StarForce Commander

STARFORCE COMMANDER

"Everything is a tactical tradeoff." 

StarForce Commander is a game of tactical starship combat. It uses streamlined and intuitive game mechanics, so it's easy to learn and, most importantly, fun to play. Your decisions and tactics, not merely dice rolls, will determine how the battle turns out. Whether you are a new cadet or a crusty old spacer, StarForce Commander is a fun and tactically rich game.

"Welcome aboard, Captain!"

As the Captain, you'll need to strike the right balance between arming weapons, maneuvering, reinforcing shields, targeting, and jamming. Get that balance right, and you'll have the edge over your opponent.

Weapons have firing arcs, and each ship has 4 shields surrounding it. Maneuver to bring your weapons to bear on weak enemy shields and "FIRE!" But be careful; the enemy will try to do the same to you. Weapons use colored 6-sided dice to determine damage. Just grab the right color dice for your weapons and the range to target. Dice results will be Light, Medium, Heavy, or weapon-specific Special hits. Damage is quickly resolved by drawing cards from the damage deck and applying the damage to the ship form.

Play on any surface; no hex maps are necessary. Ships move in one-inch increments, and turning is handled using turn rate templates for precise turns of 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, or even 60 degrees. In general, the faster you are moving, the lower your turn rate will be.

Optional rules let you tailor the complexity to your preferences. Jump right into the command chair with the basic Quickstart rules to play a very basic “move and shoot” game, or add the optional rules to make smaller battles more detailed and exciting. The choice is yours.

StarForce Commander lets you scale your battles to your preference. It has enough detail that a simple duel between 2 heavy cruisers is fun, tactically interesting and finished in about an hour. Equally important is that operating a ship is easy enough that you can promote yourself to commodore and play 3-4 ships efficiently, allowing squadron sized battles to be resolved in a 3-5 hour gaming session.

UNITS: Individual Starships

COMBAT SCALE: 1-4 Starships per player is ideal.

GAME TIME: Approximately 60 Minutes for every two ships in the battle.

PLAYERS: 2 or more.

MAP: Any surface.

PRINT AND PLAY

StarForce Commander is a Print and Play game, but we do sell physical game components. Download the rules and purchase game components at: Mariner.games/store

DOWNLOAD CONTENTS: The download includes: 66 page Rulebook PDF, a 40-page Game Component PDF, and a formatted document to print dice stickers. The Game Component PDF contains ship counters (full color and printer friendly), maneuver templates, printer friendly damage cards, Captain's Reference Card, Command Cards (full color and printer friendly), terrain, and 18 ship forms.

"This looks great, but I need more details."

We plan to continue supporting the StarForce Commander with expansions and new ships. If you want more details about StarForce Commander, please continue reading below. Also, click on links to our website and FaceBook pages for more info and regular updates.

IMPORTANT CONCEPTS

For me, the important thing is that my decisions matter and drive the game's outcome. I have played games where it felt like all I was doing as a player was moving units and rolling dice, but there were not any meaningful decisions to make. For all practical purposes, I was just the person resolving the battle, my decisions didn't really matter.

Next, I wanted the game mechanics to be intuitive for easy understanding and streamlined to keep the game moving. I wanted to minimize the necessity for charts to continually reference.

HOW DOES STARFORCE COMMANDER COMPARE TO OTHER GAMES LIKE IT?

StarForce Commander is the game I've always wished someone would design. My gaming group has been playing Starforce Commander since 2017 and we plan to continue playing. I would rate its overall difficulty level as moderate based on the number of rules and tactical options available to the player.

I've played and loved many games like SFB and Federation Commander, my favorite for many years. I wrote the Tactics Manual and won the national championship several times for Fed Com. I've also played FASA's starship combat simulator and most of the "fleet" battle games at the lower end of the complexity scale. I like them all for different reasons.

I wanted ships to have enough detail that a simple duel between 2 heavy cruisers was fun and tactically interesting. But it was equally important that operating a ship was easy enough that any player could operate 3-4 ships efficiently so that a squadron sized battle can be resolved in a 3-5 hour gaming session. Our best guess is that for every 2 ships on the board, the game takes about 1 hour.

I wanted to streamline the process of operating a single ship but retain enough decisions that duels were fun and exciting. From there, people could choose to add as many ships as they could handle.

I felt that some fleet-level games lack enough detail to make duels and small engagements tactically interesting (this is just my opinion so you know where my bias lies). I've had plenty of fun playing the fleet-level games, but I felt there were enough of them in the market already.

"QuickStart" rules provide players with just the minimum rules necessary to play. These are just the resource allocation, movement, and shooting rules. If you prefer to play at the fleet level, you might choose to keep the rules at this level. You can add the rest of the Standard rules, such as general ship systems and electronic warfare if you prefer.

Finally, there are optional rules that players can choose to use or not use based on their preference for details. If you are using all the rules, you will have lots of details and options, but StarForce Commander will play faster than the most complex starship combat games.

Here is an example of the standard and optional rules. In the Standard rules, once all of a ship's structure is damaged, the ship is removed from play. No explosions; simply remove the ship. It's about 1 paragraph of rules. If you want more details (perhaps for a campaign), you can add the optional rules for ship explosions, abandoning ship, rescuing crew in escape pods, and derelict ships. These optional rules add about one and a half pages and only matter if you have set up a campaign. So, the detailed rules are there for people who like them, and those who don't need them can ignore them.

GAME COMPONENTS

We have a game component pack available on our website for purchase that includes 16 dice (4 of each color), a counter sheet with turn templates, and a damage deck. The counters and turn templates are laser-cut MDF boards, making them a little more durable than cardboard. There are ten 1.5-inch ship counters.

The counters are double sided. One side has a ship silhouette; the other has the firing and shield arcs without the ship silhouette so that you can set your own miniatures on them without needing to put new bases on your miniatures. The intent is that SFC is compatible with most miniatures if the base can sit on our 1.5-inch counters. The full color damage deck has 56 cards.

I know there will be a small time investment to get your components up and running in the print and play version. Please take heart; the time invested will be worth it because the components are a large reason for the streamlined gameplay.

MAKING YOUR OWN SHIPS

You should feel free to create your own ships and settings for SFC. You can use any graphics or drawing program you like to create ship forms; we used Microsoft's PowerPoint. I would recommend you use the included ships as a baseline. Eventually, we hope to release a set of guidelines to help players create ship forms that won't break the game system. To be clear, it won't be a competitive design system like many of the fleet combat games out there, but we hope to have a refined spreadsheet to assist players in balancing the ships in their own settings.