There is no shortage of Star Trek fans in the Board's Eye View team so any game with evocations of Trek has an immediate appeal with us, whether it's an 'officially licensed game like Star Trek: Missions (WizKids) or one that's merely inspired by Star Trek, like The Captain is Dead (Alderac Entertainment Group). Designed by Peter B Hoffgaard, Starship Captains is in the latter category, but there's no denying its homage to Star Trek, with crew mirroring the colour-coded uniforms of the original TV series and its starship playing pieces, each looking like squat versions of the USS Enterprise. And there are clues too if you were still in any doubt, including a mission card where the crew are tasked with foraging for Roddenberries...
In Starship Captains, the 1-4 players are moving their starship across the galaxy (board) and deploying their crew members with their yellow, blue and red uniform specialties to complete missions. The missions are laid out randomly at the start of each game from a generous deck that offers ample variety and replayability, and each card is beautifully illustrated by the team of artists: Roman Bednář, Mergen Erdenebayar, Alena Kubíková, Jiří Kůs, Jiří Mikovec, Radim Pech, Jakub Politzer and František Sedláček. As well as its end-game points value, each mission carries its own rewards for meeting its specialty requirements. Typically this may include advancement on one or more of the tracks on which players will be trying to progress, but it can also include, for example, the ability to warp to any location on the board: a great way of avoiding the pesky space pirates that prey on ships traversing the space lanes...
The ship-shape player boards incorporate a queue for crew members, so when you assign a queue member for an action, they go into a queue which determines which crew members will be available to you on a future turn: you get back all your crew except for the three at the back of the line. You can trade in medals to switch crew members' specialties and to promote a crew member from ensign to officer to increase their effectiveness but, ultimately, your turn is one of optimising the use of the crew you have available to you.
In addition to the missions, you'll be battling space pirates and you'll be collecting cargo. Pairs of matching colours on cargo tiles can be used to substitute for a crew action of that colour. However, cargo space, along with space for improved technology (cards) will be limited by the damage taken by your starship, so you will want to have your crew take periodic repair actions. Tech cards give various benefits but their selection and placement also incorporates an additional optimisation puzzle because you'll reap additional bonuses - extra movement, a medal or a free repair action - if you match up adjacent symbols on the cards.
CGE's Starship Captains is a fun game. It's competitive, in that you're trying to end up with more points than the other players, but you're all members of the same 'starfleet' and there's no 'take that' ship-versus-ship interaction. With just two players you may well find you're both busy tackling missions in different parts of the board. As you increase the player count, you increase the prospect that competing players may have eyes on the same mission, but that's pretty much the extent of the interaction. But then that friendly competition is true to the utopian spirit of Star Trek.