First Impressions of The Captain is Dead

The Captain is Dead! There are enemy ships of the starboard bow, the teleporter is on the fritz and what the hell is that orange block doing in the engine room!? Does anyone have any orange cards? Because it seems the jump drive operates some kind of ticketing system and I’d really like to get out of here before the alien boarding party eats all the ice cream.

Climbing on board your psychedelic 80’s style spacecraft, sparkly sunglasses an integral part of the uniform, you were expecting a peaceful mission of exploration and maybe a little bit of adventure. A panicked space battle was probably not what you were hoping for, but it’s what you’ve got! Time to man the guns and drive off those attackers.

The Captain is Dead is a cooperative game, and plays a lot like Pandemic on acid. In fact, it looks like game is on acid now that I think about it. The aim is to fully fix the jump drive without being blown up by ships or overrun by boarding parties and if you think it all sounds very Star Trek then you’d be right. Except on acid, obviously, because if there is one thing The Captain Is Dead definitely involves, it is psychotropic drugs.

A relentless stream of alerts will come pouring out of the stack featuring all those bad effects, knocking you out, beaming in bad guys, space ship attack runs to hammer your shields. Fortunately your spaceship is pretty well equipped with a plethora of technologies spread around the edge of the board. Sadly, it’s all pretty badly maintained and gets knocked out of action demanding regular repairs, while you are running around in a panic trying to keep on top of everything else.

The core mechanical system for doing just about anything is set collection. You have a deck of resource cards that can be collected and shared between you (especially when the comms are still working). Then various stations require some number of those cards at once to use. 5 engineering cards will take the jump drive up a step, a couple of red tactical cards will fire the torpedoes, science cards will deal with the weird sciencey things that crop up. In the tradition of coops everywhere, you’ll need to balance the immediate threats with progressing on the overall goal.

The Captain is Dead is a solid, amusing coop. I really enjoyed it! It falls squarely into the category of Pandemic-esque coops but the game is mixed up and zany enough to set itself apart. For fans of Star Trek or for fans of poking fun at Star Trek, this is also a brilliantly realised theme. And there is a ton of challenge and variety buried inside this box, with a string of difficulty settings and a load of different characters to play with. First Impressions: very positive!

 

This First Impressions article is based on a single play through at the UK Games Expo.