We’re great fans of the Imperium deck-building card games designed by Nigel Buckle and David Turczi and published by Osprey but many of us in the Board's Eye View team are even greater fans of Star Trek in its many incarnations over the past 60 years, so we were excited to hear rumours that Imperium was being reworked for the Star Trek universe as a two-player or solitaire game.
Imperium pits different civilisations - historical and mythological - against each other. In the six decades since we first encountered the Starship Enterprise, Star Trek has featured numerous interplanetary civilisations. Of course, there's the Earth-centric United Federation of Planets, and the Klingon and Romulan Empires, and in more recent years we've learned much more about the Borg, the Cardassians and the Dominion, not to mention the hundreds of other spacefaring races that have made fleeting appearances in just one or two episodes. In translating Imperium to the Star Trek universe, the easy and obvious route would have been to generate decks representing various of the spacefaring civilisations. As the title suggests tho', that's not the route Nigel Buckle and David Turczi decided to take with Captain's Chair. Instead, each player's starting deck is built around a specific Starship Captain, so it's possible to mix and match cards from different races as you progressively build your deck. This approach also means you can readily play with competing captains from the same faction: this core box of Captain's Chair includes six captains and their starting decks - three Federation (Picard, Sisko, Burnham), one Klingon (Koloth), one Romulan (Sela) and one Andorian (Shran) - and we're promised more to follow, with booster packs likely to feature Kirk, Pike, Janeway and Freeman (Federation), Daimon Bok (Ferengi), Martok (Klingon), Khan and the Borg Queen. Trek purists may complain that this means mixing and matching ships and characters from different time periods (just as was the case with Imperium) but there's an extra joy in being able to draw on all the various incarnations of Trek from the original series through to Discovery and Strange New Worlds, and even incorporating the animated series Lower Decks.
Besides, we wouldn't want strict adherence to 'canon' to get in the way of a good game. And Captain's Chair is indeed a very good game. It's a step up in complexity from Imperium, mainly because there's an arsenal of key words to look out for. Cards mostly trigger several different actions but which depends on how and where they are deployed. If the cards are merely 'played', they'll go into your discard pile at the end of your turn, but if they can be added into your tableau - for example, by promoting a character to a duty officer - you can instead use their 'activation' ability or benefit from an ongoing passive power. Often you'll need to beam character, ally or cargo cards to a ship, but when you do you benefit only from the traits shown at the top of the card. There are quite a lot of opportunities to trawl draw decks so you aren't just at the mercy of a lucky or unlucky card draw but just be warned that the generally high-reward Encounter cards can vary quite widely: some - for example, The Guardian of Forever - can have a strong impact on your game but relatively low points value, while others - for example, Koala - have zero impact on the game but are worth quite a lot of end-game points.
Each of the captains in Captain's Chair involves a different style of play and, as you might expect, some are more interactive (ie: 'take that) than others, but even if you're playing with the most combative decks you'll still be mostly focused on your own tableau rather than that of your opponent. In short, this is essentially a multiplayer solitaire game, but none the worse for that. There's likely to be initial competition to bring the displayed planet cards into your control or to screw with an opponent by making their acquisitions more difficult but once you've added a system to your tableau (requiring at least three away teams and/or ships, and two more than your opponent) you can expect it to be yours alone for the rest of the game.
This is a deckbuilding game where it's in your interests to recycle your draw deck as quickly and frequently as possible so that you get to add the cards in your reserve and in your development pool. There are lots of ways to score points but the big points come from the cards you've collected with values on their bottom right and in particular with those that score the multiple you've reached on the corresponding track by the end of the game. In our first plays of Captain's Chair we fell so readily into role and so involved in developing our deck to complete missions that we neglected to focus our track development so that it corresponded to the cards we'd added to our deck. It's a rookie ensign error that an experienced starship captain needs to avoid.
In the past there have been some dire board games published to cash in on the Star Trek IP (see, for example, Star Trek: The Final Frontier) but happily that's a thing of the past, with some excellent recent releases. With Captain's Chair following on from games such as Star Trek Discovery Black Alert, Star Trek Missions and even Star Trek Super-Skill Pinball, WizKids are continuing to deliver the Next Generation of engaging games that give a genuine flavour of the franchise.
(Review by Selwyn Ward)