Stardriven Gateway
Crowdfunding Gen Con

Stardriven: Gateway – Crowdfunding Preview

Let’s continue with the Gen Con conversation. This time, let’s talk about one of the games that I demoed that is coming to crowdfunding or isn’t out yet. That is going to be Stardriven: Gateway from Rock Manor Games. Rock Manor Games has made other games like Merchancts of Magick or more likely you’d be familiar with their games Maximum Apocalypse or Set A Watch. Let’s talk about what type of game Stardriven: Gateway is and how it plays.

How To Win at Stardriven: Gateway

I want to change things up about how I talk about these games. Often times I touch on how to win, but I want to make it a focus. Stardriven: Gateway is a game of collecting points. You get your points in a few different ways. The big way is getting influence out onto the main planets. You do this, generally, by completing missions. But at the end of the game, you also gain points for trained crew, total crew, and anomaly faced. Though, that scoring can change depending on the scenario you play.

The game end trigger is when one player has nine influence out on the board. At that point, the round is completed and one more full round happens.

How to Play Stardriven: Gateway

While this is a big space game with hexes and planets that you fly around, that board is almost secondary. Most of what you do is going to be on your player board. On your player board you are managing your crew by placing them in locations and then activating those locations with dice.

On your turn you always get two actions and any number of free actions. The actions are simple, either place a crew or activate a station with a crew with one of your dice. There is a third action, resting, which allows you to get back and reroll your dice. Only after you play out four of your dice. To activate a station on your ship, you need enough energy, so you sometimes need to take less ideal actions to be able to get energy back.

The free actions are things like upgrading your crew if you have experience, completing a mission or activating crew. Crew actions can vary a lot. You can exhaust them to refresh or re-roll dice or gain energy back. But how you activate them and if you use them to complete missions is part of the puzzle of the game.

Game Play Highlights

There is a lot that I like about Stardriven: Gateway. The biggest thing is the smoothness of the system. You know what you want to do on your turn, and other players are not going to affect it too much. Yes, a mission might get stolen out from under you, but generally the player interaction is limited. I’ll talk more about that later with how it might not be. The actions are consistent across the game, so that is what I mean by smooth.

And I really like the crew management aspect of the game. That is what is interesting to me on this game. Each faction has it’s own crew with their own abilities. So everyone is a bit asymmetric that way. And while a lot of the abilities fall into the categories of refresh a die, swap a die, or gain energy. But I like to use that to prolong when I need to pull back dice. If I can use them to squeak out an extra couple of actions more than other people, I feel like my efficiency is good.

The dice actions were interest as well. The number on the die is basically the amount of action points that you get. This might be for drawing more crew, or how far you can fly. Or if you can take out an enemy ship. No die is a complete dud, though, it always provides you some actions. But a worse role is going to be provide you fewer actions or less energy in return.

What I Need To See More Of

Firstly, they talked about how there are some scenarios that are competitive, like I played, and some that are cooperative. How is the cooperative going to work? That is the question that I have and will it feel compelling? I mainly ask that because I think cooperative will work, the game didn’t have much direct confrontation. But is it just going to be beat a score or something like that which you want to target?

The one thing that I said I’d talk more about is player combat in this as well. When going up against the enemy it makes sense. The system is enjoyable and simple. But there is options for players to go up against other players. That never happened in my play. And a lot of that was because I didn’t see a good reason for it. I think that everyone else in the playthrough thought the same. So is this just part of the game that is rarely ever used, is it maybe in a specific scenario there is reason? I want to know if I should ever focus on player vs player combat, because I’m not always the biggest fan.

Final Thoughts and Initial Impression

I like this game, a lot. It is a game that doesn’t feel over engineered in what it is doing. It is also a game that doesn’t feel like it doesn’t have real choices. That for me is a sweet spot because it’s easy enough to teach and play but won’t feel old or stale after a few plays. Even with the scenarios, the one I played will go completely differently next time I play it.

And I think another important factor about this game and you can take it for what it is worth, I want to play it again. I think that there are elements that I could do better and explore more. Like how I utilized my crew wasn’t always the best. So I think I can do even better than I did the first time. And I think that that feeling isn’t going to go away quickly with the factions and scenarios to explore in the game.

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