Stellar Conflict

Today's review is of the 2015 release, Stellar Conflict.  For 2-4 players, it takes 10 minutes.

Overview
You control a space fleet, set on conquering your corner of the galaxy.  Command your chosen ships and place them wisely, orienting them so their weapons fire on foes.  Will you prevail?

You need a large tabletop surface for this one.  First, you decide on the scale of the conflict (the total credit value of each fleet).  Once decided, each player prepares by secretly selecting ships from their pile of ship cards until they have a fleet with total cost less than or equal to the credit total.  Once done, their deck is shuffled (with predetermined ships placed on top and bottom).  Ship choices for one fleet are below.

ship's cost is the smaller number in upper right; image from here

Players then deploy their ships simultaneously, and they have to do it fast (deploying everything in 30-120 seconds, depending on the size of the conflict chosen).  To deploy, both players draw the top card of their deck and play it anywhere on the table, pointing in any direction (but it can't touch or overlap another card).  Once the first ship is placed, players keep going until their decks are empty or the timer goes off.

After deployment, battle commences.  Here, ships fire their lasers based on their initiative number (bigger number in upper left), highest number shooting first.  Players use the included rubber bands to extend all laser lines coming off of ships to determine if their ships have hit anything (if a laser hits your own ship, you must take the damage).  Purple lasers to 1 damage, red 2, green 3.  If a ship's damage exceeds its hull value (smaller number, upper left), it is destroyed and it goes into the opponent's victory pile, where they gain victory points (larger number in upper right) based on the ship.

battle in progress; image from here

After battle, victory points are tallied; highest wins!

Review
This is okay.  Some interesting concepts, but the "must fire all lasers" rule bothers me, and the real-time component frustrates (I guess I'm a turn-based-only type in competitive games).  Some people are high on this one, and I can see why . . . but I'll stick to other titles.

Rating: C+