Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Like many successful deckbuilder games, Star Trek Captain’s Chair adapts proven game mechanics – in this case, from Imperium’s civilization-building system – and reimagines them through a new thematic lens. While Imperium explores broad themes of the rise and fall of empires, Captain’s Chair distills the same core systems into a streamlined duel peppered with all things Star Trek.
And the word “streamline” carries a lot here. Star Trek Captain’s Chair may be more approachable than Imperium, but it remains a deeply intricate asymmetrical game. This isn’t a mere clone of Ascension or Dominion. Each card is a holodeck of possibilities, with some of them presenting up to five different options. You also need to master an extensive vocabulary of keywords while comprehending a battalion of icons and card traits.
Furthermore, Captain’s Chair is a good representation of asymmetrical here. You pick a Captain, such as everyone’s favorite, Picard, and you get their deck. Almost every single card in your Captain’s deck is unique, with little crossover to any other deck. There are also two additional decks to consider. When your main deck empties, you add the top card of the Reserve deck into your main deck. Once the Reserve Deck is depleted, the Development deck becomes available, offering powerful cards that require resources to acquire.
Captain’s Log
Just like any other deckbuilder, you also have a common market with four different card types: Person, Cargo, Ship, and Ally. All these cards have additional abilities you can use, but the two important ones are Person and Ally. Person cards can be promoted to a Duty Officer, a special slot where the card remains out of your deck while providing passive or activation benefits. Ships are far more different, as they can be used to control Locations.
Locations are the star of the show here, as it’s the one feature that isn’t present in the Imperium predecessor, and the main reason that Captain’s Chair is an exclusively two-player game. Three Location cards are showcased to both players, and at the start of their turns, check if they retrieve any of them through their Ship and Away Team tokens assigned to these locations. Like any other card, they provide benefits and don’t get added to your deck.
As for the flow of turns themselves, it’s surprisingly far more straightforward than the cards themselves. You do a “Resupply” phase where your eyes dart around your side of the game area, looking for that green keyword and follow the text. “Control” checks if you control any of the location cards and add them to your tableau. “Play” is exactly what it means.
Making It So
Anyone experienced with deckbuilding games will recognize this narrative. You play cards from your hand into the “staging” area, activating their effects. These effects allow you to perform various actions, such as assigning a Person card as a Duty Officer, discarding cards behind your Captain akin to trashing, or beaming them. The game features an abundance of keywords—so many, in fact, that the player aid doesn’t cover them all. A substantial portion of the rulebook is required to explain them in detail.
After playing your cards, you proceed to the cleanup phase. Unlike other deckbuilders, you aren’t required to discard your entire hand. The final step involves placing a victory point token on one of the face-up cards. This action is crucial as it also serves as the game’s timer—the game ends when these tokens are depleted. If the game ends this way, whoever has the most points wins, which is a combination of Location cards, victory points, bonus points, end games condition, and market cards you have in your possession. Alternatively, the game can end if the Incident deck is empty. Incidents are negative cards, and if the game concludes this way, the player with the fewest Incident cards wins.
Now I am skipping quite a few details here. For example, each captain has their own player mat that includes unique mission objectives that award bonus points if completed. Bonus points are based on advancing three tracks – science, diplomacy, and military – while also collecting cards that align with these domains. Missing mission objectives means forfeiting these bonus points and then there is Discovery cards and…
I’ll stop.
Red Alert
If there is one area of Captain Chair’s that I need to highlight, it is a mouthful to digest when you play for the first game or three. Most board games often ease you into the experience by offering a series of simple and understandable options at the start. As the game progresses, complexity enrolls itself through the player’s decisions, sometimes even offering the option as to the amount of challenge the player wants to engage. That is certainly not the case here.
Your chosen Captain has their own starter deck, reserve deck, development deck, a ship card, and their own card. The learning curve is steep: you’ll need to understand not only your card interactions and synergies to complete mission objectives, but also navigate the shared market and location cards. It’s like taking a mountain climbing course and your final exam is dominating the K2 mountain.
