EP1 - Star Trek Captain's Chair: To Boldly Go - Solo Cadet Practice - Kirk

0:03 Welcome back to Box Lights and welcome to a new playthrough. I'm taking a little bit of a break from designing my own games. I'm going to be playing Star Trek Captain's Chair, the second uh main box, which is called To Boldly Go. This was the first base game just called Star Trek Captain's Chair. To boldly go is its own standalone game as well. You do not need the original box to play to boldly go. And of course, I'm of a generation where I grew up with James T. Kirk, so that's the reason I've picked this one up. I'm enjoying the the card playing in this. The playability is really great. I confess I struggled a little bit with the Imperium series, but this one is is is for me just just fitting much nicer. It just feels a little bit more refined. the the I'm talking about the solo game in particular. Um yeah, so anyway, it's um it's a it's a debt building game by David and Adam Turtzy and Nigel Buckle, published by Whiz Kids. And yeah, I'm finding this a great distraction for me just to to unwind and and settle away from designing. So I wanted to share this with you. We're going to do the solo cadet practice.

1:19 So there's multiple ways to play this game. And with the solo cadet practice, you're just chasing a high score. You're not playing against an automated opponent. There is an automated opponent. That's another way to play solo. But if you're just starting out, this video is aimed at you. We're going to learn to play as Captain Kirk, solo cadet. We're chasing that high score of 70 victory points. I've nearly finished setting up as it goes, so I just want to run you through what this is all about. This is our player area. We have a a starting deck. So, when you unbox this, you're going to if you want to join me and play Captain Kirk, you're going to look for all the cards with little Kirk down in the bottom left corner here. Right. So, you should have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 cards with available written here. Okay. You should have a captain card. It looks like this on the back.

2:16 Here's Kirk. And again, we're looking for this logo. We have deployed the USS Enterprise and a stand here here with the Enterprise on it. And it's got Kirk's image on the back. We're going to place that here on the Enterprise. Deployed means it starts in play, same as the captain. And there's also this controlled location here. It's called Starfleet Headquarters. And it's again, it's got Kirk on the bottom. It's part of your starting deck. and it says it's a controlled location. That's going to start in play as well. I want you to place them like this. This is your captain card. You got a space here above your captain for your duty officer. Think of them as your second in command. So, one of these other people in your deck could get promoted to duty officer, right? You start the game with no duty officer. And then next to your duty officer is your controlled locations.

3:10 Anything that's deployed is going to be next to your captain. And then we got another area down here that we're going to call your staging area. This is when you play cards from your hand kind of into a temporary area. Okay. Next to Oakkirk over here is your player board. It has two sides, a basic and an advanced. We're going to start with the basic side. Okay. And on this we've got three tracks. And we're going to place these three cubes on the zero spots of these tracks. These represent three specialtities, research, influence, and military. We also have five away team tokens. I know it's five because Captain Kirk brings five away teams. 1, two, three, four, five. You can place them here.

4:00 Place them here. Place them where you like. I like to place them just up here. Every captain also comes with its own special mission. So Kirk has this one, where no man has gone before. It has a goal and a reward. This is not mandatory. It's optional, but there'll be some cards that trigger off having completed your mission or failed your mission. And they come with a great reward. So, completing a mission should be something you're trying to achieve. The aim of the game is to score a certain number of points, right? The points are called glory in this game. This is a glory token. Everyone starts with one glory and a couple of other resources. is these are like um the currencies of the game, things that you can spend to trigger effects and take actions. These rectangular ones are called latinum. The pink crystals are dithium. We also have [snorts] supplies of these up here. This is just a big heap of supply of tokens.

4:57 Think of the pink ones, dythium, as kind of like a currency for influencing people and allies. and the Latinum. These ones, these are more like fuel if you like for charging up your your cargo, your items, your weapons, and your ships. That kind of thing. It's it's a very broad um this is my own definition of how things are things things are things resources are used. Glory is your victory points. You can substitute glory if you want to. If you run out of these platinum and dithium, you can spend glory as a substitute. There's a little reminder on the back of here. One glory is worth two dithium or one latinum. Okay, but these are your points. This is what you're trying to reach. Remember, we're trying to get at least 70. Is that right? I'm going to double check this.

