Star Realms Academy Review

boardgamequest.com:

My kids (age 6) love playing games with me. For many years, we really could only play kids’ games together, which were basically memory or dexterity games. As they’ve aged up some, we’ve moved on to more complex games, with the “My First,” or “My ‘lil” style of games being perfect gateways for them. They’ve already torn through Catan Junior, My ‘Lil Everdell, and My First Carcassonne.

At Gen Con this year, publisher Wacky Wizard Games (an imprint of Wise Wizard Games) released their introductory deck-building game, Star Realms Academy. It’s tailor-made for families with simpler rules, cute art, and no reading required. Fingers crossed that this intro-to-deck-building game works as advertised.

If you’ve played Star Realms before, then a lot is going to be very familiar to you. However there are some rules changes, so you don’t want to just dive in and start playing. Each player starts with an identical deck of 6 cards. On a player’s turn, they must play all 3 cards in their hand.

Each card will provide one or more icons that include:
Coins: Used to buy cards from the market to add to your deck.
Attack: Removes your opponent’s shield token(s).
Draw: Draw a card.
Repair: Gain a shield token back.

Any ships you played and cards you bought will get sent to your discard pile at the end of the turn. Any bases you put in play remain there until destroyed by your opponent. Bases will also provide defense against attacks on you. Bases that are in play from previous rounds will provide their bonuses each round.

Some cards also have an “ally” ability which triggers if you play two cards of the same color/faction on a turn. So that green card may only grant you 1 point of attack, but if you play a second green card on a turn (or have a green base in play), then you get its boosted ability.

After finishing your turn, you draw your hand back up to three cards and your opponent goes. The first player to remove all of their opponent’s shield tokens wins.

My kids have had zero