- Original Release: 2011
- Developer: Mike Elliott, Bryan Kinsella, Ethan Pasternack
- Publisher: WizKids
- Platform: Board Game
One of the big Star Trek board games. This came with 24 miniatures, a ton of cards and is quite an in-depth game. There’s a focus on both exploration and combat, with the board starting out as completely hidden. It’s a 1v1 game (although you can play as 2v2).
Setup takes a bit of time, sorting out the map. You don’t get to choose your initial ships, instead you draw them at random until you have 10 points (or an agreed amount). Mission types are based on the ships drawn. You then pick four decks of cards to become your abilities for that game.
When you reach a new tile, there’s a random chance of an encounter, which you draw from the encounter deck. These will usually be challenges you have to face by the ship’s abilities – which can be altered by twisting the base – cards, and crew assigned to the ship. Checks involves adding these abilities and rolling the dice. While this is all a bit random it’s a lot of fun, but I feel it doesn’t suit the 1v1 nature of this game.
Combat also uses this system, pitting your ship’s weapons stat against the opponent’s shield stat (with dice rolls added). Destroying enemy ships nets you a victory point, but the opponent can draw a new ship and their fleet strength goes up as well. Your focus will be on completing missions instead, creating a lot of variety in how you play.
There’s a lot of good things about Fleet Captains, but for me the weakest aspect is the 1v1 or 2v2 nature of it mixed with the randomness. I personally think this would work better as a co-op game.
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A great game! I still own my copy. To this day, I still maintain that it does the best job at nailing the feel of the Star Trek franchise out of all the ST boardgames I’ve tried. I really get the sense that I’m playing out an episode of one of the shows.
One of my favourite games, that I sadly haven’t played in ages