Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This game is based on the Starcraft computer game. As such, it does a great job of modeling the concepts and gameplay of Starcraft in a tabletop environment. It uses a combination of game tiles, figurines, cards, and cardboard chits to represent the Starcraft game.
If you don't have an experienced player to guide you, plan on taking a whole day to learn this game. Once everyone knows the game, plan on 2-3 hours per game.
The game is of quality construction - almost all the Starcraft units are represented with plastic figures, along with cardboard punch-outs representing things like planets and buildings, and finally sets of cards that represent technology, random events, and unit combat power.
The basic board consists of laying down 2 planets per player, with a starting base on 1 planet. Planets are connected, but require a transport to move units between. Planets have areas on them, each area either has crystal, Vespene gas, or conquest points players struggle to control. You will build, move, research, and battle in order to achieve victory later in the game.
Though it takes time and a lot of reading, the rules are logical and consistent, so once you start understanding the phases of a turn and the subtleties of the rules, you begin to appreciate the amount of strategy available - just like in the computer game. You can try to rush, expand, build mass air, turtle up. A lot of the computer game concepts translate quite well into the board game.
Even the real-time nature of the game is modeled in the game. Players take turn laying down "order" tokens on planets. Nobody knows what each others orders are, but the orders on a planet stack up, and during the execution phase, the orders are revealed one at a time. In this way, an element of interactive surprise causes you to adjust your plans on the fly based on what someone else just did.
Battles are resolved by pairing attackers and defenders figures, and using cards for each pairing to represent health & combat power, as well as any special bonuses that might come from researched technology. Thus battle is sort of a mini card game. There is an element of luck here, in that at any given time you will only have a subset of cards in your hands to use in combat, but all players can shape their hand and add more powerful cards to their deck as the game progresses.
The game has some nice touches, like modeling cloaking and detection, and including special units like the Zerg queen or Protoss Archon, and the Terran nuke strike.
The learning curve is steep, but once you get through a couple turns of play, you really start to feel like the game is incredibly deep - with lots of strategy options.
This game is much more complicated than any other game I have played (e.g. Settlers of Catan), but this ends up providing much more strategic depth then other games. Recommended if you like deep games in general, and Starcraft in particular.
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Starcraft: The Board GameWhether you choose to lead the versatile Terran, mysterious Protoss, or voracious Zerg, in Starcraft: The Board Game you'll command an army like no other in the universe. Once again, Fantasy Flight Games brings one of the world's best-loved computer games to your tabletop. Players take control of the Protoss, Terran, or Zerg and battle across multiple worlds. True to the Starcraft legacy, each of the three races features a unique and distinctive play style, and the inclusion of two distinct factions for each race allows for up to six players to compete for galactic dominance at a time.
With over 180 plastic figures and dozens of unit types, Starcraft: The Board Game features an innovative modular board of varying sizes which guarantees a new experience each and every game. An exciting card driven combat system allows players to modify and upgrade their faction with a wealth of powerful technologies. Players can unleash a Zergling rush, use powerful Protoss shields to halt an enemy invasion, or even send cloaked Ghosts out to guide nuclear missiles to their target.
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