Product Description

Whether you choose to lead the versatile Terran, mysterious Protoss, or voracious Zerg, in Starcraft: The Board Game you'll command an army like no other in the universe. Once again, Fantasy Flight Games brings one of the world's best-loved computer games to your tabletop. Players take control of the Protoss, Terran, or Zerg and battle across multiple worlds. True to the Starcraft legacy, each of the three races features a unique and distinctive play style, and the inclusion of two distinct factions for each race allows for up to six players to compete for galactic dominance at a time.

With over 180 plastic figures and dozens of unit types, Starcraft: The Board Game features an innovative modular board of varying sizes which guarantees a new experience each and every game. An exciting card driven combat system allows players to modify and upgrade their faction with a wealth of powerful technologies. Players can unleash a Zergling rush, use powerful Protoss shields to halt an enemy invasion, or even send cloaked Ghosts out to guide nuclear missiles to their target.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30614 in Toys & Games
• Brand: StarCraft
• Model: SC01
• Published on: 2007-11-14
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 4.25" h x 11.75" w x 23.25" l, 8.54 pounds

Features

• StarCraft: The Board Game is a game for 2-6 players, ages 12 and up, playable in 3-4 hours.
• Starcraft: The Board Game Includes: 1 Rulebook, 180 Plastic Miniatures, 12 Planet Tiles, 15 Normal Navigation Routes, 12 Z-Axis Navigation Routes, 1 Conquest Point Track, 6 Conquest Point Markers, 6 Faction Sheets. 6 Reference Sheets, 70 Event Cards,
• Also Includes: 1 First Player Token, 54 Order Tokens, 36 Base Tokens, 90 Worker Tokens, 42 Transport Tokens, 40 Buildng Tokens, 38 Module Tokens, 12 Starting Planet Tokens, 20 Depletion Tokens, 26 Resource Cards, 108 Combat Cards, and 126 Technology Cards

From the Manufacturer
In the StarCraft universe, the versatile Terrans, the mysterious Protoss, and the voracious Zerg are locked in a galactic power struggle. In StarCraft: The Board Game, players control these races and battle across multiple worlds while forging alliances, collecting resources, and building military forces in an attempt to conquer the known galaxy. * An innovative modular board provides a new experience each and every game. * An exciting card-driven combat system allows players to modify and upgrade their factions with a wealth of powerful technologies. * Three different races each feature unique and distinctive units, special abilities, and play styles. Players can swarm their enemies with a Zergling rush, use Protoss shields to halt an enemy invasion, or even guide nuclear missles to their target with cloaked Terran Ghosts. Prepare for a game of deep strategy and fast-paced battles in the futuristic, war-torn univers of StarCraft.

Customer Reviews

Complex and challenging
This game is based on the Starcraft computer game. As such, it does a great job of modeling the concepts and gameplay of Starcraft in a tabletop environment. It uses a combination of game tiles, figurines, cards, and cardboard chits to represent the Starcraft game.

If you don't have an experienced player to guide you, plan on taking a whole day to learn this game. Once everyone knows the game, plan on 2-3 hours per game.

The game is of quality construction - almost all the Starcraft units are represented with plastic figures, along with cardboard punch-outs representing things like planets and buildings, and finally sets of cards that represent technology, random events, and unit combat power.

The basic board consists of laying down 2 planets per player, with a starting base on 1 planet. Planets are connected, but require a transport to move units between. Planets have areas on them, each area either has crystal, Vespene gas, or conquest points players struggle to control. You will build, move, research, and battle in order to achieve victory later in the game.

Though it takes time and a lot of reading, the rules are logical and consistent, so once you start understanding the phases of a turn and the subtleties of the rules, you begin to appreciate the amount of strategy available - just like in the computer game. You can try to rush, expand, build mass air, turtle up. A lot of the computer game concepts translate quite well into the board game.

Even the real-time nature of the game is modeled in the game. Players take turn laying down "order" tokens on planets. Nobody knows what each others orders are, but the orders on a planet stack up, and during the execution phase, the orders are revealed one at a time. In this way, an element of interactive surprise causes you to adjust your plans on the fly based on what someone else just did.

Battles are resolved by pairing attackers and defenders figures, and using cards for each pairing to represent health & combat power, as well as any special bonuses that might come from researched technology. Thus battle is sort of a mini card game. There is an element of luck here, in that at any given time you will only have a subset of cards in your hands to use in combat, but all players can shape their hand and add more powerful cards to their deck as the game progresses.

The game has some nice touches, like modeling cloaking and detection, and including special units like the Zerg queen or Protoss Archon, and the Terran nuke strike.

The learning curve is steep, but once you get through a couple turns of play, you really start to feel like the game is incredibly deep - with lots of strategy options.

This game is much more complicated than any other game I have played (e.g. Settlers of Catan), but this ends up providing much more strategic depth then other games. Recommended if you like deep games in general, and Starcraft in particular.

Starcraft board game review
This is one of the best strategy board games I played. Unlike Risk, battles are not resolved by dice throws, hence there is no chance involved at combat time. Instead it takes a card game approach, you resolve the battle by playing the cards in hour hand. The element of chance is still there, but it occurs earlier, when you draw the cards, so at combat time you already know what you are holding.
It takes about two hours to learn by reading the book, and about 45 minutes to explain the rules properly to someone else. A game takes about 3 hours. I highly recommend it to any hardcore strategy gamer or Starcraft nut, but also to casual strategy gamers, if you don't mind feeling a little geeky moving little plastic figures around :) .
The only problem is the plastic figures, which are very detailed, are a little fragile (some of them came broken, or with parts missing). I would have liked them sturdier, even at the expense of some detail.

Hardcore
It's what you'd better be if you're going to play this. It comes complete with a 48pg. full color instruction book, which you will need and may in fact need to read more than once, especially if you're new to this style of board game. If you have trouble sitting through the short game of "Monopoly" this isn't for you. I'd be more willing to put it on a level with "Risk" as far as the amount of time you invest in it and the number of pieces, but there are no dice, and it takes a little getting accustomed to. Not a game you want to get the kid (or adult) with a short attention span). As long as you're willing to put the time and love into it, it's worth it. Just remember, it's not the PC game either fanboys but when the power's out and you need your "Starcraft" fix it's got enough friendly faces to get rid of the shakes. As far as my durability score goes, all of the unit pieces are made of a rubbery plastic, but as you may know a number of the units are flying creatures and in an attempt to be super cool looking, these units are mounted on a clear acrylic base. It does look super cool, however about seven (not really a lot considering there are 180 unit pieces) came to me snapped off of their pedestals. I was a bit disappointed, but with some super glue and a bit of patient matching (it's not just a board game it's also a puzzle. Bonus!) you can hardly tell now.