5:46 So, in the back of the rule book, there's the cadet training mode. Yeah. So, we're trying to get at least 70 to kind of consider it a low victory. 100 is a is a good victory and then 120 is an exceptional victory. So it's kind of a beat your own score kind of kind of thing. Um but yeah, you've got a target. You've got a threshold you've got to try and get. Okay. Rule book's really good actually. All right. So that's us. That's our ability. Oh, we've got action tokens as well. We start with three of them. And what's really neat about this is on your turn. So, we're going to have uh we got a captain, we got ships, we've got cargo on our ship or equipment, weapons, things that we can attach to our ship, and we've got locations to explore and control that we can then when we take control of them, we bring them back into our player area, and they're going to grant us little effects and abilities and and actions and reactions.

6:44 Um, but we can activate our cards. We can activate cards that we've got in play. We can activate and play cards in from our hand. Some of those actions will require require spending one of these action tokens. Okay, so we have three to spend per turn and we'll have some free play stuff that we can freely play that doesn't burn one of our three actions. But effectively when you run out of things to play, actions to to spend, then that's the end of your your turn, right? So you can be playing your cards trying to get or build up a tableau if you like that creates as much glory as possible to score those points. Cards themselves have a victory point tally. None of your starting ones do, but I haven't shown you the locations yet, but there's a victory point or a glory number in the bottom right. That's a way of earning glory is to take control of cards, take control of locations, and that will obviously power you up. So, we talked about these cards with Kirk on the bottom. There's a couple more decks that you've got. So, this is your starting deck. These all have Kirk and available written. Okay. So, that you should have 10 of these. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Yeah, we're going to shuffle this up. This becomes our deck from which we're going to draw cards to make up our hand. And then throughout the game, we can earn more cards. And we're going to earn those from two separate decks.

8:10 One set of cards will have reserve written on the bottom. There's five of them. We'll give them a shuffle up. And these are going to be kind of the first five cards that we'll add to our deck randomly. Place those face down. And then we've got a set of how many is there? Six. Seven. Seven. These are called development cards. They got development. We're going to be able to handpick these. So we don't need to shuffle this. They're placed face up. But once we've gotten through our reserves, we'll pop these on top of our development. We can then start to handp pick individual development cards like a market into our our deck. Right? So that's all of our custom stuff for our character, Captain Kirk. Right. Our captain. Okay. A couple more things to show you.

9:00 We've got these two cards. They're called star date cards. All right. They kind of define your mission if you like. what we're going to be doing for this game. Right. So, we've got two star day cards, right, for the solo cadet practice. There's a whole stack of them uh for different player counts. And here it says we need to put five glory tokens. This kind of acts like a timer. So, we've done that. We put five glory tokens on our uh star date card, our first star date card. When we get through this, we'll execute this effect and then we'll do this. Okay. All right. Good job. Next to this, we've got some location cards. These are places that we can go out and explore and control. We've got a set of starting locations. They have starting location written in the bottom. And then a deck of advanced locations. They have advanced in the bottom. Right. Give both of these a shuffle up.

9:59 Place your advance cards here. Shuffle up your starting locations. And I've taken three spare away team tokens. Remember, these were ours. They're pink. And there's the navy colored ones. Doesn't matter which set you use, but I've copied this from Paul Groen's videos. So, we place three out here to represent the three locations that we need to explore. They could kind of create little markers for the places we're going to. Shuffle up your starters. Place one on top here of the advanced and then deal three face up. The rest you can discard. They go back in the game box. So these are the locations that we can explore at the start of the game. Last bit of setup is the market strip. So we've got uh six decks. So there's four primary decks.

10:52 These are the big decks. We've got all your persons. So, this is the person deck. Give that a shuffle up. Okay. Then we got cargo. So, they have cargo in the top left. Right. Give that a shuffle up. Then we got ships and we've got allies. Okay. Ships and allies. Once we've shuffled up those four decks, you're going to draw one card from the top of each deck and place it below this market strip here. Okay, two more decks to the right. We've got the incident deck. There's six cards. You could have more depending on which captain you're playing. Give that a shuffle up. And then up top here, the encounter deck. Okay, we've got eight of these. Give that a shuffle up. Place it face down.

11:42 And perhaps perpendicular like so. Right, that's it. We're ready to go. So, to kick things off, we're going to draw five cards. Right. Let me give this another little shuffle up. Now, there's a bunch of cards in here called directives. They're kind of like instructions, and they're ways to get new cards or like your basic way to get new cards. We do have some new directives in this this deck here. So, for Kirk, let's see. I've not played this deck yet, so this is my first time playing. I've been playing the base game, but um you're kind of joining me on this exploratory foray into to boldly go. So, we're boldly going together.

