Preview: Starcraft by Fantasy Flight

Lets start the preview off with what you get in the box. The answer to that is a whole lot of stuff. It contains something like 180 figures, nine sheets of punch out tokens, six faction cards, six quick reference cards and the rulebook. Just in terms of quantity I would say it is worth the $80.

So far I have only played a single game, but I had a blast. It was myself, Kyle, and Ryan in a three person free for all. Just like in the computer game I played as Zerg(I would never touch the other filthy races) while Kyle and Ryan played the two Protoss factions. Setup took a while - almost 45 minutes. But this was our first time and a lot of that was explaining the rules to Kyle and Ryan, so setup time should be reduced in the future. It would be fun some day to see what can be setup quicker - This game or Axis and Allies.

Lets jump to the game play. The coolest feature are the order tokens, which you can see in the second picture. These indicate where and what a player plans to do in their turn. So your opponents can see where you plan to act, but not what you plan to do. Also, the order tokens can be stacked on one another and since only the top token is available for play it is possible to completely mess up your opponents game plan by blocking their orders.

Turns do not take too long to play, but the game did seem a little "short". While the game lasted about two hours, we did not have enough time to build the ultra powerful units and only several areas actually changed hands. I think Kyle only fought two battles....Which interestingly led to his victory. Each faction has special victory conditions, so these differences add to diversity of tactics.

And last I will comment on the battles. I was not too sure if I was going to like the card driven battle system, but after playing it I really like it. It reduces a lot of the randomness out of combat. Plus It favors aggressive tactics. Players who choose to turtle will find themselves in trouble.

Thats it for now, check back later for the full review on The Tabletop Battlefield!