Star Chamber

Sam discovers a new love for star-gazing...

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Winning a Power Play also brings more immediate gains as you can purchase a tech for a loss of destiny points, or opt for one of the five Power Plays themselves. These range from Council Intervention which will prevent a planet's conquest for a turn, Assassination for ridding yourself of a pesky enemy hero, Tip the Balance to grant you ownership of a planet where both you and your foe have equal influence or Sweeping Changes which gives you a card to play which will cause the target player to drop their hand and draw fresh ones from their deck. There is also the option to declare War, (or subsequently Peace) here. Declare war on your foe and you get a free bomber at your Homeworld while unlocking the bomber build option for both players. Bombers can only move two jump points per turn but will destroy one enemy citizen on a planet if they survive the space combat round. The winner of the Power Play also gets The Edge for the next six rounds, something which has numerous benefits with the ability to fire first in any engagement being the most desirable.

The game is broken into 11 turns per round. The first turn is for deploying your choice of cards. All ships move in the third and engage in combat on the fourth while bombers will drop their loads on the fifth. If you then have more influence than your foe in turn six you will win that planet. The next two turns will see your planets generate industrial and destiny points in that order. After that is the draw phase where each player will draw one card up to the hand maximum of five, although there are some situations and cards which will allow you to hold more. The next two turns are the end phase and will cover any events not taken care of in the preceding rounds.

Combat itself is broken down into ten turns. While shooting only occurs in seven of these the others are there for special actions. Different ships have different weapons. Scouts have beam weapons and can fire in rounds four and five while cruisers come with missiles and cannons and will blast away in turns three and six through nine. These different firing phases mean that having a balanced fleet is important. Fleets are enhanced in the presence of a hero who will add varying degrees of leadership which will increase the damage and combat effectiveness of your ships. Many of the cards will also enhance your craft while a fair number will damage and or debilitate those of your foe. Each ship has an attack, defence and move rating and keeping a good eye on these can tell you whether or not a battle is winnable but you can never fully prepare for the what cards your opponent may play or how the destruction of your most important craft early on will effect the final outcome. Combat only cycles through the rounds once per engagement. If you loose all of your ships then you will also lose any personae that they were carrying. Of course there is a card to counter this, as there is a card to counter nearly everything in the game but only certain races, like Humans, have access to the Lifeboat card which would save your crew from death.

There are nine different races in Star Chamber and in addition to racial traits each one specialises in two of the five different tech types, Order, Mind, Life, Entropy, Cyber. On the first turn you pick a tech, then a new one is given on the 4, 6, 9, 12, 16, 20, 25 and 30th turns. The more tech points you accumulate the more cards you can play. The more common card types usually require a point or two from either one or both of your races specialist tech types. The rarer and deadlier cards will require more, often up to numbers so high that they can't be played on the smaller maps. This means you have to know your deck pretty well.

Before you can enter a game you will have to choose a deck. You build your deck from the collection of cards that you have which will be determined by the number of packs that you have purchased. The more you buy or trade the more you will have at your disposal and making up decks for your preferred races is half the fun of Star Chamber. A lot of the deep strategy in this game comes from how well you have configured your deck. Depending on the race chosen and the cards you have available you may want to build-up a military deck that will be full of ships and heroes. Or you may prefer the sneaky route, or the destiny route, or the diplomatic route or whatever combination suits your desire and style of play.