Stellar Conflict

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 4 out of 10

   Cold Blue

   We were not thrilled with this, looked like it would be more fun than it turned out to be. I guess maybe too random and not enough to actually do to make it a game for us. It's fast - so there is that as a filler.

2. 6 out of 10

   darker

   I was [b]very[/b] excited when this came out; I'm a big fan of Light Speed. It took me a little while to figure out whether I felt this was an improvement or a step backwards; sadly, I think it's more the latter (for me, that is - one of my friends enthusiastically considers it better, so YMMV). The three net-negatives that I find most frustrating are: (1) the much-larger cards make aiming easier, but require WAY more table space; (2) "Special powers" seems fun on paper, but makes parsing board-state harder, and along with the fleetbuilding ups the teaching complexity/time just over a threshold that I feel is too high for a game with 60 seconds of active play. (Also, the graphic design for the two special weapon types can be *really* hard to tell apart from normal lasers.); (3) "Build your own fleet" seems super-fun on paper, but makes scoring large games much more tedious/irritating - you no longer have exactly one (1,2,3,4,5,etc)-initiative ship per player, so have to scan the huge fracas over + over and hope you didn't miss something. Lesser negatives are: (4) "Merchant ships" is nicely thematic, but it seems like parking them as inaccessibly as possible is optimal, which makes for physically awkward games; (5) Damage tokens look nice, but stand out less than, eg, glass beads, can flip over to an incorrect number, and are hard to pick up without jostling a ship if you need to, eg, replace a '2' and a '1' with a '3' due to being short on damage tokens. (6) It's less portable. Unadulterated pluses: the art is great! Playing for a fixed length of time instead of "fastest player" is lovely! And having the shields all the way at the edges of the card is much clearer. I still like it - but not as much as the original. I think my (imaginary) ideal version would meld parts of each - eg: if each faction had a fleet with exactly 1 of each initiative number (though the lasers/shields on the ship for a given number might well be different from fleet to fleet), 4 factions without special powers and another 4 with them. Card-size would be larger than Light Speed and smaller than Stellar Conflict. Much clearer graphic design on the special powers, and nice art. Fleetbuilding rules could still be present, so long as playing #1-#10 (or #1-#8, or some other easy sequential set) of the 4 non-special-power fleets against each other made for a balanced teaching game.

3. 6 out of 10

   AmadanNaBriona

   A fun game kids would love, and works better than I thought it would, though a large playing surface helps. Basically you lay cards down with a timer limiting you, and then use rubber bands to trace lines of fire from your ships to enemy ships (or sometimes your own!), and see who ends up wreaking the most havoc on their opponent.