Game summary:
A game for 1-4 players
Play time around 20-45 minutes per player
Designer: Robert Dougherty, Darwin Kastle
Publisher: White Wizard Games
At Spiel we’ve met Rob Dougherty, he has told us everything that White Wizard Games does and had made us very enthusiastic about the deckbuilding games from Star Reals.
Star Realms: Frontiers is a card game from White Wizard Games, it’s a space deckbuilding game where you have to fight against your opponent. Reduce your opponent’s score to zero to win.
Unboxing
– Rulebook
– 144 standard sized cards:
- 80 trade cards (20 of each faction, there are 4 standard factions)
- 16 explorer cards
- 32 Scout
- 8 Viper
- 4 Scorecards (Ones digit)
- 4 Scorecards (Tens digit)
– 8 Oversized challenge cards
Let’s get it to the table
Every player starts with a personal deck, if you play without any expansions, then every player starts with the same deck. Each deck contains 8 Scout cards and 2 Viper cards and starts with 50 health (Authority).
Place 16 Explorer cards in a separate deck next to the market deck. Shuffle the remaining cards and place 5 cards open in the market en place the rest of the cards next to the market.
Each player has the following phases; Main phase, discard phase and draw phase.
Decides who starts at first, that player draws 3 cards from his personal deck and the other player(s) draws 5 cards. Each player plays the cards in his hands, he doesn’t has to play all of his cards, for example when you don’t have the amount of money to buy a card from the market.
The options that you got in your turn are:
– buying cards from the market;
– buying an Explorer card;
– attacking you opponent;
– placing a base/ outpost;
– playing abilities that are show on your cards, for example scrap a cards from your hand to the scrap pile, combine faction cards and make an double or triple attack, heal yourself etc..
When the first player has taken all the actions he could take, he discards his cards to his personal discard pile and directly take 5 new cards to his hands. Then the next player take all the actions he can play with the 5 cards in his hand and chooses 1 or more of the options as shown above. This continues till one of the players has zero health.
When a player has an outpost open on the table, he cannot be attacked directly but you first have to destroy this outpost, after that you can attack him directly. When a player has more outpost, you’ll have to destroy all of them. When an outpost has been destroyed, you place it back into your discard pile.
If a player has bought one a card from the market then immediately replace it with a new cards. The market always got 5 cards open. .
Final Conclusion & rating:
Weight: 2/ 5
My rating: 🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲
We’ve met Rob Dougherty during Spiel, in this interview he has already gave a lot of passion to his games. But it still was our first deck building game, we didn’t had the idea that it would be this easy to get it out on the table and play it. Also because you can play it solo, after a couple of Solo games during my trip through Asia, I really enjoyed the game and how simple it is to lay it on the table and to play a good game.
Playing with an opponent is also very great, it’s simple to learn but a lot of fun to play with. Sometimes you can combine cards and attack your opponent with a lot of power or scare him with buying some nice cards. One of the best things in this deck building game, is that you can scrap cards so that you get rid of some bad cards. This is something that I really miss in other deck building games. Besides ‘just’ playing against an opponent, you can also choose to play with a challenge card. In this box there are 8 challenge cards that all has their own rules, read those rules to pick one of them, this is also the way to play solo.
One of the great thing is this game are also the graphics, those are also very nice and makes the game a lot better to play.
