blast-Phasers first, then the Security Suit, and then get 10 medals throughout the game, you can promote five Ensigns to Commanders.

 But that would be a miracle. Why are there so many rings on the field for each player for such a miracle?

 These are the questions that give me pause. I think Starship Captains is best played by casual players, and only occasionally. It's ideal to play once every few months and let the players who come mostly for the theme take part in a light gaming experience that is easy to learn.

 For core gamers, I think Starship Captains will be average. Maybe there are ways to address some of my concerns by allowing players to make bigger jumps on the technical lane (one shot should be one uphill through the zone, not one gap, which makes the lane much easier) or by providing a starting technique for each player to help guide his strategy.

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