Have you ever wondered what might happen if the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise beamed down to the Planet of the Apes? Well, wonder no more. Star Schlock is here with the tools to help you answer that question for yourself!
Designed with a clear and obvious affection for screen science fiction of the 1970s and ‘80s, Star Schlock is a miniatures skirmish game populated by sentient apes, brave explorers, opportunistic pirates and noble adventurers. The game stirs all the familiar tropes together into a soup that serves as an excellent background for tabletop skirmishes featuring a wide range of colorful characters.
What’s in the Box?
The Star Schlock Battle Game Starter Set includes just about everything needed to play the game: rules, cards, dice, tokens, measuring tools, and 16 miniatures. The only thing missing is terrain, but most miniatures gamers should be able to throw together something suitable – just about any table setup can stand in for the set of a low budget scifi TV show.
The components are of reasonably good quality, but I do have one very minor complaint here. The token sheet is thin foam core board that has been laser cut, resulting in a lot of soot – you will need to clean off all the tokens (and your hands) thoroughly once you’ve punched them out. The free standing status tokens are a nice touch though, and look great on the table.
The miniatures are all metal and well cast, with only a minimum of assembly and cleanup required prior to painting. The designs are very characterful, evoking the franchises they are inspired by but also fairly versatile, inviting any number of different paint schemes. The game’s Galaxy Guide book even offers several “make them your own” suggestions.
How Does It Play?
Forces are made up of a mix of singular character units and group units of five models. Characters move and attack individually, while groups have to remain in base contact with each other, activating as a single entity. Each unit is assigned a level of either 2, 3 or 4, and a force can contain one or more units of each level. The two forces in the starter set are the Space Apes, consisting of an Ape Officer, a group of Gorilla Grunts, the fearsome Mongo-Rilla and the scheming Dr. Zayce; and the Explorer Corps, made up of Captain Curt, his first officer Commander Nico, Tobor the Robot, and a Landing Party group.
The game uses a mix of cards and dice to assign actions and resolve combat. The cards provide the game’s primary engine and its most interesting aspect: each player has an identical deck of 18 cards featuring a mix of numbers and symbols that correspond to unit and action types. On their turn, a player selects a card to play from a hand of three, and then chooses a level of unit to activate. They then activate all their units of that level. If the card played matches the level chosen, the units each get three actions; if not, they get two. If a unit has already activated in the round, they can go again but they only get one action regardless of whether the card matches or not.
Played cards become resources, which can then be spent any time during the round for numerous effects, such as giving an activating unit a free action of the type pictured on the card. Resources can also be spent to interrupt the opponent’s actions with counterattacks or retreats. In addition, character units can spend a resource as a “buff,” to add dice to an attack roll or ability test (used for things like scaling vertical surfaces or rallying after a devastating attack).
After all the player’s units of the chosen level have activated, that player draws a card and their opponent takes a turn. Play continues back and fourth until each player has played three cards, which ends the round. All played cards (whether or not they’ve been spent) are then discarded and a new round begins. A standard game ends after four rounds, with victory points awarded for controlling objectives and defeating enemy units.
Who Would Win in a Fight Between…
Combat is quick and relatively simple, resolved using custom six-sided dice. Each die shows three success symbols, two shield symbols, and one space-helmeted skull, which usually indicates that a special effect has been activated. Like most games, combat is down to an attack roll vs a defense roll, with the defender’s shield results canceling the attacker’s successes. If the attacker’s remaining successes equal or exceed the defender’s Vigor value, the defender takes a wound. Double equals two wounds, and so on.
Damage for group units is tracked by removing miniatures from the group. When a group is down to its last miniature, it is eliminated from the game.
For characters, a wound normally means death. However, players have the option to use any card from their hand as “plot armor,” which prevents the character from dying and also gives them two extra dice on all subsequent attack rolls and ability tests. A character can’t be assigned more plot armor cards than their level, and there is an additional catch: you don’t draw a new card after playing one as plot armor, so your hand, and therefore your options, are reduced for the remainder of the game.
Being attacked has the additional effect of adding “pinned” tokens to the defender, representing panic in the face of battle. If a unit ever has more pinned tokens than their Will value, they are routed, and may only move towards their player’s side of the board until they Rally by making a successful Will test (by rolling dice equal to the unit’s Will value and getting at least one success result). If they move off the edge of the board they’re out of the game.
A Lot to Think About, but Not Too Much
The card-driven game play gives players a lot of tactical decisions to make. Your hand starts at three cards, and stays there for a while since you draw a new card every time you play one for an activation. Controlling objectives lets you draw extra cards at the end of the round, increasing your hand size and giving you more options, as well as more latitude to play cards as plot armor. If your hand is ever reduced to zero cards (which happens at least once or twice in every game), you play the top card of your deck for your activation, relying on the luck of the draw.
It’s a great game system, chock full of meaningful choices. Tracking the different game effects is very elegant, with no need to keep track of hit points, and statuses such as pinned and routed represented by fun 2D tokens that look great on the battlefield. The model count is fairly low, with around 8-12 figures per side in a standard game once you expand beyond the contents of the starter set. Units tend to be fairly easy to run effectively, without a lot of special abilities or other rules that are easily forgotten or slow down game play.
Moving Beyond the Starter Set
There are a fair number of additional models available for the game, from the Buck Rogers-inspired Union to the Star Wars-like Eternal Empire, along with a nice mix of aliens, mutants and robots. The miniatures are consistent with what’s in the starter set, high quality with a lot of character, but here is where I have another (very minor) minor complaint. Other than the starter set, none of the miniature packs come with stat cards – they need to be acquired either by printing out bland-looking black and white PDF files (many with no images), or chased after in randomized packs of trading cards that (at $7 per pack of six cards) are a little on the expensive side. I understand that the publisher is going for a 1970s vibe here, but it’s a little annoying to have to jump through hoops just to make the models playable.
On the other hand, the free PDFs do make it easy to substitute miniatures you might already have in your collection, and honestly, the game is an absolute blast, so I don’t mind doing a little extra work.
Who’s It For?
Star Schlock should appeal to experienced miniatures gamers who will appreciate the slightly over-the-top 1970s/1980s aesthetic, and might even be a good fit for new players who want to dip a toe into the hobby. The metal models look great and require very little assembly, with most just needing to be glued into their slotted bases, and the terrain requirements are minimal.
The rules complexity is light to moderate – there are a few easily overlooked “but wait, you can do this too” rules buried in the rule book, but everything makes sense and flows well, with concepts that should be familiar to experienced gamers and reasonably easy to grasp for new players. The Starter Set is very self-contained and a great place to begin.
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