game over man, game over!

Tonight John, Emory, Tony, and I played Starcraft: The Board Game for the first time ever. I wish I could say it was fantastic fun, but it wasn’t. For the benefit of the makers of the game who may or may not be reading my blog, I have divided up my complaints into a few major points below:

STBG is too convoluted.
So, you have your planets, one of which is your starting planet and upon which you place your starting base — in one of the 2-4 “areas.” Then you have your order tokens, SPECIAL order tokens, base tokens, worker tokens, transport tokens, module/upgrade tokens, building tokens, dozens of plastic figures for units, resource cards, technology card deck, combat card deck, and your faction sheet. On top of those things you need to keep track of your conquest points (which, in the Starcraft environment don’t seem to make any sense.) There simply is too much going on, and too many fucking tokens to keep track of it all. I still have no idea what the cryptic symbols on my upgrade token meant. K.I.S.S.

STBG is SLOW.
Setting up the board and distributing / setting up our respective piles of tokens and cards took an hour. Sixty minutes. Granted, it was our first time ever and likely will only take 20 minutes next time, but it still has a substantial learning curve simply to get everything started. Each turn then comprised of three phases — planning, execution, and regrouping. During the planning phase you set up your order tokens in little stacks on whatever planets you want to build units on / invade / etc. This is a fairly quick process. Execution, on the other hand, sucks. People play their orders — initiating combat (more on that later), shuffling through cards to research technologies, building workers / units / bases / structures, and move units around the board. This involves a lot of waiting around, unless you take that time to study your own cards and potentially miss an important development.

Combat in STBG sucks.
The process itself involves aligning units against each other in formation and drawing, then playing combat cards. This takes a while. If you have four units attacking four other units, you have four completely separate skirmishes set up which all resolve individually and may result in a situation where a sole surviving zealot causes three hydralisks and a zergling to flee in terror. Stupid. Units themselves do not have any base stats (despite the seemingly useless listing of “average stats” for units on a quick reference card) so it is entirely possible to have an ültralisk lose to a firebat if you happen to place or draw a shitty card for it. That is retarded. Instead, units should utilize some form of base stats, and build off of it with the combat/technology cards. Or, simply scrap combat cards altogether. Assuming you lose a battle, the losses are catastrophic. Not only do you lose the units, you potentially can lose your base (and consequently, the ability to gather resources from the planet), and all workers which were harvesting from it. When you start with seven workers, losing four sets you back one to two turns. When the game lasts only three turns, … well … that’s just poor design.

Suddenly, it’s over.
At the end of our third turn — over three hours after we began — we drew two event cards which ended the game. Just like that. In a game which takes so long to set up, which takes multiple turns to make any reasonable progress, it is absolutely ridiculous to have the game simply end at the snap of fingers. Perhaps they were trying to emulate the experience of everyone but one person going linkdead. In the three hours we played none of us progressed past the second tech tier with any of our buildings, meaning we had perhaps three different types of units altogether.

In conclusion..
I think STBG could be a fun game but will most certainly require some user-modifications to the rules to speed things up and make combat less shitty. With D&D Minis this was easily accomplished by lowering the point and unit limits. I’m not entirely certain yet what we will need to do to fix STBG up next time. I wouldn’t spend the $80 for it yet (unless you really want some purple and green Hydralisk minis) but if you are considering spending three hours playing a Starcraft-themed board game, you probably have nothing to lose by trying it out if a friend of yours already owns it.