Ready to Crew your Starship?

While there are penty of super cool starship board games out there (Battlestar Galactica, any number of Star Trek ones, The Captain Is Dead -- just to name a few), I've never found one that captures the sense of managing not just a few Named characters and/or tricking out your ship only for combat but gives the player the feeling that they have a ton of crew who all contribute to the well-being of the ship itself and help accomplish the game's goals.

That's why I've been designing Starship Crewpers for over 12 years (formerly titled Living Starship which all got rebranded due to legal issues with our former book publisher). The version that is now coming to fruition was predominantly inspired by the playstyle and mechanisms of Lords of Waterdeep and The Invincible bag-building game.

The minor twist in worker placement in Starship Crewpers is that placing a meeple (crewper) does not GIVE the player anything, but instead inverts the traditional process and the meeple DEPOSITS resources wherever you put it. This simulates the notion that each crewper is a functioning worker and is expending EFFORT (pegs) in order to help the players accomplish the end goals of the game - completing missions before the intrinsic crises come to a head.

Effort Peg assortment and Mission Track slider

We also have designed modular ship boards, each with its own unique shape reflecting a differernt style (hospital ship, warship, research vessel, etc.). Now whether you decide to trick out your ship in keeping with the theme or cobbling together your own, it will all work.

Each ship has snap-in slots for 8 different rooms that can hold 1-3 crewpers each and 4-6 effort pegs. As you gain renown during the game by completing missions you will be able to acquire new rooms with larger capacity to replace your existing ones.

Snap-In rooms with duty stations (indentations) for 1-3 meeples and 4-6 pegs

There is also a deck of unique character cards that can be gained during the game. Each player can have 10-rank-worth of characters attached to their ship who support the efforts of all the nameless crewpers. Officer cards provide new duty stations (worker placement slots) and Enlisted cards provide new or cheaper abilities you can spend your ship pegs on to help accomplish tasks in the game.

Named characters also provide you with Renown bonuses when missions are completed and rewards are handed out.

Named Character cards