Logan and I got a chance to run through three turns of Starcraft The Board Game by Fantasy Flight Games.

After receiving the game, I read the rules once all the way through, and then skimmed the first half of them the second time. The rules are very clear, have quite a few examples of use in play, and are easy to read.

Punching the game pieces and setting up a two-player game took about an hour. There are a ton of bits that come with the game, but once you separate the factions out to their respective colors, one factions' bits are easy to handle.

The minis are detailed and have a nice tactile feeling to them. The counters have very accurate art from the computer game and are easy to distinguish. After doing a count of all of the pieces, everything was present and accounted for. There were a few extra minis as well. Three of the flying minis came broken off of their pegs, but a little super glue and you would never notice.

The game map is of a modular design, where you lay down planets randomly and connect them with navigation routes. This allows a very flexible design with continued re-playability.

Logan played the Zerg: The Overmind. I played the Terrans: Mengsk's faction. After the setup we walked through the first turn very carefully. The second and third turns went a lot smoother. It helps tremendously to have played the computer game BUT it is not necessary to enjoy the board game experience.

The first two turns consisted of basically building units, moving them around to mobilize, and building bases, base modules, and individual buildings. The third turn saw the first combat of the game so we slowed down a bit to make sure we covered everything we could think of regarding the rules.

There is resource gathering and management, building units, buildings, bases, and modules, combat; all that a good RTS already has.

This is a dice-free game. Combat is card-based and there are basic combat cards, reinforcement cards, and technology cards purchased to be used for combat.

Overall, it represents the RTS experience for the most part. For a turn-based game, I think it is well represented of the computer game. We plan on setting up a full game soon and from what I've seen, I like the game. Logan also likes the game and picked up the rules as well or better than me.

I'm guessing we got about 75% of the rules correct. After the sessions I went through the rules again and found just a few things that we missed. All in all, a very nice experience.