• Game: Battleship: Galaxies: The Saturn Offensive Game Set
• Publisher: Hasbro
• Designer: Craig Van Ness with Colby Dauch and Jerry Hawthorne
• Genre: Tactical spaceship combat
• Players: 2-4
• Playtime: 45-90 minutes



• What's Hot: World class production including plastic miniatures and a comic book; simple, accessible rules with unexpected detail, tremendous potential for expansion; great for kids



• What's Not: Accessibility comes at the expense of depth and meaningful detail; missed opportunity to include official advanced rules; expansions may or may not actually happen depending on how the game sells

by: Michael Barnes

Battleship: Galaxies, new on store shelves courtesy of Hasbro/Milton Bradley, is a very unlikely attempt by the largest corporation involved in board games publishing to not only renew the Battleship brand (as in, “you sank my battleship!”) but also to gain some traction in the hobby market. The crack design team comprised of Craig Van Ness (Heroscape) along with Colby Dauch (Summoner Wars) and Jerry Hawthorne have created a highly playable and appealing tactical space combat game, which is no small feat considering that games of this type tend to veer sharply into esoteric rules and unassailable complexity.

It’s a great-looking package with 20 painted spaceship miniatures perched atop plastic stands and damage-tracking bases, hovering over the cold reaches of space depicted on the starkly empty game boards. A graphic novel, penned by popular Batman writer Chuck Dixon, sets the space opera stage for the battles between the ISN and the Wretechedarians. Guess which ones are the bad guys. Well-written and illustrated rules appear complex at a first read, but the directness of the energy point-driven resource system, card play, and basic processes for movement and combat describe an easy, kid-friendly game that will also please hobbyists—provided they aren’t looking for anything more than a somewhat flat shoot-em-up.

Despite its lack of depth, Battleship: Galaxies is a kind of game that I have wanted to play for a very long time: a spaceship-to-spaceship battle game that doesn’t require binders of rules, tons of miniatures, or a physics degree to enjoy. The good news is that the game is exactly that. It’s a very fun, neat game that works in some surprising details like a zone-of-control electronic countermeasures rule that controls proximities, differentiation between shield and hull damage, a card-driven boarding mechanic, asteroids, heroic captains, and ship differentiation along class and experience level. And it does all of this without overwhelming the game with process or exception.

However, once the “wow” factor subsides and a couple of games all go down along the same path—ships clumping together in the center of the board without much maneuvering, blasting the bejeezus out of each other while players hold hands of situational ineffectual or superfluous cards—some limitations become apparent that suggest the accessibility that is the game’s prime asset is also its greatest liability.

Without rules for facing, firing arcs, vector movement in a three-dimensional space, damage locations, energy distribution between ship systems, or other finer details the game constantly feels like you’re playing the “Basic” game and when you go to look for the “Advanced” rules, they’re not there. Because the game simply doesn’t, at this stage, support the kinds of details that make the more complex tactical space battle games so interesting.

But these details are also the root cause of the rules bulk that has relegated games like Star Fleet Battles in particular to the “rarely played” column, even among hobby gamers. It’s easy to understand why so much of the more technical material hit the cutting room floor, but I can’t shake the feeling that there simply should be more to the game. For example, the combat system calls for a player to select a weapon (either primary or secondary ship-based weapons or an additional weapon from an attached card) and then roll coordinate dice. The roll is cross-referenced with a chart displaying a silhouette of the ship and if it’s in a gray area, it’s a hit. Damage initially reduces shields and then hull, but on each ship there are one or two boxes indicating critical hits locations- instant kills. It wouldn’t have required much rules weight to also assign a box to each ship’s diagram that would damage engines, incurring a movement penalty. Or that would knock out weapons systems, affect life support and increase the ship’s activation cost, or disable its ECM system.