How to play Starcadia Quest: Showdown

Starcadia Quest: Showdown is an arena combat miniatures game.

Title: Starcadia Quest: Showdown

Year Published: 2020

Designer: Leo Almeida, Thiago Aranha, Guilherme Goulart, Eric M. Lang, Fred Perret

Publisher: CMON

Players: 2-4

Game Time: ~60 mins

Set-up Time: ~5 minutes

Ages: 14+

Theme: Sci-Fi

Mechanisms: Dice Rolling

How to win: Get 3 kills

Game Description

Showdown is not about going on an arduous quest to defeat evil monsters, no siree! Showdown introduces a new mode: full Player-versus-Player deathmatches that will see players draft & pick all-new Upgrade tokens and enter a vicious arena to battle enemy Crews!

How to play Starcadia Quest: Showdown

How to play Starcadia Quest: Showdown includes the rules changes for 2 or 3/4 player games and how to play with the Build-A-Bot Expansion.

Theme

The Arcadia Quest and Starcadia Quest world is great fun. The cartoony element, especially the chibi nature of the characters puts people off I think. But under is a fun world with lots of crazy and wacky characters. the stories are fairly sensible, the weapons and abilities are all quite realistic… As realistic as sci-fi and fantasy can be.

Starcadia Quest: Showdown is set in a holodeck style room that allows Arcadia Quest characters to play is perfect.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is fine. You put things out and players draft characters or whatever.

Strangely, the Starcadia Quest rulebook is really good. But, the Showdown rulebook itself is really lacking in clarification.

Components & Artwork

Excellent as usual. Here is an unboxing of Showdown itself where you can see what the components inside the box look like. There isn’t much to be fair but there is everything you need to use.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

I always think the hardest part of these games is teaching line of sight, movement and what happens if a space is full. games like these have different rules for different situations.

Here, they are easy and as I like the system so much is the only one I keep so not much to remember! 🙂 I’d love to have the money and space to keep Adrenaline but also have full sets of Funkoverse, Unmatched and other similar games, but I don’t.

It’s all open information so should be very few accessibility issues.

Starcadia Quest: Showdown Summary

This kicked Adrenaline out of my collection. That is a VERY good arena combat shooter with deterministic combat and excellent scoring, ammo and weapon reloading system.

But this issue is, is that is all that it is, a one-off game. I was hoping they would bring in competition modes so you could play over several games and have some persistent scoring system.

The good thing about Showdown is that it’s an expansion to an already very good game. It adds VERY few components outside of those you already get in the base game so it barely takes up any space. (I’ve crammed it all into one half-size box).

Also, this combat system is one of my favourites. You have the exploding dice which means even the slimmest of chances is still possible. You can have 1 defence die and fend off 5 damage if you’re lucky. If you manage it the whole table will cheer… Except for the person that damaged you maybe.

Starcadia Quest: Showdown Round-Up

Taking one of my favourite gaming systems and making it so I can play it outside a campaign is great. I’ll mark it down due to the lack of Monsters etc but it’s still very fun.

Rating I give it 8/10