• Game: Star Trek: Fleet Captains
• Publisher: WizKids
• Designer: Mike Elliot, Bryan Kinsella, Ethan Pasternak
• Genre: Adventure-tinged 4X
• Players: 2-4 (definitely best with 2)
• Playtime: 90-120 minutes



• What's Hot: Great “epic” Trek concept with lots of content; several cool design ideas including customizable action card decks; manageable rules/play time



• What's Not: Mechanics and systems never seem to mesh quite right; click bases; too many “+1”-type cards; production and quality issues; $100 MSRP

by: Michael Barnes

With 24 unique click-base starship models and a host of cards featuring characters ranging from Captain James T. Kirk to Wesley Crusher packed in a huge box adorned with an image of the Enterprise blasting a Klingon Vessel, Wizkids’ Star Trek: Fleet Captains is set to stun. And so too is the $100 price tag, particularly in light of the uneven production values and quality control issues that have unfortunately marred what is certainly the company’s most ambitious entry in the board games marketplace to date. It’s definitely an impressive game, not just because the designers have attempted to pack in so much of the unique Trek character and tone but also because it’s done in a relatively manageable set of rules and a reasonable play time.

The game covers a lot of classic Trek material, drawing primarily from the original series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. It’s sort of a temporal mish-mash, so don’t get too upset when there are two versions of the Enterprise on the board and you’ve got both Kirk and Picard on your team. There are plenty of events straight from the shows and films- fans will be pleased to see the Tribbles and Q show up during the game’s adventure- as well as more generic space anomalies and situations to discover and either shoot, research, or reason with.

But the game isn’t looking to recreate any specific storyline or narrative arc, rather its goal is to offer a fairly simple 4X-style space game focused on managing a small fleet of several vessels attempting to accomplish mission cards that fall into three dispositions (Science, Influence, and Combat). There are also opportunities to explore uncharted areas of the hex-based space map, send away teams of red shirts planetside, and to set up permanent installations that can be upgraded and developed at strategic locations. There’s really a lot to do, and the options give the game a great sense of scope even when the available actions are pretty simple and abstract.

It’s a two player or two team game, with one side taking control of the Federation and the other the Klingon Empire and at the outset of the game 40-card Command decks are assembled from a number of ten card packets, all with a different theme corresponding to the functions or advantages offered by their actions. You can tailor your available action cards to match up with the missions you’ve drawn, which are based in turn on which ships you’re sending out into the Final Frontier. The limited deck construction concept is a good idea, but this is also where the game starts to run into some problems.

There’s a lot of content in the game... all of those command cards, hex tiles with a range of different effects, planets, or hazards to encounter, and a whole pile of adventures with different requirements and narrative. But the problem is that a lot of it feels redundant, with many cards and effects offering only different modifiers, penalties, or bonuses and it’s really not much more than a dressed-up card-flip adventure game at heart. Too often the game falls on old fashioned resolution models where you’re fudging to-hit numbers up and down, and although the pictures are cool and the layout says “Trek”, it’s actually not very thematic. It gets weird when the content starts to feel stretched thin- the mission cards seem to reward almost every possible action in the game, eventually. Even taking damage.

The click-based ships, unfortunately, turn out to be a good concept that feels like a bust as well. The dials track each ship’s four systems (weapons, shields, sensors, and movement) and these numbers can be adjusted one time during a ship’s turn. The numbers are added to a die roll to check for success or failure of various tasks including combat. So cranking up the weapons on the Excelsior might drain its shields and make it more or less worthless as a survey ship, at least for that turn. There is no limit on the adjustment, as long as the dial stays within three banded ranges of damage. White is an all systems normal state, with Yellow Alert and Red Alert restricting the choice of where to set the dial.