Starship Captains

• Designer: Peter B. Hoffgaard
• Publisher: Czech Games Edition
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 25min/player
• Played with review copy provided by publisher at SPIEL 2022

Welcome aboard and congrats on the promotion! Your “new” starship is ready to embark on its first big voyage. Just scrape off some of the rust, and she’ll do fine. And that crew? Might look a little green around the edges, but they’re your crew now. Make us proud. The stars are calling…and adventure awaits! As newly promoted Starship Captains, players are in command of their first starship and hungry to prove themselves in a galaxy full of space pirates, grumpy old androids, ancient artifacts, and interplanetary adventures.

In this 1-4 player Eurostyle game, which mixes action selection and engine building, you’ll manage a diverse crew of cadets, ensigns, androids, and officers — each with different special roles and capabilities. By earning medals, you can promote and train your crew for even greater effectiveness. Similarly, you can upgrade your ship with powerful engine building technology for maximum synergy. What will you do with this enhanced crew and ship? Explore an ever-shifting galaxy full of dangerous pirates and interplanetary missions in order to boost your reputation with three distinct galactic factions for bountiful rewards. Do you have what it takes to deftly command your crew and become the best captain in the cosmos? We’ll see!

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Atiwa

• Designer: Uwe Rosenberg
• Publisher: Lookout Games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 30 min per player
• Played with review copy provided by Lookout Games

Per the rules: “The Atiwa Range is a region of southeastern Ghana in Africa consisting of steep-sided hills with rather flat summits. A large portion of the range comprises an evergreen forest reserve, which is home to many endangered species. However, logging and hunting for bushmeat, as well as mining for gold and bauxite, are putting the reserve under a lot of pressure.

Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Kibi, the mayor is causing a stir by giving shelter to a large number of fruit bats in his own garden. This man has recognized the great value the animals have in deforested regions of our planet: Fruit bats sleep during the day and take off at sunset in search of food, looking for suitable fruit trees up to sixty miles away. They excrete the seeds of the consumed fruit, disseminating them across large areas as they fly home. A single colony of 150,000 fruit bats can reforest an area of up to two thousand acres a year.

Just like that mayor, in Atiwa, you know that fruit bats — once scorned and hunted as mere fruit thieves — are in fact incredibly useful animals, spreading seeds over large areas of the country. By doing so, they help to reforest fallow land and, in the medium term, improve harvests. This realization has led to a symbiotic co-operation between fruit bats and fruit farmers. The animals are kept as “pets” to increase the size of fruit farms more quickly. Tall trees are left as roosts, providing shelter for them rather than hunting them for their scant meat. However, if you have a lot of fruit bats, you need a lot of space…“

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