Assemble your capital ship and engage in space battle in this deck-building game.
What Is Solar Titans?
Solar Titans is a deck-building battle game for 1 to 4 players, ages 14 and up, and takes about 30–60 minutes to play. It’s currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, with a pledge level of $25 for a copy of the game. (This campaign is for the Definitive Edition; owners of the original edition can get an upgrade pack for a $4 pledge.)
Solar Titans was designed by Xian Wu and Phillip Gee and published by SunnySideUp Games, with art by Hong Sun, Gloria R., Riya Santra, and Gainne Arban.
New to Kickstarter? Check out our crowdfunding primer.
Solar Titans Components
Note: My review is based on the original edition of the game. The Definitive Edition adds 16 new cards, along with updates to the solo game, but most of the gameplay and components will be pretty similar to what you see here.
Here’s what comes in the box:
- 100 Starter cards:
- 8 Ship Layout cards
- 20 Field Repair cards
- 32 Starter Ship cards
- 40 Starter Crew cards
- 80 Main Market cards
- 24 Hired Crew cards
- 6 Automata AI cards
- 4 Automata Ship sheets
- 4 Reference cards
As you can see, the majority of the game components are cards, along with a few reference sheets for the automata ships (used in solo or 2-player cooperative games). The ship cards are illustrated with a top-down view of the component, showing the module on the exterior of the spaceship. The backs of the cards show an explosion, since you flip the cards face-down when a part has been damaged. The icons are pretty large and are all fairly easy to interpret.
How to Play Solar Titans
You can download a copy of the rulebook here.
The Goal
The goal of the game is to destroy your opponent’s Command Deck.
Setup
Each player gets two ship layout cards and chooses one to use, setting up their starting ship cards according to the card. Stack your five Field Repair cards with the “5” on top. In addition, each player gets a starting deck of 10 crew cards, which is shuffled and placed face-down. Each player draws 5 cards as their starting hand. (The player with the lowest-numbered ship layout goes first, and discards 1 card from their starting hand as a handicap.)
Set up the card market by shuffling the main deck and revealing 6 cards. Also, place the Mercenary Crew and the Hauling Crew decks face-up nearby.
Gameplay
On your turn, you may play the cards in your hand, buy cards from the market, modify your ship, and fire weapons. At the end of your turn, you’ll discard all your cards, perform Field Repairs, and draw back up to 5 cards.
Your starting deck has three basic crew cards, mostly Cargo Crew that provide 1 coin each. You may spend these coins to buy cards from the market, placing them into your discard pile and refilling the market after every purchase. You may also spend a coin to scrap the most expensive card from the market and refill. (Scrapped cards are removed from your deck and go into a scrap pile, or the advanced crew cards are returned to their stacks.) You have one Crew Coordinator that can be used either as 1 coin or allows you to spend a coin to scrap a card in your hand. Hauling Crew cards may be purchased from the market and they each provide 2 coins, or can be scrapped to move ship cards around.
To fire weapons, you’ll need the Arming Crew or the Mercenary Crew (available from the market). These can be played to fire a weapon immediately, or placed below your ship to prep them, where they can fire once on a future turn. Each weapon on your ship may only be fired once per turn.
When you fire, you must do enough damage to meet the shield level of the card you are attacking—damage does not accumulate between turns, so if something has 2 shields, you must do 2 damage on your turn to disable it. There are four types of weapon abilities, shown in the photo above. The single red arrow attacks one card at the front of your opponent’s ship. The purple arrow also attacks the front of a ship, but does piercing damage: any remaining damage continues to the next card in the column. The orange double arrow attacks the front of two adjacent columns. Finally, the yellow split arrow is a flanking attack, which hits any card on the right or left edge of the target ship. If you disable a card, it is flipped face-down.
You are allowed to scrap parts from your ship at any time, as long as your ship is still one contiguous shape overall. If you’ve drawn ship cards into your hand, you may add them to your ship—the ship must stay within a 5×5 grid, and you may have a maximum of 15 ship cards in play at a time.
