Solar Titans
- Board's Eye View
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Solar Titans, from SunnySideUp Games, is a tableau-building deckbuilding card game with a spaceship combat theme. Unlike other space-themed deckbuilders like Star Realms (Wise Wizard) you're not dealing here with fleets of space ships but you're instead focused on direct head-to-head ship-to-ship combat.
Tho' the mechanics of Solar Titans follow pretty much standard deckbuilder rules, including identical starter decks and cards that let you customise your deck by buying other cards from a market display, this game feels very different from others in the genre. That's because you're not just building and refining your deck, you're also using the cards to augment, repair and manage your ship. Each weapon on a ship can fire once per turn but you'll need to arm a weapon with an appropriate crew card before you can fire it. Each weapon is of a specific attack type, so you'll need to target your weapons accordingly. Likewise you'll want to organise your ship's defences, having an eye to the weapons that your opponent(s) are deploying. Many of the cards are effectively single use (for example, the mercenary weapon crews) and part of the tactics of this game is optimising their use.
Xian Wu and Phillip Gee have designed Solar Titans to be played in various different ways. You can play with up to four players as a 'free for all' (everyone attacking everyone), as a 2 vs 2 team game, and solo or cooperative against one of the tough-to-beat automata ships. For us tho' this game is at its best as a two-player head-to-head combat game. As you take the command decisions to adapt your ship and out-think your opponent in the two-player game, you can easily imagine yourself in the position of Captain Kirk commanding the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek episode 'Balance of Terror'.
Players who can keep a mental note of what cards their opponent has bought, drawn, played and still have in their draw pile will have a strong advantage, but ultimately you may well find that you need to pull off one or two push-your-luck gambles to secure victory. Several of our plays at Board's Eye View ended up as wars of attrition, with both players' ships crippled from battle and struggling to survive. In those games we felt more like Captain Janeway in the Star Trek Voyager episodes 'Year of Hell'.
Aside from the different ways of playing, the game comes with a good variety of ship starting layouts, adding to replayability, tho' whichever ship design you start with you're certain to end up with a very different ship by the end of each game as you add cards to augment and upgrade your ship's weapons and defences. You've got mostly free rein over what goes where, provided you keep your ship design with a 5 x 5 card grid.
Solar Titans is a tactical tussle but it's easy to teach and learn, and you can expect most games to run to around 30 minutes. SunnySideUp are bringing the reprint for Solar Titans to Kickstarter on 15 April, and the campaign promises to include some exciting new upgrade cards. Click here to check it out.