Star Trek: Fleet Captains First Impressions

Star Trek: Fleet Captains is in Space, the final frontier…

These are the voyages of Wizkid’s poorly constructed miniatures.

Actually, they’re not too bad, for Wizkids. Wizkids has a bad name for making minis.

Each player begins play with a fleet of ships and starts at opposite ends of an unexplored sector of space. This sector of space is represented by hexegonal cards (which are shuffled before play and placed face-down in a pre-determined pattern). As each ship progresses through the sector, you turn the tiles face up, revealing what is in that part of the sector (a Class-M planet, a Class-J Nebula, empty space, etc…). Hopefully you will discover and acquire resources while simultaneously denying them to your opponent(s).

When conflict inevitably breaks out, you and your opponent(s) will battle it out for sector supremacy. Last fleet standing wins the sector for their respective faction.

Each ship will be on a base with a dial and accompanied by a “Ship Card”. The Card denotes three different statuses for each ship; normal operating, Yellow Alert, and Red Alert. Each status affects how your dial plays as well as how the game and your opponents interact with you.

There is also a deck of cards involved that each player brings with their fleet, and these are used during gameplay to affect the outcome of battles, player interactions, etc…

This game is also marketed as a non-collectible, non-blind product but will also be built upon the expandable board game model.

Star Trek: Fleet Captains Summary

I like flying around, exploring the galaxy, finding plants, building bases and resolving encounters. I also like that Klingons can cloak and ping themselves so Star Fleet won’t know where they are for sure.

The victory points were a little random I feel. We (Star Fleet) won due to VERY lucky victory point cards so that helped me enjoy the game. Had I been on the other side I would have thought it was a bit weird.

Update 19/05/2018

I remember this fondly just with the random scoring problem. I haven’t played Attack Wing, Frontier or Ascendancy but Star Trek: Fleet Captains does give a ‘Star Trek’ feel.

The table is a mess with those cards.s When you have cards making up the board and you move plastic over them they move and it gets messy. But as cool as it was playing as Star Fleet. Breaking a mini taking it out of the box and that terrible random scoring is the thing I’ll remember the game for.

I was so nervous turning the dial on the base. I had no idea of the best place to grip the mini to do it. You can’t hold the figure itself, or even the stand. You had to hold the base while also trying to turn the base, it was awkward!

While I’m being picky, I’m not a fan of 2v2 games, I’d rather play everyone for themselves or just set a side 1v1 time. But that is me being really picky.

But hey, if you really like Star Trek you will like this a lot.

Jesta ThaRogue