Review: Star Trek: Fleet Captains – Romulan Empire

Finally played with the Romulans. 🙂

I’ve talked quite a bit about Fleet Captains. It is a nice two player game that is playable for 4. So what does the Romulans add?

Simply put, it adds a 3rd (or a 6th player if you follow the rules of two players running each faction) player to the game. The Romulan ships are very nice and didn’t come broken like some of the ships in the orginal game.

On top of the ships, the main thing the game adds is a new set of Mission Cards just mostly for the Romulan player: Espionage I must say that the Missions really capture the spirit of the Romulans who are always sneaking around.

Everything else is two tons of chips and cards to support the new player. 🙂

From a rules point of view, there was very little the game added. The Romulans have the ability to add saboteurs to the crew of ships, which can mess up the other player(s). Also those ships, that are able, can cloak by giving up 5 movement points instead of an action if they wish and that is a plus. It was a very seamless addition.

Down side: The game does give some more tiles (10) to make a bigger board, but you really need more for a 6 player game. The recommended board for 3 players is a little too small. You have enough tiles to make this a little bigger board, but my feel is for 6 players you need more.

Long story short: If you like the game, get it! Can we have the Borg next please???

Star Trek: Fleet Captains – Romulan Empire

Yep, the game is on pre-order. 🙂

Star Trek: Fleet Captains is a lot of fun. I’ve been trying to get it to the table to play but life is getting in the way with my kids back in school. Maybe this weekend I can get a game in.

I have a number of posts about this game and one of my worries is a number of ships in the box were damaged in the original game. My hope is that Wizk!ds has that fixed this time around.

Review: Star Trek Fleet Captains (Part 2)

I’ll start off by descriping a game played by my wife and I.

My wife picked playing the Klingons. She was assigned the Ships:

IKS Bortas

IKS T’ong

IKS Somraw

My ships as the Feds were:

USS Venture

USS Defiant

USS Enterprise A

So the game starts out with the Klingons getting a lot of combat missions and the Federation getting mostly Science and Exploration missions. The Feds spread out to ‘explore new worlds’ while the IKS Bortas and T’ong more forward to attack, while the IKS Somraw scouts Klingon space. The Klingons move into Fed space uncloaked and miss their chance to attack the USS Defiant. All three Federation ships pounce on the Bortas and the T’ong and direct their fire toward the smaller T’ong. Some fancy flying keeps the Enterprise from attacking, but the Venture and Defiant pound the T’ong and come close to destroying it. The Klingons cloak and the T’ong limps back for repairs. The Klingons get some Victory Points for the battle and the Feds get a few for building a Star Base and Exploring space. So things are fairly even, but a slight lead for the Fed.

So a new mission pops up for the Feds to rescue an away team from a Klingon planet that is luckily not too far from Federation Space. The Bortas and the repaired T’ong go to the planet and beam up the away team to the Bortas. The Enterprise (with Captain Kirk now in command) continues their mission to explore ‘Strange New Worlds’ and the Venture and Defiant speed to the planet to help the away team. They warp into the area before the Klingon can cloak with full power to the sensors and shields. The Federation is able to overpower the Bortas shields with their combined sensors and beam the team off of the Klingon ship and onto the Venture. The Klingons are furious and direct all fire at the Defiant. Only the T’ong can get a clean shot at the Defiant and she is nearly destroyed. Too damaged to cloak, the Venture and Defiant try a quick retreat with the Venture trying to cover the damaged Defiant, but the attempt fails and the Defiant is destroyed by the Bortas.

The Defiant is replaced by the USS Sutherland.

The fleeing Venture is able to help complete an Exploration mission the Enterprise was working on. Between that mission and saving the away team from the Klingons, the Federation is up 9 to 4 on Victory Points. At this point it was getting late and my wife gives up (very un-Klingon), but the goal of this game was to get the feel of the rules.

So the point of that session report is to simply ask the question: Does that sound like Fun?

If you are enough of a Sci-Fi geek to say yes, then this game could be for you. I liked it a lot. Despite the issues with the game parts themselves (and my wife was tossing a few comments about the game components as well (not positive)), I would buy an expansion if it came out and re-deal with the issues. Hopefully WizK!ds will have learned their mistakes the first time around as well.

