Sam takes a look at the newest addition to the Commands & Colors family of games designed by Richard Borg, Red Alert: Space Fleet Warfare, from PSC Games!
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source: https://krescentmoon.net/
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I didn't buy it because it's too big for my table. Contacted company…play it on the floor!
Large table space for two players.
Warhammer 40k be like, Hold my drink.
A very solid review. I'd agree with most of the points for and against. This is a Command & Colors game, so you pretty much know what you're getting into. If you've played BattleLore, that's probably the most direct comparison as the Lore from that game is similar to the Command Stars from Red Alert, although the emphasis is much more (obviously) on ranged combat then melee. In fact, one thing I was surprised not to see in Red Alert was some kind of rule for ramming or boarding actions; you can ram ships during forced retreats (red alerts) but only by accident.
The ships looking similar was a problem for our first game and then pretty much ceased being one apart from Flagships, which are far too similar to Battlecruisers and do take a few moments to tell apart from them. This seems to be something they realised with the expansions, as the Carriers and Dreadnoughts are immediately much easier to tell apart from the other big ships.
The stand problem did wind me up to the point of supergluing the stands into the bases (not the stands into the ships, that's really not necessary). In fact, I don't know why they have the tall stands at all. The low stands for the Flagships and Battlecruisers are more than good enough, don't break anywhere near as easily and still look pretty good. Also worth noting that the stands are somewhat unnecessary: if you don't mind touching the models directly, they can just sit flat on the table.
As for the size, yup, that's the biggie and I think it was very clearly deliberate. Memoir 44 is the (relatively) small, contained C&C game, most of the other ones are a bit bigger and this one is bigger still. I think they wanted an iteration of the system that was meant for spectacle gaming, that could handle bigger models that people can customise and paint (and, cough, which you can substitute for ship models from other IPs that are way too expensive for PSC to ever licence) and which could actually give a good thematic sense of the largeness of space without going too big. You can still fight most battles in under an hour. I also wonder if this is a bit of a field test for the inevitable C&C naval game they'll get round to one day, where larger maps and models would also make sense.
Something worth mentioning which you didn't in your review, this is the first C&C game where you can play an Overlord version of the game (2v2 or 3v3) without having to buy a whole second core box. You can get a second mat cheaply and there's enough tokens and models in the base game for both sides to field much larger fleets than you ever can in the 1v1 game. Although of course you'd need to find someone with an aircraft hanger large enough to handle such a game, but there you go.
I would rank it a bit higher. Once you've taken on board the negatives, I think the positives, especially the much greater tactical depth from the stars and the second card deck (and the return fire mechanic, which they've finally made work), makes this one of the best C&C games to date, if not the best, and something I'd like to see in any future 2nd Edition of Memoir 44.
Just pretend the wrinkles are fluctuations in gravity or ripples in space time. Adds theme, and issue solved! 😉
The game box looks like it was made in 2019 BC
In the graphic at the beginning it says this is for 2-6 players, is that a typo? I thought that it’s a two player game
Thank you.
I consider it a profound design flaw to have fleet action combat in space where combat can happen at range while still imposing 2-dimensional constraints, as if the vessels operated on water rather than in space. It would make more sense to have all combat happen within a hex and not have these stupid "line of sight" rules. If you insist on having a design that features ranged combat in the vast reaches of space, then it should dispense with line of sight rules because there are almost no cases in which an angle to the target can't be found with a small shift in position in the dimension not represented by the flat board. Even aircraft combat games have "altitude" as a factor, and so it is just dumb not to put the third dimension of space into the design somehow.
BoxThrone review! Make it so…
You should try War Rocket by Hydra miniatures… fantastic game and minis. – it is a miniatures game but can be played on a hex mat. very very good, simple, fun and engaging
The ships looking extremely similar intra and intra faction is exactly why I didn't back this. Crazy because they paid for unique moulds for the different sculpts, so why not
-really-make the ships and factions different and help add some theme regarding the background of the factions? A neoprene mat that big would have been >$200, but yes, everything could also have been smaller.The battlemat got me thinking of https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/700/battle-masters. That game was only playable on the floor. As it happens, that game also uses a deck of cards to activate units. Faster units had more cards in the deck, and were activated more often. Pretty inovative for a game almost 30 years old!
The only thing I disagree on is the footprint con. This basically is a two player miniatures game (at least that's what it seems) and most of those revolve around tables being at a minimum 3×3 and more often 4×4 or 4×6. A TI size playspace seems fairly small in that regard.
Games usually cheap out wherever they can so I’ll never agree something is too big.
This is a hard pass for me.
Agreed with everything you said, well done review Sam. The game is so much fun and you can tell the design has matured over the course of the years, but those components issues… Ugh, its heartbreaking really. If they had made very different ship models in a manageable size, this could have been close to a 9 or 10 for me. Perhaps it could be remedied with a nice coat of paint?