Starship Captains

In Starship Captains up to 4 players compete for reputation and glory across the galaxy in this adventurous euro game.

Race from planet to planet, fighting space pirates, collecting tech cards, managing your crew and completing missions. The game is played over 4 rounds, afterwards the highest scoring captain wins!

So Much To Do, So Little Time

Players can take one of three actions on their turn; activate a room, complete a mission or pass.

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.

Completing mission is the real driving force of the game. Not only will these grant you extra reputation points but they will give you a wide variety of bonuses such as artefacts, android figures and progression on one of the three faction tracks.

These tracks, in addition to having random event cards that effect all players, allow for players to gain extra reputation and some bonuses too.

Finally when players have exhausted all their options, or even before if they want to save some crew, they can pass. After everyone has done this a new round begins.

This allows everyone to gain an extra cadet, redistribute any bonus planet tokens and refresh their crew members.

With a limited supply of crew and only 4 rounds, games of Starship Captains can flow quickly. Despite a rather long set up time, this is one of the few games that actually has an accurate game length that’s printed on the box, 25 minutes perp player.

At times it can feel like you are a restricted and you can run out of options but I found this approach not only keeps the game time down but forces players to carefully manage their actions.

Managing Your Crew & Your Ship

Each player starts the game with their own ship which contains spaces for medals, upgrade rings, mission cards and a queue path to push your crew after use.

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.

This system means that some crew wont be available for the round, forcing players to think twice about which order they perform their actions.

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.

Cadets can’t activate rooms (except for repair) but they can be promoted to an ensign if players spend medals, this allows for players to instantly gain an ensign of a colour they need by spending this resource.

Ensigns can be promoted to commanders by spending 3 medals. These upgraded units can be used to activate a room twice or bring across a matching coloured ensign from the queue into the ready room, allowing for more actions on future turns.

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.

It’s great fun and a clever puzzle managing which crew you want to use. The clear iconography and simple colour coding combined with multiple ways to manipulate the available ensigns with commanders allows for some clever strategies to be formed.

Technology & It’s Uses

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.

These cards can grant permanent bonuses, become rooms to activate with ensigns or be the limited omega tech which provide extra reputation at the end of the game if certain conditions are met.

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.

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.

Perform a repair action, move or gain a medal can all be gained if players can place cards in the right slot. Of course these spaces are limited and some may need to be repaired first to be used.

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

Those familiar with Czech Games Edition’s previous hit euro game; Lost Ruins of Arnak, will understand this point easier.

This is large euro game with so many paths to take, ways to gain points and a heavy emphasis on managing your actions efficiently. Players will start to question their actions and think about their turns heavily.

With limited actions and only 4 rounds, finding little boosts and combinations which grant you extra rewards present themselves so often. Something as simple as fighting a pirate, combining it with a tech card so you don’t take any damage and gaining another artefact. Then using 2 matching coloured artefacts on the next turn to move to a mission card then use an android you acquired to gain extra rewards is so satisfying.

The large variety of mission cards that constantly fill the board allow for almost endless ways to gain points and progress on the faction tracks.

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.

Move to a mission, fight pirates, gain tech, use artefacts, upgrade your crew, try to complete missions to move around the faction tracks, the options are almost endless.

Space Looks Kinda Cool

Starship Captains has a great cartoon-like art style to it, which can be seen on the mission and tech cards. It features a bold and vibrant colour scheme which for me personally is a welcome change from the usual blacks and blues we so often get from other sci-fi games.

The component quality is mostly good especially on the cards but I did find some of the figures could be damaged easily. Wether this was a case of careless handling in shipping or not it is something to watch out for.

I also wasn’t much of a fan of the ship and board assembly.

The small coloured ships consist of 3 small cardboard pieces that need to be folded over and clipped together. Folding these small cardboard bits over and sliding them together can be risky as they could be damaged rather easily.

The ships come opened outwards in the punchboards and need to be folded over to give them their shape and look. This is fine however the instructions tell you to stick them together using the double sided tape tags provided,

Again this would be fine however the game comes with a strip of paper with small white sticky tabs on it.  Some of these came off in my box and attached themselves to other tokens and punchboards causing some slight damage when removed.

Final Thoughts

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.

Despite some minor design issues it’s an incredibly pleasant experience. A game of endless possibilities and combinations that doesn’t overcomplicate itself or outstay its welcome.