Star Trek: Captain's Chair - To Boldly Go

^{review by Alapai}

Star Trek: Captain’s Chair - To Boldly Go is a 1-2 player game and the second base set for the Star Trek: Captain’s Chair series from WizKids. In it, you take the role of a Captain from the Star Trek universe, trying to best utilize the resources at your disposal in order to be the most successful.

Gameplay

Each Captain in the game has their own unique board and starting cards. The board has missions unique to the Captain and ways to track how much Research, Influence and Military might you acquire along the way, with certain parts on the track earning you Victory Points at the end for each card you have with a Focus in that Specialty. The starting cards will include a Captain, a starting deck of Available cards, Reserve cards that get added to your deck over time, Development cards that can be purchased after your Reserve cards all get added to your deck and then you might have Controlled Locations and Deployed cards you start with in play, Incident cards that get shuffled into the Incident deck or cards that start in your Discard pile. You also set up a Market out of decks of Person cards, Cargo cards, Ship cards and Ally cards, as well as an Incident deck and Encounter deck. There is also a Location deck that gets set up with three Location cards forming a Neutral Zone between the two players. There is also a deck of Stardate cards that act as a timer for the game.

Each turn takes place in 4 steps: Resupply, Control, Action and Clean-up. During the Resupply step, you trigger all of your Resupply operations, most of which are on cards you will get later in the game. During the Control step, you can secure one of the Neutral Locations if you have at least 3 tokens on that Location and have at least 2 more than your opponent. During the Action step, you will be taking most of your turn. You can use a Play operation on a card in your hand to play it to your Staging Area or use operations that are on cards you have that stay in play, like your Captain, Ships, Locations or your Duty Officer. Many of these will have an icon in front of them meaning it costs one action to use the operation. While you can use as many operations as you want on your turn, you are limited to only 3 actions per turn. During the Clean-up step, you trigger all your Clean-up operations, resolve any Stardate cards you have, place a Glory token from the current Stardate card on a Market card, then move cards from your Staging Area to your Discard pile, discard any cards you want to from your hand, draw back up to your hand size and then refresh any exhausted cards you have.

Over the course of the game, you take alternating turns with your opponent. Any time you are told to gain Glory, you take Glory tokens from the current Stardate card. Whenever the Stardate card runs out of tokens, the inactive player takes the Stardate card in their Staging Area and during their Clean-up step, they will resolve the card. Once all the Stardate cards have been emptied of Glory tokens, then you trigger the Resolution. You continue play through the end of the second player’s turn, then each player gets one more turn. After that, you add up Victory Point to determine the winner. Alternatively, if the Incident deck is ever empty, that triggers the Burn and whichever player has fewer Incidents overall is the winner.

Review

As you can see by the length of my gameplay summary, Captain’s Chair is a relatively complex game. Both versions of the game and the Second Contact expansion are all sitting at least at a 4 weight on BoardGameGeek as of my writing this, which indicates a pretty complicated game. For comparison, all the other games I reviewed this year (other than the MtG Beginner Box) are weighted 1-2. And Captain’s Chair does earn that weight. There is a lot to do and a lot to figure out in the game. For example, there is a Cadet Training Mode in the game that allows you to play the game without an opponent (including an AI opponent) where if you get the minimum amount of points the game asks for, it tells you that you understand how to play the game.

The complexity of the game also lends itself to a relatively long play experience. The setup is pretty involved, where you have to do things like set up 7 different decks of common cards. 2 of those decks you just shuffle and place down. 4 of them you shuffle, place down and flip up a card. One of them, the Locations, you have to separate into two separate decks, shuffle the Advanced Locations and place them down, shuffle the Starting Locations and place one on top of the Advanced Locations and then you have to reveal three other Starting Locations to make the Neutral Zone. You also have to set things up for each player, getting the appropriate Crew board, Crew deck and setting up so you have all your different cards, from your Status, Available, Development, Reserve, Controlled Locations, Deployed, Incident Deck and Discard cards in their appropriate places as well as have your Specialty markers, starting Dilithium, Latinum and Glory tokens, Action and Mission Completion tokens and Away Team tokens. Gameplay takes a decent amount of time as well. There are often going to be a lot of decisions on a turn, mostly revolving around which operations you want to use, including action-based operations, and in what order you want to use them. The game claims to be 60-120 minutes and maybe that will eventually become true if you and your opponent both know the game well enough, but I haven’t had any game last less than 2 hours so far.