12:29 So, this one lets you find any card. Okay. Bring back a time travel card. This directive, log deployed ship, and send away crews to locations. Okay. All right. So, I'm guessing then my starting deck contains the directives. I need to grab new cards. All right. Well, there we go. We've got four directives. Okay. These are directive cards. Okay. This is a person. So, here we got Leonard McCoy. He's our Starfleet doctor. There's a human. So, these little traits up here, we look out for those because things will refer to them. So for example here we see McCoyy's got a reaction after discarding or logging a person join your action free play an incident okay from your handle discard path. So these are the kind of instructions that we're looking at and this is the thing there's no kind of built-in rules like that that it's just all on the cards right so the the the foundations of the game is really simple and the depth comes from all these different effects on all these different cards. All right. So, I don't have anything here that's going to let me grab a person, a cargo, a ship, or an ally. Nothing from there. So, these are cards that you can gain and they'll either go on top of your deck or to your discard pile when you gain them. Um, this is the way to kind of build up your deck. Let's have a little look at Kirk's mission here to see if there's anything here that might direct us in which way to play. So, Kirk's mission where no man

14:00 has gone before have two encounters on the same ship and it says our research track at four. Remember, these are the encounters, right? We had a deck of six of them, right? I'm just going to Did I shuffle it? I can't remember. But anyway, I can't shuffle that again. This is a fixed deck now because I can start looking at some of these cards, putting ones on tops and bottom and that kind of stuff. How do we get these new cards? Well, every time we cycle through our deck, we get to add one of these. So, you need a little speed in your deck. This is what this game encourages. And now, I don't really have anything that Well, this one helps. Uh, which one? Yeah, the maximum warp directive. Draw two cards and discard one. Okay, let's have a look. So, maybe we'll play this directive. Let's see what see what this does. Now, what you'll notice on this directive, we just have a play, draw two cards. On this one set, of course, we have this icon. This is the action token icon. So, this play will cost us an action, one of our three actions. This one doesn't. There's an alternative here for set of course. You can play it here without an action. Okay, this is called a free play.

15:17 All right, so some of these things you can do cost an action, some of them don't. So, let's start with maximum warm. Let's see if we can see a couple more cards. It says, "So, we'll play this. Draw two cards and discard one of the drawn cards, and then you may warp a ship." Okay, nice and easy. Let's start simple. So, I play this into my staging area. Play. Doesn't cost an action. It doesn't have that action token icon. I draw two cards and I discard one of the drawn cards. Right. So, I've got can keep one, draw the other. All right. We have Captain Spock here. And we have an incident. Now, if you remember, we had a little deck of incident cards up there. These are kind of like bad things. They're worth negative points. This one's worth negative -2. So, if we end the game with this card in our in our deck, we lose two points. Mr. Spock here, well, he's got two species. He's a cross between a Vulcan and a human. It seems he has these other traits. Starfleet scientist telepath.

16:20 He has this icon here. This is like a skill icon. So, he's good at research. So, that might help us. But for now, I think I might just discard this one. Remember, I have to discard one of these two. So, let's just discard the incident for now. Right. I'll create a discard pile. I like to just place it kind of sideways over here. And the other one goes to my hand. Now, it says you may warp a ship. So, what does that mean? So, I've got one ship in play. So, Kirk starts with the USS Enterprise. So, we can send this to a location. There's the Starfleet headquarters. We can send it here. I don't know if there's any benefit to sending it here or we can send it off to one of these three. These are called neutral locations. These are like things that in a multiplayer game you're competing over. Now, to control one of these locations, you need a certain number of tokens. Either ships or your away teams.

17:16 So you can beam your away teams down here like this. Send your away teams here. If you've got at least three tokens here, then we can control this location. The normal rule is at least three and two more than any other opponent. Now in this solo cadet practice mode, we always assume there's one of an opponent. Okay? That's another reason why we place these awaiting markers up here. Just to remind us, we've got to have at least three and two more than an opponent. So, three will always do it, right? So, this could be three ships, it could be three teams, a mixture of both. Okay, so sending a ship here will help us take control of one of these locations.

18:03 Now, which one do we go to? In the bottom right is a number of victory points. So, this one's worth one, this one three, this one two. So that might influence our decision. But also when we control one of these locations, the moment we control it, they give you this ability. So Delta Vega here says no effect. But this one here, I don't know Star Trek, so forgive me. Tahal Mirage says control. You may enlist a reserve. Draw two cards. Okay, so that one's quite nice. This means we can take one of these cards. Enlisting. Reserve means grabbing one of these cards. And then this one here, Dexi Depo says, "Control. You may discard a card to send an away team here. If the discarded card is a business card, gain two platinum."

