Starbase Annex

It's surprising how few moving parts you need to make a successful board game. Go has been popular for over two thousand years, and has barely any rules at all.

Starbase Annex isn't going to claim that crown anytime soon, but it's a game in the same paradigm. Easy to learn, hard to master.

Unfortunately it's also one of those titles that's far easier to learn than to describe. A deck of cards, with four suits numbered one to ten, is dealt between two players.

At the start of each turn you can buy cards up to the value of the number of board spaces you own. At the end of each turn you can place these at entry points on the board.

Between, each card on the board can move one hex. If it contains enemy cards, you can capture them if the total value of your own cards is equal or higher than theirs. Whoever has cards left on the space gets control of it.

Rinse and repeat until one player captures the whole board or you run out of cards. The game then works out which side gets to win one of several victory points. It's all based on who has most of a certain suit, or a certain number, and so on.

There's an Italian card game called Scopa which is oddly similar. You play cards to capture ones on the table to the same value. Then there are various conditions to win points. Starbase Annex is kind of the same but with resource management, movement, and manoeuvres.

This stripped down framework is solid. It has the potential to deliver the sort of deep play from simple rsules that's the hallmark of a good abstract game.

Except Starbase Annex isn't abstract. It's presented as some sort of science fiction face off, in the style of Chimera Software's classic hit Starbase Orion.

As you might expect with such thin foundations, the theme fails. Oh, sure, there's pictures of starships on the cards, the entry points are called "stars" and there's alien races to fight.

But it's only touchscreen deep, and fooling no-one. This might as well be a game about turnip farming. Grainy presentation, a clumsy interface, and repetitive music don't help.

Still, that would be forgivable if the game made the most of its mechanics. But it falls short in most areas.

After the tutorial, you're launched into the single-player campaign. It'll take a couple of ignominious defeats to get the hang of the way the game plays. Then you can dismiss the easier opponents in short order.

And the normal difficulty ones, and the hard difficulty ones too. The AI doesn't seem to have much idea how to play its own game properly.

English self-deprecation

Without effective opposition, the simplistic nature of the game becomes repetitive and dull. So I struck out into the menus, looking for an asynchronous match online against some human players.

The menus held nothing but graphics and sound options. There was no online play option at all. In this age, that's just not acceptable.

There are other games in the same genre and at the same price point that offer this function. Starbase Annex just can't compete with them in terms of potential replay value.

It tries various tricks to engage you. It presents solo play as a series of battle against alien space captains with extensive text biographies. But they're just not interesting enough to bother with.

It mixes things up with different board shapes. But without challenging opposition it doesn't really matter how the hexes fit goether.

What we have here is a solid time-waster for strategy fans. If you want something that will engage your brain for ten minutes Starbase Annex fills that brief.

But then again, so do lots of other games. Starbase Annex isn't terrible. It just isn't novel, interesting, or even professional enough to stand out in the increasingly crowded app store.