The front of the box declares the game a deckbuilding game and technically, it is a deckbuilding game. You have a starting deck of cards that you play through, acquire cards over the course of the game and when you run out of cards to draw, you shuffle your discard pile to recreate your draw deck. Unlike most deckbuilding games though, acquiring cards is not one of the more common things you do on a turn. Most deckbuilding games will have acquiring new cards baked into the rules of the game. For example, in Star Realms, your starting deck is mostly ships that provide money and on your turn, you can spend money to purchase cards from the Trade Row. In Captain’s Chair, you obtain cards from the Market only when an ability tells you to Gain or Scan for a type of card (ie Gain a Person or Scan for Klingon). At the very least, you will also obtain cards related to your Captain over the course of the game as whenever you have to recreate your Draw deck, you shuffle your Discard pile, then place the top card of your Reserve deck on top of your Draw deck (or pay the development cost of a Development card if you’ve already obtained all your Reserve cards). So while knowing how deckbuilding games work might help when going from a game like Star Realms to a game like Legendary, it will only help minimally for Captain’s Chair.

Now, if you’re interested in this game, it is most likely because you like Star Trek. While you can play the game without any knowledge of Star Trek, you will lose a lot of the flavor the game adds. Each version of the game has 6 different captains, each with their own flavor, and the Second Contact expansion adds in 3 more. While you can play the game without having watched any Star Trek, you are going to be missing out on why any given Captain’s deck or why any card will work the way it does. If you aren’t up to date on modern Trek, you probably won’t understand why there is an alternate ending called the Burn that triggers with too many Incidents. On the other hand, if you do like Star Trek, the cards are very flavorful with cards representing every era of Trek. Aside from the Captains in this box representing Discovery, Enterprise, the TOS movies and Lower Decks, there are cards like Commander Tysess from Prodigy, Vice Admiral Pasalk from Strange New Worlds, a Kazon ship from Voyager, the Enterprise-C from the TNG episode Yesterday’s Enterprise or the Horta from the Original Series.

I really like Captain’s Chair as a game with a good deal of complexity that plays asymmetrically. While any deckbuilding game will have some differences each game, with different cards available to purchase in any given game, each game of Captain’s Chair starts out with even more difference thanks to the different captains, each of which plays out differently from the others and have even more differences with Basic and Advanced versions of each (except Khan who is only Advanced and plays more differently than any of the others). While it may take a bit of time to understand what’s happening and what you are doing, the game does start to flow better once you get a feel for how a turn works. Then, you can plan out your turn and what things you are trying overall to accomplish in between turns and make the game a bit faster.

Storage

With To Boldly Go, I didn’t condense the game as much as I did for many of the others I reviewed this year. Like with A Gentle Rain, I instead just found a box that worked better for me. The insert that comes with the box is pretty bad. It’s a generic plastic insert that doesn’t fit sleeved cards all that well and is barely able to hold everything once sleeved. What I found was the Ultimate Guard Star Trek Galileo Collectors Case, which is designed to hold 8 of their Squaroes boxes (which do horrify me). The Collectors Case is the same width as the original box, while a little taller and a little less deep. While the Collectors Case can stretch to fit all of the boards in To Boldly Go, I also got Second Contact which adds 3 more boards and made it even less feasible to use the case to hold the boards as well. Instead, I have them in the Second Contact box for now while I try and find another box that could fit them well.

Conclusion

Captain’s Chair has quickly become one of my favorite games. Like Eclipse, another game I love, it is a complicated game with a long setup and long playtime, but has very rewarding gameplay. If you want a 2-player, asymmetric game set in the Star Trek universe and are okay with longer multi-hour games, then Captain’s Chair is definitely a game to look into.

To Boldly Go, the original and Second Contact are available now on our wesbtore.