18:57 Okay. But the other thing to note is that they also have some specials. So, Delta Vega says, "Resupply. Rebuild your hand for each person. gain a diliththium. This one says when you log this card, gain two glory. And then this one here has two activations. When we control this card, we can activate it. We tilt it sideways and then do the thing. So if we control this, we can activate it to then gain a ship and then this one to find a ship. I quite like this one. So this is a nice way to get ships and find them amongst our carts, but then we can deploy them. I think we're going to go here. Let's go here. I is not. No, maybe here. I quite like the idea of getting this resupply effect. So, over here on your player map is a turn order.

19:48 So, the way the turns go is you start with the resupply step. If you've got any cards in play with this effect, resupply, you trigger them at this point. I don't have any, so I skip past that. The first first turn, the second step is control. This is when if you control one of these three neutral locations, you then can can take control of it. And then we move into player actions, which is what we're doing now. And then you clean up. Okay? So you anything that you've activated, you deactivate if you like. So you can use it again next time. So all right, discard and draw. All that kind of stuff. So I quite like this resupply effect. Let's let's do that. Let's get some economy going. All right. So there we go. We've warped our ship. That was it. Okay. So, as I said, the rules are simple. The thought and the depth is is just great, right? So, that's it. So, that stays there in our staging area. We don't discard it or anything like that.

20:42 That stays there. And that's important because we can pull cards back from staging area or discard from in play. So, these are in play, right? In fact, these are all in play. But keep keep those locations in the right spot. We talked about the duty officer spot. So if we look at McCoy and Spock,

21:12 these have these blue banners. These blue banners are not effective until we put them in play here up in the uh duty officer spot. At the beginning of the game, you can only have one duty officer. So, we might want to think about promoting one of our people to the duty officer position. Um, and we can do that with our ship. The USS Enterprise says activate. Promote a person from your hand to duty officer. And we have we got two persons right now. But I also know that if I get Delta Vega for every person in my hand, that will give us more dialeth. So, grabbing people is quite a good idea. So, maybe maybe I'll do something else. Maybe I'll I'll hold off on that in a minute. I don't know if I can use their abilities too much right now. But how about this? How about set a course? This one costs an action. Okay, it says play to discard up to three persons to send the same number of away teams to the same location.

22:15 How about that? Let's do that. So, let's let's take an action set, of course. So, once more, I place this in my staging area, but this time I've got to spend one of my three actions. So, I just flip that over. Okay, now I'm down to two. Discard up to three people. I'm going to discard these two to send the same number of away teams to the same location. Right. So, I sent two away teams to the same location. I'm going to send them up here to Delta Vega. Wonderful. Now, I've got three here. Three tokens. One, two, and a ship. Three. So, I've got at least three and two more than that one. So when we get to the next control phase, I will take control of Delta Vega. You can only take control of one. So if I had another three or more here, I'd have to choose which one. All right, just be aware of that.

23:05 Now, let's see. Let's see. I've got two more directives left. Um there's nothing we can do with these. So with my ship, spend a little to walk the ship. I've already walked it. I want to I mean I could send it somewhere else but I don't want to discard a card to beam a card here. No need to do that just yet. Beaming a card basically means you kind of stash it. So I could um discard I could do that now. I could activate this. Discard this. Discard a card. Beam a card here. This is kind of a way to kind of just store cards that you don't want in your deck clogging up your deck someplace. Okay. So, I might go set about recruiting lots of allies and people, but maybe I'll send them all beam them all to the Enterprise so they're not clogging up my deck, for example. Right.

23:51 There might be other reasons why you want to beam cards places, but that's one reason at this point. That's the only reason I would be doing that. Um, and it also says promote a person. Okay. From to off. So, we don't have any people left. We've just discarded them. What about Kirk? What does he do? Well, Kirk says after putting a cling on into play, and this is a reaction, discard a card to gain one on one spot on our military track here. And he also has an activation, an activation. Turn him sideways. So, once per turn, if you like, put a card on top of your deck to draw a directive from the discard pile. I don't have any directives in my discard pile. They're both in my hand right now. Yeah. But if I'd have drawn instead of draw drawing Spock and an instant, I might have put a directive in my discard pile and then use Kirk to pull it back to my hands. Do you see? So Kurt's got this nice little ability.

