Starship Samurai
A strategy game that will mecha you smile
Designer: Isaac Vega Artist: Gunship Revolution
If you haven’t already guessed by the name, Starship Samurai is a game that’s not trying to hide much. It has starships and it has samurai: here, massive sword-wielding mecha represented by miniatures that absolutely capture the glee of watching and playing with Gundam and Transformers. Its dependable gameplay, too, offers up few big surprises – but it’s still easy to be won over by the results of its reliable blend if you don’t expect a game about robots in space to be the most mindblowing thing you’ve ever played.
The mecha may be the stars of the show, but it’s the planets they are fighting over that set the stage for Starship Samurai’s action. A deck of location cards presents a fresh spread of worlds to try and rule each round, racking up ‘honour’ (read: victory points) for claiming a card, with the added spice of extra points for collecting a set of different planet types (quite uninspiringly denoted by different amounts of pips, rather than actual categories) by the end of the game.