There are already some varients rules floating around. There are some good player aids as well to help with the rule book if needed.

If boardgames and Sci-Fi is your thing, I think there is enough here plus fan support as well that you can get a lot of fun out of this game. If WizK!ds makes add-ons to the game, I would buy them in a second. Does the game have issues out of the box, yea it does, but if you can get over that than at least I can say that I’ll get my $70-100 out of this game easily.

Review: Star Trek Fleet Captains (Part 1a)

In my first post I had said that I was missing 4 command posts. Turns out that box insert has a removable piece that was hiding the command posts. Sorry about that WizK!ds, but the other points still stand.

Review: Star Trek Fleet Captains (Part 1)

So, I hope everyone had a good Holiday and New Year’s day. Time to get back to blogging.

I had said before that I was getting Star Trek Fleet Captains (STFC) and Yggdrasil for the holidays. I’m going to start off with STFC.

This review is going to split up into two parts, mainly because I haven’t played the game yet (maybe tonight). However, there was enough about the box itself that it was worth a post.

As you can see there is a lot of eye candy and there should be for a game that lists for $100 (you can get it for $70 at online stores). 24 ships, 400 cards with nice artwork and over 100 tokens… It should rock. However…

Too many owners (like this one from Germany) are getting ships that look like:

Also reported: damaged or missing cards on BoardGameGeek‘s forums for STFC. In my case 3 ships (USS Sutherland and Reliant, Plus the IKS T’ong) had ‘popped off’ the bases, so it wasn’t even a break like in the pic above. With a little bit of super glue and a hair dryer to speed up drying, the ships were quickly fixed.

Also, 4 command posts (big cards that act as your starting point) are missing.

Now Wizk!ds is supposed to have a good and quick replacement program and I submitted my request and we will see how that goes. However, I think it goes without saying that repairing a $100 game is not cool and Wizk!ds needs to follow up with their factory about Quality Control.

The second part is the cards and the tiles for the game board, which are just cards cut to a different shape. The art is excellent with great shots of all the characters, etc. where needed. The cards themselves are on the light side. My wife, who used to deal in such things, said they upgraded the paper by having a pattern on them and they gave the cards a finish, but it was clearly lighter than Card Stock.

I’ve read the rules and the game looks like fun. I’ll report more on the rulebook and game play on part 2. However the game components have some issues. Summary:

• Broken Ships: This is offset by the fact that WizK!ds is good at replacing the ships, but making these minis should be the company’s ‘bread and butter’. Having this many reports of damaged ships does not put the company in a positive light.
• Cards: The art on the cards is very nice but the overall quality of the cards themselves is low. The cards are very thin. People who plan on playing the game a lot should consider sleeving the cards. Not cheap since you have 400 of them.

Still, I think the game is going to rock when I play it in the next day or two. More in Part 2…

Yggdrasil

Yea, I got my Xmas list ready baby!

The first game I’m going to get is Star Trek: Fleet Captains. Which I posted a video of here.

The other game I’m going to get is Yggdrasil. I played this once before while visiting a gaming group during a business trip. Here is a video review from Tom Vasel:

As the video points out it is similar to Pandemic in that it is a co-op game. Pandemic is a great game by the way if you don’t have it.

What’s nice about co-op games is that all the players are playing against the ‘game’. It allows for more interaction between the people at the table as you work together to win. Having games like this is great. The group can help new players along and players and come and go as needed from the table without worring about slowing up the game.

Based on my one play, it I didn’t think it was as good as Pandemic (not as deep for sure), but a solid game with some top rate art on the board.

If you don’t know of Pandemic, here you go:

Star Trek Fleet Captains

So let’s talk board games. 🙂

Most people when they think board game in the US think of ‘Clue’ and ‘Sorry’, but there are a LOT more fun games out there that make you think and have good themes.  So called ‘Euro Games’ and ‘Ameritrash’ Games.

Both of these two classes of games are quite different. 

• Euro Games: These tend to be under 1 hour of game time and keep all players active during the game even when it is not your turn.  Very good for social events.
• Ameritrash: Tend to take quite a bit longer and have harder rules but excellent themes to the game.

This game is a good example of a Ameritrash game.  Looks like a lot of fun but too costly for me to buy soon….