Ensigns can be promoted to commanders by spending 3 medals. These upgraded units can be used to activate a room twice or bring across a matching coloured ensign from the queue into the ready room, allowing for more actions on future turns. Your crew consists of ensigns and cadets. Ensigns are coloured in either red, blue or yellow and are used to activate matching rooms of their colour.

Each player starts the game with their own ship which contains spaces for medals, upgrade rings, mission cards and a queue path to push your crew after use. The basic blue action is to research technology, and the variability of the tech market is the game’s best feature. Taking a technology from the market of eight cards doesn’t cost a thing, and the tech is added to a tech board with six available slots. Over the course of play, adding technologies gives you three different options: There are moments of compelling, puzzly squeeze as you try to figure out if you can wring an extra move out of your crew, grab a useful tech card, or perhaps promote an ensign to give you a double action. Sometimes other players snap up a mission you have assembled to perfect crew for, or grab the piece of tech that was going to synergise perfectly with your turn.Final Score: 3.5 Stars – A well-produced game with a fun theme, but it’s hard to pin down what it excels at. The small coloured ships consist of 3 small cardboard pieces that need to be folded over and clipped together. Folding these small cardboard bits over and sliding them together can be risky as they could be damaged rather easily. Starship Captains puts players in control of Enterprise-like starships working together in the faction known as the Cooperative (in part because I’m guessing “Federation” was taken!). Recently promoted to the rank of Captain, each player has command of a small crew of specialists from across the universe.

After using your crew to activate a room or complete a mission, they slide around the path and form a queue. When a new round begins you slide everyone towards the ready area and leave 3 again at the starting positions.Finally when players have exhausted all their options, or even before if they want to save some crew, they can pass. After everyone has done this a new round begins. Among the other rewards for various deeds (points, androids, artifacts, influence, etc.), each captain can also accrue medals. These can be spent to promote cadets to ensigns, trading their gray, unimpressive miniature for one color-coded ensign of your choice. But medals can also be spent to promote an ensign to the rank of commander, which is awesome! Commanders can work twice as hard as ensigns (for double the effect), or can even command other ensigns of their specialty to zip out of the queue and into the ready room, giving you more flexibility and control over your available actions. Starship Captains has clearly had a lot of love put into its production. It’s disappointing, then, that the overall experience doesn’t quite hang together. A space-themed board game with thematic similarities to the beloved sci-fi television series Star Trek – particularly its focus upon the wonders of space exploration – Starship Captains will support two to four players in a tabletop title about adventures in the galaxy.