Congratulations, Captain! Your promotion is well deserved. Now, it’s time to get to work! Gather your crew, roam around the galaxy, and really show off your skills to all those other captains. You’ll need to complete missions, upgrade your ship, defeat pirates, and more in order to prove you are the coolest captain in the cosmos!

What Is It?

Action Selection w/ Workers – Each turn, players will use their ready workers to either activate a room or complete a mission. Basic rooms allow the player to move, defeat a pirate, gain a tech card, or repair ship damage. Tech cards may have additional options for rooms, or other ongoing abilities instead. Rooms must be activated by a worker of the matching type (color).

If players move on the main board to a planet with a mission, they reserve it to complete on a later turn. Missions require a certain number of workers, and using matching colored workers will get the player various bonuses/benefits.

Worker Upgrades – Players can spend medals on their turn to change the color of a workers, allowing them to match the actions a player may need to do, or promote a worker to a commander, allowing them to do extra actions on a turn, such as doubling their benefits, or calling down another worker from the queue.

Track Movement – Players will be able to earn diplomacy rewards throughout the game to move forward on the 3 faction tracks, earning them various bonuses during the game, and points at the end of the game.

‘Hand’ Management – As players use workers, they will return them to their queue in the order they were used. At the end of each round, players will slide their crew into the ready room until only 3 remain in the queue. Since players always know the order of their queue, they can try to play their workers in a particular order to better manage their available crew types and set themselves up for the next round.

Engine/Tableau Building – Tech cards give players more rooms to activate, or ongoing bonuses such as track movement when they complete a certain colored mission. So, picking up cards that can play off of each other, or compound together, might be a good strategy to get more bonuses.

Who Is It For?

  • 1 to 4 Players – I’m not huge on the solo myself, but it’s fine and overall the game scales well at any player count
  • Ages 12 and Up – Fun theme for everyone; the game has decent room for strategy without being too heavy, so it’s fairly accessible
  • Fans of action selection and planning ahead to try and maximize your turns

Variants

Solo Mode – A solo action deck is included which is just a simple AI player that takes a turn until they run out of moves, the same way a player would. The human player will also use one of the included Passenger cards which may remove some tech cards from the deck,. and give the player a certain bonus or penalty at game end. The AI player will take tech cards, fight pirates, complete missions, or have the passenger take an action. It’s very simple to upkeep and plays much the same as the normal game. I just found myself having a more fun experience playing with others because I like watching the different strategies at the table, so it isn’t one I’d play solo much myself. But if you’re primarily a solo player, and the game sounds cool to you, it’s definitely a good variant!

PROS

  • Aesthetics – Love the look/art/colors on everything; very bright and fun
  • Components – Nice dual layer player ships, good quality plastic and cardboard components across the board
  • Game Flow – Plays really smoothly, turns are fairly quick and snappy
  • Variability – There are a lot of tech and mission cards which keep each game fresh; you can try different strategies/focus on different things depending on what is available
  • Epilogue – I think it’s super fun that you can read a little snippet of your Captain’s story based on how you scored
  • Theme – Works well for the game; fun to fly around space
  • I like that the mission locations rotate and you can see where the next one will come out
  • I also appreciate that if you’re the first person to a mission, you automatically reserve it and no one can take it from under you. I think that takes a lot of pressure off and doesn’t create an unnecessary “race” element
  • Many paths to victory

CONS

  • Table hog
  • Slight first player advantage as you have your pick of the first available missions or tech cards
  • Some tech cards definitely seem more powerful than others, which is odd since they don’t have costs of any kind
  • The game feels a little too short. You only get 1 new worker in rounds 3 and 4, and missions often use up 3 of your available workers, meaning you may run out of options early in a round. Commanders help with this a bit, since they can do “double work” essentially, but still, I wish there was another round, or an easier way to get a few more workers so I could do more

Final Thoughts

I feel like, for some reason, I found it hard to put into words what exactly I like about this game. I just find it really charming! I keep going back for more plays, and I have a great experience every time, win or lose.

I enjoy trying to get the right combination of workers to get bonuses on missions, and I’m also a big fan of going for track movement to get those bonuses and points. There are so many options in this game, which I love, and I have seen people win from focusing on missions this time, tracks the next time, omega tech cards another time, and more!

I wouldn’t call the game short (my average play time is 75 minutes, mostly playing at 4, but I’ve played at all player counts), but I still wish it was a bit longer, perhaps an extra round, because I’m always excited to do more and that last round comes too quickly!

Overall, I love the look, love the gameplay, and just think it’s pretty rad!

Additional Information:
My Final Rating – 8/10

Designer – Peter B. Hoffgaard
Artists – Mergen Erdenebayar, Jiří Mikovec, Radim Pech, Jakub Politzer, František Sedláček
Publisher – Czech Games Edition
MSRP – $59.95
Website

*I was provided a copy of this game to do this review*

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