StarCraft board game

Well, I am a year older now and a proud owner of the StarCraft - The board game. This was my birthday present from my family - really, really cool one!

This is the first board game based on the computer game that I have seen from close up. I saw Doom while ago but never heard anyone how it is to play it.

What's inside?

Let's see what is inside the box. This is a big box and there is a lot of stuff in there. Well, on the top there is the manual "Rules of play".

This is quite demanding reading with 43 pages of descriptions, rules, examples and tips. It is very nicely done in usual StarCraft look and feel.

Now, there are 12 boards with various elements - planets, navigation routes, variety of player tokens, base and order tokens, depletion tokens, conquest track and markers. Below are shots of all boards before tokens were removed from frames.

We also have "Faction sheets". There are six cards and they are for

• The Queen of Blades (Zerg)


• The Overmind (Zerg)


• Aldaris (Protoss)


• Tassadar (Protoss)


• Jim Raynor (Terran)


• Arcturus Mengsk (Terran)

These are very important and they show faction's special abilities, victory objective, what can you build. It also represents your base configuration. Face of the sheet contains brief biography of the character while the back is used during the game.

Here is a closer look at The Queen of Blades and The Overmind faction sheets.

Next lot of 6 cards is a set of Reference Sheets. They contain useful summaries of the effects of the various order tokens, as well as each player's special victory objective. They also summarize units' statistics and list their average attack values.

Cards - there are quite a few cards in the box. The cards are divided in four groups:

• Resource



• Combat



• Technology



• Event

Now comes the cool part - game pieces! There are six sets and the colours are blue and red for Terran, yellow and orange for Protoss, green and purple for Zerg. Game pieces are quite nice but there were some broken pieces - joint with stand for flying units are relatively fragile so I'll have to do some fixing.

Here are close up shots of each faction.

Zerg

Protoss

Terran

So, this is firs look at the game content. How does it play? Well, I had a test "game" with my nephew last weekend and it is hard to play it for the first time. I'm sure we will get it right eventually and have a lot of fun.

When I figure out how to play it properly I'll try to explain and describe it in separate post.

If anyone would like to see a something in close up view (e.g. Hydralisk :)) I can add more images.