There’s a lot of flex here.Īdd in an optional equipment list, weapons, and armour to further specialise and patch up your Captain, alongside a customisable First Mate, and eight more Soldiers, picked from ‘standard’ and ‘specialist’ rosters, and you’ve got some truly creative scope to your warband. Or make them a supernatural Psionicist, better suited to dealing offensive sallies in storms of mind-bending elite powers. Build them as a Han Solo-esque Rogue to disrupt enemy actions, and pursue deceptive bait-and-switch plays, while focusing on loot-grabbing above all else. Make them an AdMech tech-priest lookalike, with one too many cybernetic enhancements, capable of supporting the rest of your squishy crew with energy shields and camouflage. There’s some truly creative scope to building your warband Assemble a crew of ten intrepid adventurers, embark upon loot-snatching sorties in competitive two-player battles, and play through a series of interlinked scenarios across a persistent campaign – all the while levelling up your crew, and recruiting replacements for those who meet the nasty end of a carbine. It’s just a shame, then, that it doesn’t explore those promising directions further, to build upon its predictably brilliant core systems.įor those that have played Stargrave’s predecessor, Frostgrave, the game will feel immediately familiar. Despite its more colourful elements, Stargrave is very much a tactical miniatures skirmisher in body and soul, sitting snugly in the realm of wargames, but peppering its streamlined combat with avenues of lucid RPG exploration.
One in which combat takes pride of place, but is ingrained within a wider fictional world, and is given meaning by player decision-making.īut that’s not how Stargrave presents itself. A customisable gang of spacefarers, character progression across a persistent campaign, a panoply of quasi-mystical tech-powers, and an expansive, interpretable sci-fi universe, spanning dense swamps, and the pitch-black gangways of derelict warships: Stargrave looks to have all the makings of a riveting tabletop RPG. A cursory glance at Stargrave can give the wrong impression.