Personal crap you may want to skip:

Star Trek means a lot to me. I mean in the way it formed my life. I don't own a uniform. Never read one of the books. I'm not that kind of fan.

My mother died 12 years ago and I think about her every day. And I think about Star Trek.

That was Ma's thing. Trek. We were lower middle income when I was growing up, an I recall watching Trek on our Black and White TV with the rabbit antenna. It was a family event.

Ma was a tough Polish meatball of a woman. She barely graduated high school. Her brother was a gangster who was gunned down in Brooklyn. She was all about family.

And so was Trek. Trek was about relationships.

There was a family in Trek and our family was duty bound to watch and learn from it.

The first time I ever saw Ma cry at a movie was when Spock died. She took the next day off from work (she was a lunch lady at school) to mourn. She was devastated.

Fast forward to my courting my wife. We would lie in bed and watch Next Generation. When she was away at school, we would watch hundreds of miles away from each other, and talk about the episode on the phone.

So while many follow Trek and are fans of it, I come from a very different angle. I don't know the stardates and I can't speak Klingon, but it's been a huge formative part of my life. Next month, my household will begin the journey of watching every Trek episode and movie made in sequence. It's important to me in a way that isn't really fandom. Its something else, although, of course I would have to consider myself quite the fan.

On to the game.

I got ST:FC on a great sale for Christmas. $48.75 at Miniatures Market Black Friday sale. Great.

Component wise, sure, there have been a ton of threads complaining.

First off, some people said the mini's were amazingly detailed. They're OK. Amazing is not a word I would use. Since having it and playing it some 20+ times, I will say that the Rotarran has come off the flight stick base, but only because I tried to put a glass of wine on it.

People complaining about the scale of the minis need to realize true scaling would not be practical, or the NegVahr would be 9 inches long. Or Birds Of Prey less than a quarter inch. You have to ignore scale.

I understand the WizKids need to use the Clix bases. They are not necessary in the slightest. Cards with peg markers would have been better.

And I understand the graphic theming, but the Trek typeface is absolutely horrible to read at 7 point. Is that a 9, 6, 8 or 0? I don't know, look at the reference card. That's our biggest component complaint. The damn font. I have lots of clix games. They're readable. This ain't.

The cards are of good quality. People have said they'd rather have tiles for the locations, but I like the cards, as you can shuffle them and the box would even be huger if there were cards.

The manual is OK. The game is really just a lot of very simple ideas that all weave intricately together somehow. Die roll plus modifier runs most of the game. But there's just a lot of conditions. Cloaking has a huge section of the rule book, but rarely is cloaking practical. However, when it does come up, it can be a game changer.

Game setup is wonderful. It's a blast finding out just what fleet you're getting. If the Klingons get the tremendous NegVahr ship, then you know there's going to be a lot of dead Federation officers. But maybe the Klingons get a bunch of tiny ships instead.

Your fleet is somewhat randomly chosen, and the makeup of your fleet determines the loadout of your missions, which essentially sets the goals of how you get victory points.

So first you find out what ships you get. This determines what missions you get. But you don't know the exact missions. You know the amount of Science, Combat or Influence (political), but you don't know the goals yet. And the comes the deckbuilding part. You get to choose 4 ten card decks out of 10 available for your missions. Some decks favor combat, some defense, some expansion. This seems like a daunting amount of setup. It is not. Is is an integral part of the game and you are essentially creating an on the fly scenario.

Your deck includes lots of characters from the Trek universe. Except Sisko... Maybe in an expansion? Maneuvers, nasty tricks and special actions that are overflowing with trekness.

You can add some guy to the crew of a ship for a permanent modifier - pretty much bringing them on as a season regular - or use them for a much more powerful one shot - a single episode guest. Difficult choice. Hopefully you have tailored your decks to match your mission and ship selection. Some of your missions are kept secret from the opponent.

The other completely random scenario generation comes from the board itself. I admit these pieces are thin, but I think it works here. The board will have various planets, habitable and uninhabitable, space anomalies and all sorts of galactic gunk. One game may have a particularly rough patch of space full of Quasars and Nebula that mess up sensors, another may have a high concentration of habitable planets. It's another way to stretch the replayability of the game.

The movement concept is very nifty. Movement points are based on your ship's current engine setting (I can't give 'er any more, Cap'n!), and each hex has a number it takes to essentially LEAVE the hex. You get one move for 1 point and after that, it depends on what's in the hex. It makes the map a very interesting representation where going 4 hexes might be a shorter trip than 2. The map ignores scale as readily as the minis do. And that's OK.

Yet another random element shows up in the Encounter deck. This is where wacky stuff happens, like Q, or Tribbles, or Xenophobic races, or time warps.

You got your command deck with your crew and special actions, your modular board, your encounters, your random missions, your non-choice of ships.

Yes, this game is chock full of random.

Your job, as Fleet Captain is to mitigate that randomness, be prepared and create a winning situation when things are at their worst.

Each turn you get to move every ship, play 8 million cards and take 3 actions. An action might be a scan, an attack, a political mission. You get very few actions. Which is one of the reasons cloaking is a rarity - it takes an action. And cloaked ships can't do much but be menacing.

Yes, without a doubt better play nets more points. Yes without a doubt, better play CAN indeed lose a game. There's random, but you can control how badly it hurts.

Now, it's just a game in a big box. But it tells stories perhaps better than any boardgame I have ever seen. I own over 500 games. And sometimes you talk about a certain moment. Or a position. A situation.

With Fleet Captains, you tell the stories over.

Remember when that Klingon ship jumped through a newly discovered wormhole to launch a sneak attack, but then was repelled by tractor beams and pushed into what was a previously unknown black hole and it was crushed?

Remember when the Voyager was using that experimental warp drive, and all of the klingon ships went to attack it to destroy the technology and brought it down to red alert only to have The Admiral rally it and it made it to that starbase?

Remember when that supernova blew the Kronos into the stellar pulse and it was trapped and torn to shreds over three turns by a pulsar with its engines disabled?

Remember when the Prometheus and the Reliant were going to wipe out the Rotarran and had all weapons modified for extra damage when Kolos shamed them out of the attack?

This is not stuff that usually happens in board games. This happens in novels and movies and TV shows. This stuff happens in Trek.

Every game is drastically different. A race where you're not sure not only of what the opponent's goals are, but only vaguely aware of your own.

This game is the greatest storyteller in a box I have ever seen. Games like Tales Of The Arabian Nights try admirably. This game succeeds astoundingly. You feel the relationships, the danger, the trickery.

If you don't like random, if you can't handle the arbitrary scale of the ships and if you hate Trek, stay away.

For everyone else, this is a treat of epic proportions.

As an aside and by total coincidence, if you get the Romulan and Dominion expansions, I worked on those.

TLDR: Star Trek adventure/war/exploration done right