24:43 And then we've got an endame thing here. Score one point for every second step gained on these three tracks, whichever is the lowest. So it seems like Kirk's all about pushing these tracks up. So maybe that's something we should think about about doing. Strange New World says, "Select a controlled location if there's an away team and a ship there. Look at the encounter deck." So I could have sent these to Starfleet headquarters instead. This is a controlled location. Once I control this location, it will come down here and then I'll control that and I'll have two controlled locations. But what about you, the utilized directive? Well, this one says gain a diliththium and two for each controlled location I have in place. So, that would be three.

25:33 That would be that would be fine. Or I can gain something on the specialtity track. Well, I quite like to perhaps play this for this second ability. Let's do that. So, we'll spend an action and we'll do this again on one specialtity track. So, I have to choose which one. So, research, influence, or military. and then that will gain for each matching skill icon I have in play excluding beamed cards. Okay, at the moment I've got two cards that have skill icons. Skill icons are on the side here. So you can see Mr. Spock, he has the research skill icons. If I had put him into play, that would be one from Mr. Spock. Okay, McCoy doesn't have any. But so you may say, well, maybe it's a bit too soon to play this card, Ricky. Well, remember we're going to go through our deck again. It's no big deal. But what you can see is that Starfleet headquarters has it actually has this wild card. It says actually any one. It's got it's got all three skills, right? And so does the Enterprise. So I've got one here, one here. I could put this up to two. Now, as you look at this closely, you can see there's multipliers on here. When my tracks down here, the multiplier is times one. So if anything refers to the research multiplier, it's currently times one. But here at two, it's time two. If I get it up to six, it would be time four. Okay. If I get it up to 10, it would be time five. Right. So,

27:03 currently I'm here at times two. Here's a card that makes use of that. This augmentation plague. It's a cargo and it has this little question mark in the bottom right. And next to it, the research icon. So, that's saying whatever multiplier is on the research track. That's how many victory points it's worth at the end. So, right now, two if I have this. Okay. Right. So, I've played this. I'll gain my specialtity. I've got one card left. Yeah, I can't do anything with this. Yeah, I'm think I'm just going to end. I've got an action left, but there's not really anything I can do with this. No. Okay. Okay. Now, I've got a choice. I can either keep hold of this or I can discard it. But we'll come to that in a second.

27:55 Yeah. All right. That's the end of our actions. We're going to move into clean up. Now, this action is just left unused. So, first step says resolve star date. Remember, this is our star date up here. And in the cadet uh practice mode, there's a special rule for this. So, you've got to forget this when you come to play the regular game. But with connect practice, what we do is we take one of these five. Remember I said it at the beginning, this is a timer. So this is going to tick down right now. Now we've got to wipe one of the cards from the market and then we'll place the token on one of the cards in the market and that will just sit there and that will protect that card from being junked. So we can't junk it. But if we do end up taking one of those cards, we'll also take the glory that comes with it. Okay. So, which one of these do I think I won't be taking?

28:50 Oh, it's it's really hard to know. I've not seen these seen these cards before. It's It's going to be really tricky to know. I I think I think this one. What is this? Kelp pin. So, I'm going to get rid of this one. So, we're going to junk this ally card. So, junk pile is here. So junked cards will go here. All right. Then we refresh and then we choose which of these four we're going to go for. Are we going to take a person? Let's take this person. It's an Andorian. Now I know Kirk plays off Klingons, doesn't he? Here's an interesting thing.

29:35 You got this this sheet here. So, if you want to see where all the Klingons are, it tells you, uh, there's one there's one in the ally deck. Yeah, there's more in the person deck, I think. Anyway, we'll we'll we'll go there. Let's um let's see. I don't know if it's that consequential. We'll probably take that person. All right. Okay. So, there we go. We've resolved the star date. We've placed our glory. And then we discard and draw. So these get discarded. We can also, if we wish, discard any number of cards from our hands. I might actually just keep this. I might just keep this. But we're going to draw back up. So we draw back up so that we've got five cards in our hands.

30:21 There's three in our deck. One, two, three. Our deck's now empty and we have to draw. We got to draw one more card to take us up to five. So we shuffle up our discard. But because we've cycled through our deck, we now grab the top card from the reserves. Okay, that goes on top of our deck and that happens before we draw. That's really important. So, we're up to four. We draw one more. So, we're going to grab that card from the reserve and it is check off. Okay, wonderful. There's our five cards. We're ready for the next turn. And we're going to head into the resupply step. And of course, we're going to have our three actions back. So, refresh your actions. All right, this is going to be our hand. So, we have Strange New Worlds from last time. We've got recruit, which will let us take a person or an ally.

31:16 We have a piece of cargo. This one's going to be pretty critical, I think. And then we've got two people. We've got Uhura and Czechov. All right, join me next time then as we continue our game.