Star Realms: Frontiers First Impressions
Star Realms: Frontiers gives you solo, co-op and competitive modes all in one tiny box.
It’s deck building in space.
Star Realms is a fast-paced game of space battles where you use the Ships and Bases you acquire to either generate more Trade, or to generate Combat to attack your opponent and their Bases. When you reduce your opponent’s score (called Authority) to zero, you win!
Star Realms: Frontiers Game Play
This game can be played competitively with players trying to bring each other Authority (like Life Points) down to 0. They do this by attacking each other with ships they buy from the Trade Row.
The game can also be played solo or co-op against an automated opponent among other options.
But, I played solo so I’m going to look at that. Playing cards and things are almost the same in both games, but the solo game only changes in how you handle the opponent.
I played against the Automatons. Each comes with a page in the rulebook and a card with all their rules on and how they operate.
A human player will draw cards and can play any of them in any order. Cards with a Trade symbol give you that much ‘money’ and Combat gives you, well, combat.
Each card belongs to a certain Faction and may have a bonus ability if you play an Ally of that faction that turn. Each of the 4 Factions has their own speciality.
New to Frontiers are double ally abilities. Here you need to play 2 cards from a faction to activate their ability.
There are also two types of cards that stay in play, horizontally, and give you ongoing abilities.
Bases stay in play, give you abilities and can be attacked by your opponent. They have a life total and if destroyed they’re put in the discard pile. Some bases are Outposts which your opponent MUST attack before attacking you directly.
Challenge Rules
On the bots turn, you’ll draw a card from the deck and resolve it. As the game progresses, the bot will draw more and more cards on a turn.
The actions the bot will take will depend on the rules of that particular opponent. The Automatons, being the ‘starter bot’ basically turn everything into Attack power. Instead of drawing additional cards they gain Attack, instead of Trade they gain Attack etc
They also have rules laid out for the order of attack. Usually Player, then Outpost, then Base or something like that.
Reduce it to 0 Authority to win.
Theme
The theme is space and each of the factions has a back story which is cool.
I’m not a sci-fi guy, but more on that in the summary below.
Setup & Rulebook
Setup CAN be fiddly if you don’t put the game away correctly. Be sure to separate the different cards out.
You need to sort out players starting hands, scoring cards, the main deck and then boss cards.
The rulebook is great. It explains everything well in a decent order.
Components & Artwork
Cards, cards and more cards. Decent quality card too. The box is really nice, all White Wizard boxes of this type seem really sturdy.
The art is really nice for sci-fi art. Again, I’ll address the sci-fi thing in the summary.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
Very simple. It’s a standard deck building game really so teaching is easy. The tricky part is explaining how faction abilities work which can be tough to explain. Where damage is assigned too, it can be tricky to remember Outposts etc
It’s very accessible. Even though a player has a hand of cards in a competitive game you can reveal before playing. This will allow you to help your opponent with the abilities of the cards in their hand.
Of course, these cards can be explained before being purchased which are again, face up.
Star Realms: Frontiers Summary
So here’s the thing, I’m not a sci-fi guy. My favourite deck build is
I just prefer fantasy over sci-fi and I doubt Robert Dougherty will mind me marking down Star Realms for one of his other games.
I like its low complexity and speed. Deckbuilding games have evolved to a point where they’re hard work. You’re not just playing cards well to achieve a goal, you’re restricted to a point where it’s not fun.
But it’s not a mindless game, the way the Factions work together is something to consider. When playing co-op or competitive you won’t always have your choice of Faction available so you may need to change it up game to game.
So it’s good, very good but only Hero Realms is preventing me adding it to my collection. 🙂
Jesta Tha Rogue
A copy of Star Realms: Frontiers was provided by White Wizard Games, a big thank you to them for this game.
