Star Trek Fleet Captains board game review

[Stofsk]

Hi guys, I've been away from the board for awhile now. I thought I'd pop in with a review for a board game I got over a month ago, called Star Trek Fleet Captains.

The game is very good. I like it a lot. I've only played it twice, but my regular gaming group seem to like it so it'll become a mainstay I think. And they're not exactly diehard trekkies either.

The core gameplay involves exploring the galaxy (set up with dozens of location tile hexes) with a small fleet of starships, doing various things with those starships, occasionally shooting your competitors, and doing things that's very reminiscent of 4x space strategy games - the whole explore, expand, exploit, exterminate schtick. But there's a big trek flavour theme to this game, I mean obviously given the title but like, it pulls it off really well.

For instance, the Federation is very much the 'nice guy' faction, happy to stick their noses into strange new worlds and scanning nebulae for fun. Klingons are very dakka dakka imma pewpew you now kind of gameplay. Romulans are in an expansion, and they're a bunch of sneaky little shits who you really need to shoot on sight for your own peace of mind.

Whenever you explore a new tile, you have to roll a die to see if you get an encounter - an encounter is one of the ways the trek theme is highlighted. You could encounter Q who decides to pick on you for his own amusement, or sentient nanites who are inexplicably benevolent, or your crew succumbs to polywater intoxication, or you get stuck in a temporal loop, or your crew encounters the borg or your mirrorverse counterparts. It's a who's who of Trek references, made by people who obviously had too much time on their hands and spent it watching reruns of all the shows.

The core game and expansion are a bit pricey, I paid about $150 for the lot, and it was on special too. Some consider the components to be a bit substandard - I don't know if I agree with that. Each faction has 12 miniature starships, very reminiscent of the old micro machines models if you remember that, but unfortunately they're unpainted. But that's not a huge issue for me. The location tiles are a bit too thin IMO, and the other cards are a little flimsy, but otherwise I'm quite happy with the set itself. It wouldn't be an objective review if I didn't mention this stuff though.

Another criticism is the rulebook is pretty badly written. The rules are good once you beat the learning curve, and once everyone knows what they're doing gameplay is pretty straightforward and enjoyable. But the rulebook could have been written better to aid in clarity. Much of the gameplay revolves around using your ships effectively to do a variety of things, and each ship is unique and has various system ratings that can be modified by adjusting the 'patented clix base' (heroclix is a thing I never heard about prior to this game; if you're familiar with it good; if not, basically your miniatures are connected to a base, which has a dial that you can adjust to favour certain stats). In addition to the ships, you also have a card deck that helps with your strategy. Some decks favour combat, others favour operations, most have some crew in them. You could get characters like Kirk, Picard, Riker, Janeway, Data, Spock, Worf, Kurn, a bunch of klingon characters from the various shows. Romulan characters too for the Rom expansions. You can assign these crew to your starships and get bonuses to various systems. Your command cards are where you can customise your deck, as each faction has 100 command cards, organised in 10 subdecks, and each subdeck has its own strengths and weaknesses. In a normal game you can choose 4 out of the 10 subdecks to comprise your deck for that game. The random element is that out of the 40 cards that make your deck, you can only ever hold 4 cards at a time. So there's a bit of strategy involved but also a bit of luck too.

The objective of the game is to win victory points. Victory points are awarded for completing missions and certain encounters (this is less reliable, as encounters are determined by a random die roll first and foremost and thus require a fair bit of luck). Missions are determined by the faction you play and the ships you pick or draw during the game creation phase. Federation vessels in general favour science missions, influence and then combat, while Klingons are the reverse. Science missions might be stuff like 'scan that nebula' or 'save this planet from a falling moon by making an engine and sensors test' etc. Combat can be stuff like 'hit and run enemy ships' or stuff of that nature. Influence is more the expand/build your empire category. So an example of an influence mission would be 'build a colony' or 'control x number of adjacent location tiles'. The Romulan expansion adds a fourth mission category called espionage, which the Roms heavily favour. In general the missions are another element where the trek theme is well realised.

The game is 1v1 or 2v2, if you run with the core game. The factions are Federation and Klingon, the expansion pack adds the Romulans as a 3rd faction. Games can then be between 3 players or up to 6 for teams of two. I'd heartily recommend getting the expansion pack as well, as playing with more players makes the game way more interesting. Even if the Roms are a bunch of sneaky bastards who deserve a photon torpedo jammed up their arse.

I'm hoping they release a second expansion pack, hopefully called 'the Dominion' that adds a fourth faction to the game. I can see the rules being expanded to include stuff like diplomacy and emergent gameplay stuff like making treaties and agreements with other players. See with the core game it's only 1v1 or 2v2, and so there isn't much room to have intrigue and diplomacy. With the addition of a 3rd faction there is scope for that kind of thing, and the expansion did include new mission types and rules for espionage/sabotage. I really hope they make another expansion with this in mind, but we'll see. In any case, the game is great to play as-is. There is potential for variant rules and house rules and such the like, but in general the gameplay runs smoothly once you know what you're doing and it never loses that strong Trek theme. I couldn't recommend this game enough.

[Josh]

Oh damn, I need to get a boardgame group together again.

This definitely sounds cool as fuck.

[Stofsk]

Another game we've been playing regularly is Spartacus.

That's an amazing game.

[Josh]

Oh god damn it Chris I'm not made of money here.

[frigidmagi]

This sounds pretty awesome.