Favorite Game for December 21st

#4 Star Trek: Captain's Chair

Star Trek Captain's Chair is a deck building card game. In it players are each one of Star Trek's iconic Captains, commanding the crew of their star ship. This is all done with cards. Each Captain has not only a unique deck of cards representing themselves and their crew, but also a unique market of cards with which to build their deck. There's also a central market that all players may pull cards from. 

I've never seen a deck builder where every character has unique cards that are available only to them. This makes every character very thematic, and every character plays differently. In addition to the central market, there's a row of cards that are planets to explore. This is a sort of area control game. "Winning" a planet earns a player glory which are the victory points in the game. 

Glory tokens are placed on a chapter cards called Stardate cards. These act as a timer for the game. There are also missions that players can try to accomplish, and resources: Dilithium and Latinum that need to be managed. This is a fairly heavy game that has a lot going on, but everything is so thematic and intuitive that it doesn't feel heavy.

This is the newest game on my list and it premieres really high. Julie and I picked this one up during a recent visit to Ohio, and we've only played the game once. I think I like the game more than Julie does, but the Second Contact Expansion has Carol Freeman, Captain of the U.S.S. Cerritos from Star Trek: Lower Decks, and I think that will really win Julie over. (I love this game and will definitely get all of the expansions!)