I won't even waste time trying to appear neutral about Star Chamber. It's an interesting, original game that I was proud to have sponsor the site. I talked about it a bit during the holidays, when its ability to run on virtually anything served me in good stead. It has a lot more going for it than just its egalitarian position on hardware.
Imagine a game where you manage a Star Empire, the genre we refer to as "4x." Abstract that out so that the galaxy itself is explicit from the start - each planet and the routes between those worlds are connected by a number of spaces, like a board game situated in deep space. Each potential galactic despot begins play as one of nine distinct races, with a homeworld, a scout, and a few citizens at their disposal. Barren Worlds, Industrial Worlds, and Artifact Worlds float awaiting colonization, as ships and citizens produced by your planet move to populate the board. There are three ways to win the game - the "Military Victory" entails you sending a fleet to your opponents homeworld, boiling their seas with the experimental orbital platform "Black Sun." You can achieve what is known as a "Cultural Victory" by accruing thirty more destiny points than your opponent. Finally, you can achieve a "Political Victory" by winning three Power Play votes in the Star Chamber. The Star Chamber itself is a planet that no-one can own, and every six turns important votes take place there with ramifications for each of the three victory conditions. The Power Plays I just mentioned are, of course, one of them - but there are also Alien Support votes, which can produce Destiny, and a final vote that can give you free Peacekeeper attack ships. The thing is, under ordinary circumstances you only get a number of votes equal to the number of citizens you have at the Chamber itself. It's an interesting way to work in the Galactic Senate element, I think. I have a feeling there are very few Power Play victories, but I don't know that for sure. Just a hunch.
Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention the most important part: it's also a collectible card game. So in addition to the game I mentioned above, there is an entire card game that modifies the events I've described. It's also one of the main ways the races are distinguished from one another, as different cards draw on different fields of research that are roughly analogous to mana in Magic: The Gathering.
Once I returned home, I went what you might call "whole hog" and purchased a box of boosters online. It probably wasn't necessary to buy so many, and you could certainly enjoy yourself in Star Chamber for less. But the game itself was free, and a box of boosters was fifty bucks, and it seemed to me that I've paid fifty dollars for a game at retail before and detested every moment. The least I could do was pay the same amount for a game that had given me a lot of fun for nothing.
There are elements of the game's presentation that are somewhat primitive. Mercifully, it does allow you to turn off the sounds they've included, sounds which can pierce the eardrum and cause you to bleed from your head. The cards could do with some anti-aliased fonts, things are just a little rough around the edges. But really, as a subset of a subset - a space empire game which is also a CCG - erring on the side of gameplay probably won't lose them a single player. Odds are good that the people this game is designed for will come to terms with those issues.
I finally worked up the courage to hop in a channel last night and play a couple games, having whet my appetite for interstellar domination on the AI opponent for weeks. Training against that AI was like beating up your little sister in preparation for a heavyweight fight, it was worse than doing nothing because now I had the stay-puft ego, fed to bursting on illusory victories. I ended up against MisterOrange, who has written a few strategy articles over at SCWatch as it turns out, and he took me to school with a card I just traded him. That made me feel like kind of an asshole, I wasn't crazy about that exact moment.
Even with just the racial starter decks, you could have a lot of fun just installing it and playing against friends. That doesn't cost shit.
(CW)TB