At the end of your turn, all of the cards you played and any left in your hand are discarded to your own discard pile, and you draw back up to 5 cards. You may also do Field Repairs: as long as the card does not have a “no wrench” icon on it, you may flip a disabled card face-up by spending one of your Field Repair cards. Note that you only have 5 of these for the entire game, and they will not get replenished.
Game End
The game ends when somebody disables a Command Deck on their turn—they win the game!
Game Variants
The game comes with several options for gameplay. You can play a 2-player head-to-head duel, a free-for-all with 3 or 4 players (you are allowed to attack any other player on your turn), or a 2-vs-2 team game. There’s also an option for a 2-vs-2 game using Titan ships: instead of one ship per player, each team has a larger ship, built with the basic layout and then adding 5 more starter cards to it. You can also play a 1-vs-2 “Titan Takedown” game.
If you’re playing solo or want to play cooperatively, you can introduce the automata ships.
The original edition included a base automata ship in the rulebook and then three additional harder ships. Each of the automata titans combines two starting decks to form a bigger ship, but your goal is still the same: disable the command module.
At setup, the automata ship also gets one randomly drawn AI card, which gives it a unique ability. The Automata draws a card from the market deck each turn, and will perform actions based on what was drawn: if it’s a non-weapon ship card, it reinforces itself; if it’s a weapon, it will fire all of its weapons at you and then upgrades itself.
For an even bigger challenge, you can use one of the hard ships—these sheets include a layout, but also a bonus ability specific to that ship (in addition to the AI card used in setup).
Why You Should Play Solar Titans
Although Solar Titans is a deck-building game, the fact that many of your cards are ship cards that end up being built onto your ship means that your deck doesn’t quite have the same sort of build-up that you often get in other games. You still cycle through your deck in a similar way, but ship cards are basically played once, and then they’re out of your deck.
Similarly, the Mercenary Crew and Hauling Crew are cards that end up scrapping themselves. The Hauling Crew gives you money to spend and you can keep cycling them through, but if you use one to move a ship card around and then it’s gone. Likewise, it’s important to get some Mercenary Crew if you want to be able to fire more weapons at once, but as the card name says, they’re mercenaries—they only work if they’re getting paid, so they are also single-use cards.
That means most players will have pretty similar decks—there are only a handful of crew cards in the main market deck—and most of the customization will actually be found in the ships, both in the types of cards you decide to build onto your ship and how you decide to lay them out.
Your starting layout is pretty basic: everyone has a basic laser and some simple armor plating, and three modules that don’t do anything but have penalties if they get damaged. If your Crew Quarters is disabled, you’ll have to discard cards every turn. If your Targeting Bay is disabled, it costs you extra cards to fire your weapons. And, of course, if your Command Deck is disabled … you lose.
Do you try to build up your armor? That certainly can help protect you, but you can’t win by being a turtle—you only delay the inevitable. It’s important to see what sorts of weapons your opponents are buying, too. If somebody buys a flanking weapon, then you know you have to protect the left and right sides of your ship. If they’ve got piercing, you need to double up on the front. On the flip side, you want to look for weapons that will get you around your opponents’ defense.
Overall, I enjoyed the modular ship-building aspect of Solar Titans. It’s a fun challenge to balance offense and defense, and the rain of destruction that happens at times reminded me a little of playing Vampire Village, where you watch your carefully arranged cards fall to pieces. Here, though, you get to play a more active part in that destruction!
I do wish there were a few more action cards mixed into the deck because I think it would make some of the turns more interesting, but the game feels like it is more about the ship-building and battle than about variety in the types of actions. I think Solar Titans will appeal to people who enjoy assembling things, whether that’s a slapped-together spaceship like Galaxy Truckers or building a starship out of LEGO.
For more information or to make a pledge, visit the Solar Titans Kickstarter page!
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Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
