In this 2-4 player Eurostyle game, which mixes action selection and engine building, you'll manage a diverse crew of cadets, ensigns, androids, and officers — each with different special roles and capabilities. By earning medals, you can promote and train your crew for even greater effectiveness. Similarly, you can upgrade your ship with powerful engine building technology for maximum synergy.

At the end of the fourth round, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins. Once you’ve used a crew member, they go to the end of your queue. Game Experience: Among the other rewards for various deeds (points, androids, artifacts, influence, etc.), each captain can also accrue medals. These can be spent to promote cadets to ensigns, trading their gray, unimpressive miniature for one color-coded ensign of your choice. But medals can also be spent to promote an ensign to the rank of commander, which is awesome! Commanders can work twice as hard as ensigns (for double the effect), or can even command other ensigns of their specialty to zip out of the queue and into the ready room, giving you more flexibility and control over your available actions.Hailing all Starship Captains! Get ready to boldly embark on a maiden voyage through the cosmos in this euro-style action selection and engine building game for 2-4 players. 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

PUBLISHERS: please, please, please, you’ve got to include player aids with your games if the iconography is even a minor challenge! Why are we still talking about this on the eve of 2023????? A space-themed board game with thematic similarities to the beloved sci-fi television series Star Trek – particularly its focus upon the wonders of space exploration – Starship Captains will support two to four players in a tabletop title about adventures in the galaxy. After three multiplayer plays and four solo plays (I was able to do two of those solo plays over a recent lunch hour), I’ve seen all that Starship Captains has to show me until expansion content hits in a year or two. (CGE has not confirmed this, but let’s just say I have a sneaking suspicion.) This allows everyone to gain an extra cadet, redistribute any bonus planet tokens and refresh their crew members.Do you have what it takes to deftly command your crew and become the best captain in the cosmos? We'll see! 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. But that would be a miracle. Why are there so many rings slotted on each player board for a miracle scenario like this? Yellow: Kill a pirate on a route adjacent to your planet. You take a damage but also gain a reward. Welcome aboard and congrats on the promotion! Your “new” starship is ready to embark on its first big voyage. Just scrape off some of the rust and she’ll do fine. And that crew? Might look a little green around the edges, but they’re your crew now. Make us proud.

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.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. The production is mostly a winner. The best tactile part of the game comes when you need to slide your crew members around a small, indented wheel at the top of your player board. Even better: only crew members fit in that wheel. Try to slide an android meeple around this wheel, and it doesn’t fit, a reminder that androids—a wild worker type—have to be discarded when completing missions. Love it!

Having options for rooms can be key. Some cards break the idea that only red ensigns can fly the ship, so in a game when I added the Jump Drive tech card to my board, this gave me more options for my yellow ensigns. Ability techs boost all the other actions, so combining some of these led to different approaches to taking on missions. Another example: five commander rings are available to each player. These rings signify when you’ve achieved a promotion. The highest total number of commanders I’ve seen promoted by a single player is three. In that game, one player had a tech which allowed them to train a certain color of commander with only two medals, instead of the normal three. There are moments of compelling, puzzly squeeze as you try to figure out if you can wring an extra move out of your crew, grab a useful tech card, or perhaps promote an ensign to give you a double action. Sometimes other players snap up a mission you have assembled to perfect crew for, or grab the piece of tech that was going to synergise perfectly with your turn. The publisher behind Codenames, Czech Games Edition, has announced its next upcoming board game, Starship Captains.Those familiar with Czech Games Edition’s previous hit euro game; Lost Ruins of Arnak, will understand this point easier.