And you know what? It’s worth it. Sometimes you need some friction at the start to enjoy something. The steep learning curve mirrors other demanding activities. Your first ski run ends with bruises, your first workout leaves you sore, and your first arrow may miss the target entirely. But that early friction makes mastery all the sweeter.
As a fan of both deckbuilders and tableau builders, this is a harmonious relationship between the two genres. Beyond the traditional “buy and play” card mechanics, not every card gets added to your deck.
Location cards enhance your tableau after controlling them, Ship cards remain in play until they secure a Location, and Person cards can be promoted to a Duty Officer – all providing ongoing benefits outside your deck. Once you start to see all of these elements working together, you feel like an Intergalactic DJ pressing all the buttons to create something out of this array of cardboard rectangles on your dinner table.
To Boldly Go
Add in the six Captain decks, each with different playstyles, and you have a game that has Marathon-trained legs that can easily outlast the competition. I’ve played with four out of the six available Captains, and all of them have been vastly different interpretations of the system at play here.
Picard, the easy one, is far more interested in engine building through Ally cards than anyone else. Shran is somewhat similar, except he prefers dumpster diving for Cargo cards. Koloth and Sisko are far more focused on the military side, making the Location portion of Captain’s Chair heavily contested while playing attack cards on each other.
There is a lot here, an impressive feat considering the box size itself certainly doesn’t enforce that belief. However, like all great things, it isn’t perfect.
I’ve mentioned the mission objective before and that is a snake you need to watch out for, otherwise it’s going to wrap around your neck. Your entire game is going to be focused on clearing that objective, because you amass a respectable number of bonus points for doing so. Since you are focused on it, it doesn’t give a lot of room for flexibility – which is odd considering the deckbuilding genre is known for player freedom.
Temporal Anomalies
There is a silver lining here. Each player mat has a “Basic” and “Advanced” side. The “Advanced” side has three objectives instead of just one, each with a different point value. To keep it simple, you do have agency over what objective to capture based on their difficulty.
The other reason I feel this way is the pacing. You don’t have that much time to build up as much as you think. The victory point pool ticks down at the end of each player’s turn, and whenever you gain victory points, you take it from the pile. It is quite possible, and sometimes tactfully necessary, to vacuum the victory point pool to mess with your opponent.
Besides being an issue for missions objectives, the quick pacing also throws your personal cards out of the development. You only gain Reserve cards followed by Development cards after you reshuffle your deck. In all of my play sessions, I barely got a chance to get more than three development cards in my deck, and that doesn’t guarantee an opportunity to play them.
And I’ll mention it again: Keywords. There are so many keywords here with extremely different functions to memorize and comprehend. Captain’s Chair loves to punch you with icons and keywords and it pretends it doesn’t hear the bell. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you play it so frequently that it becomes tattooed to your brain, but if you leave week or month long gaps between your sessions you will take frequent trips to the rulebook glossary.
Mission Complete
The beauty of such challenges is that they’re temporary hurdles rather than permanent roadblocks – merely signposts to navigate on your journey to mastery. Star Trek Captain’s Chair boldly deviates from deckbuilding conventions, willing to neglect the traditions of the genre and take risks to create something truly distinct.
You don’t need to be a Star Trek fan to enjoy this game – I’m not a fan of the series, yet found myself thoroughly captivated by its engaging gameplay. For those willing to brave the initial complexity, like I have, it is worth the initial confusion to be rewarded with a richly strategic experience and a fresh perspective on what a deckbuilding game can be.
Star Trek: Captain's Chair details
- Designer: Dávid Turczi, Nigel Buckle
- Artists: Gong Studios, Kurt Komoda
- Publishers: Frosted Games, WizKids (I)
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 1 - 2
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 60 - 120 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Deck, Bag, and Pool Building, Solo / Solitaire Game
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.1329 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
- More articles about Star Trek: Captain's Chair.
Says release date 2024, but it hasn’t released yet, so should be 2025
You can already “buy it” on Amazon, but it says the delivery date is May. I’ll update the release date.