Sci-Fi Sunday at Noble Coffee & Tea

Today on Boards & Brews, Claire and I prepare for our first official review!  We've made it a Sci-Fi Sunday and played Star Realms.  Star Realms is a fast-paced, in-depth, yet easy to learn Sci-Fi deck building game.  As usual, our location was the delightful Noble Coffee & Tea in downtown Noblesville.  The game is based around three primary resources, health, damage and currency which in this game are referred to as authority, combat, and trade.  The end goal in this game is that you are attempting to reduce your opponents authority points to zero.  Trust me, you'll want to read more to learn about this game and prepare for awesomeness...

There are four unique factions for the base game and each provide you with unique play styles and self-synergies that make them superior within their categories.  The Trade Federation is a fleet based upon economy and a wall of versatile outposts.  These factions focus more on trade and are also the only cards that allow you to heal damage that has been dealt to you.  The Star Empire is a military machine that is designed to drive the opponent into submission.  These are great cards as you can build up strong defense outposts, and the amount of fire power behind these cards can make your opponent discard their cards.  The issue is that this faction pays for it's power with a sub-par economy.  If you want to build currency, you'll have to supplement them with another faction for trade.  The Machine Cult has very limited damage and trade, but they have the most utility so you can trash a lot of your unwanted cards and allow you to remove base on your alliance ships to improve your chances at drawing more important factions.  The final faction group is The Blob which are a vicious xenos threat that use hoard tactics of biological entities to attack their opponents but they rely heavily on synergy to get the most out of their ally abilities.  This means you'll want to purchase a lot of cards with the blob faction (green) icon so to make the best use of your currency.   

We have played this game numerous times and both applied multiple strategies and attained our victories and our losses.  Today, Claire managed to create an awesome defense system from the beginning and this time around, she took the win!  Star Realms offers up a fast-paced round of intense fire power, building defense bases and outposts, all while battling in space.  Initially the base game is just for two players, but you can purchase multiple copies of this game, adding two additional players with every purchased copy that you pick up, which is a really cool concept!  There are multiple ways to achieve victory in this game, and like other deck-building games, you'll want to utilize the various factions based on the direction that you can see the game heading.  Building multiple defense stations is a valuable technique, but there's different ways to tear those bases down quickly.  You'll come up with various strategies based on who you're playing against at the table.  This is probably one of the best portable games that I own.  The artwork in this game is excellent!  I love the amount of detail and vibrant colors on the cards and the mechanics combined with the theme of the game provides an excellent deck-building experience.  If you love deck-building games, especially one as portable as this, then Star Realms is a definite must for your collection.

Star Realms
Overall Meeple Rating: 7.5/10


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