"Star Trek: Fleet Captains, the first battles..." Topic

Got this game this weekend. I had downloaded the rules a while back and wasn't sure It was worht the $100 price tag, but after reading some reviews on BoardGameGeek, I decided to give it a shot.

There have been some gripes about Quality Control. My set was complete, with one engine fallen off the Sabre-Class ship (easily fixed) and one of the Bird of Preys snapped off the stand (a little harder, but also fixed).

Bottom linem this game was pretty fun. Got two games in with my 11 year old son (he picks up games pretty quick, and depsite my wife's urging he beats me enough these days I don't feel a real need to let him win).

First battle, I had the Klingons. Drew a bunch of lackluster, smaller ships (3 BoPs and a D-7, I think). My son, of course, managed to get the Enterprise E right out of the gate.

We both spent a few turns exploring our sides of the board. I got off to a rocky start when one of my BoPs flew right into a Black Hole on its first move. I wrote it off and it died screaming over the next 2 turns.

My son sized up his mission cards and looked at the Ent-E's stats compated to mine, and decided to cross the board looking to do some Turtle-Head clubbing. At this point he managed to get Kirk and Spock onto the Ent-E (a Trekkie dream come true).

Seeing how this was going to pan out, I made the decision not to call in reinforcements for a while.

The Enterprise took out my D-7, and chased most of my fleet back to my single forward base. I was now down enough that I could call in the only Klingon ship that could stand toe-to-toe with the Ent-E: the Negh-Var.

I forced a meeting of the fleets near my base, then popped out Duras, which made him give up Kirk (my son was not thrilled with that). From there, it was pretty much a slug-fest, with me able to get in the first punch. I won after mopping up the Enterprise, the Grisson-Class Yosemite, and the Sabre-Class Yeager (I'd already won several of my other non-combat missions).

Second game the next day went quicker. I had the Feds (Prometheus, Reliant, and Yeager) vs his fleet. Once again, my son was lucky in that he pulled the Negh'Var and Kronos One as his ships. Unfortunately, having only 2 ships may have put him at a real disadvantage. Most of my missions were Influence-related (at least they were after I swapped a bunch out over time that I knew I couldn't win). We only had a two rounds of combat. He tried to bushwhack the Prometheus with the Negh'Var, but I was able to stop his attack with a card play.

I then moved my entire fleet into that space and together they gave the Klingon Flagship a bloody nose (a single hit, out of 3 to kill it). My son cloaked and moved off to his Starbase to repair.

This gave me the time to complete some more missions, and I reached 10 VPs to win the game.

Overall, not a 'Starship Combat Simulator', to be sure, but very fun. Not havin studied the cards ahead of time means there are enough surprises to make it seam more like an actual episode (or season) of Star Trek.

Thanks for the review and share.

Sounds like fun.

:)

So can you tell us some more about the non-combat aspects of the game? As a straight starship shoot-em-up it doesn't sound too interesting, but if the other facets are sufficient it might be worth a look.

Thanks,
Doug

So there is combat (obviously) and non-combat aspects to the game?

Combat is only a part of the game. In fact, like I said our second game had a total of 2 shots fired… although the first one may or may not have ever been 'fired' depending on how you interpret the text on the card.

Exploration is key – the game map is a layout of hex cards that are flipped as you move onto them. More (smaller) ships = faster exploration. Each one has a chance for a random encounter. These run the gamut of finding a freighter in distress to encountering that lovable good-natured mentor of humanity that is 'Q'.

Most of these encounters are resolved with a die-roll check against a ship's system. Even though the mechanic is pretty basic, it was cool to see the cards calling out various events from the series. Even my wife (who is a Trekkie-light) had a 'Oh – I remember that episode. It was the creepy one' moment.

You also add 'influence' token to the areas of space. These allow you to build bases there, and a lot of the mission cards (and victory conditions) are based on how many spaces you control at any given time.

I'm sure one of our future games will be a slug fest, just to see how that works. In theory, if you can blow up all 10 ships available to a side, he's out of the game completely.

How were the hulls on your ships, Ghostrunner? The glaring problems I saw were misshapen seams. I'm talking really nasty splits between hull sections. Toss in a little warping, and these can be seriously difficult to correct.

I've a friend that won't even look at Encounters; 'it's not really Star Trek'. ;->=

Don't think he'll go for this, but at least it has characters to whom he can relate.

Doug

For the most part, the hulls and their assembly was pretty good.

I have one D-7 where one engine was glued on at a 45 degree angle forward-to-aft. Going to require a bit of cutting to fix.

The sculpts are more than adequate for their role in the game, but they are anything but scale models. For the price, I can see why some would balk.

I'm tempted to swap out some of the ships for some more in-scale models from Shapeways or eleswhere, but I will probably just settle for a coat of paint, and maybe a wash.

I guess that I was the lucky one. No breaks, no malformed ships.

Combat in our games is actually fairly rare, because my 10 year-old daughter is always the Feds, and has figured out that racking up science missions while avoiding combat is a pretty good path to victory.

Great game, but if anyone buys it as a space combat game, then they will be disappointed.

Good review of the game, Ghostrunner.

…my 10 year-old daughter is always the Feds, and has figured out…

Merde, I love hearing stories like that! I have high hopes for my six year old grandson.

Doug

Someone needs to make some Cardassian ships for some Trek spaceship game. I'm watching DS9 in my Netflix queue and man, I sure do love those Cardis.

There are a number of Cardie-inspired ships on the market, if you look. Studio Bergstrom has some in 1/7000, and I have some available on Shapeways, if you are willing to go the print-on-demand route.

There are rumors that there might be a Romulan Expansion for this game in works, but I won't hold my breath.

Actually, other than some new ship sculpts and themed command cards (which would probably have mostly the same game effects), I'm not sure what they would add to the game (Klingons already have cloaking devices).

As fun as it would be to have more fleets to choose from, either the new fleets will be nearly the same as the current ones, or invariably you will wind up with at least one case of 'you can't beat X with Y.'

Wizkids is supposed to be coming out with a Hero-Clix version that uses Star Trek ships, so I guess if they have Romulan and Cardie ships in that game, it might be a simple matter to build an expansion for this game with them (using different dials).

Cardy's used to be one of the least sought micromachines; nice to see the love. Wish I had more Keldans…

From what I was hearing from the reps over the summer, I wouldn't expect too varied a set of scuplts. They seemed more interested in various repaints with a variety of stats.

Course, it sounded back then like they were as expansions for Fleet Captains, rather than a clix-based game engine.

Doug

If they are that hard for production to glue together properly, then why don't Mongoose re-design them as fool proof (half moon shaped double-pegs and mated holes and such) snap togethers, slap the pieces in baggies with a spare or two, and then let the customer do the very simple assembly? It worked well enough for Privateer Press's Grind game and Dust: Tactics.

Mongoose doesn't publish this game. Blame WizKids for a change, please.

My copy of the game came in as a "model kit" more than a ready to play game. Cards busted out and scattered like I had bought it used at a thrift store. 9 ships busted off stands and one with a dial lock that made it unusable. I was really really bummed. Customer service was responsive but took three shipments and numerous emails to sort out.

I did manage to get it to the table months after purchase.
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