Star Trek: Captain's Chair

Here is an overview of how to play Star Trek: Captain’s Chair based on the provided rules.

Setup

1. Player Boards and Markers: Place your Crew board to the left side of your player area (selecting either the Basic or Advanced side) and place 3 Specialty markers on the zero space of all your Specialty tracks (p. 6).
2. Captain and Decks: Place your Captain card to the right of your Crew board, leaving an empty space above it for your Duty Officer (p. 6). Separate your Crew deck based on position indicators (such as Incident, Deployed, Controlled Location, Development, Reserve, Available, and Discard) and place them accordingly (p. 6).
3. Common Setup and Stardates: Set up the central Market, Location deck, and Neutral Zone following the game's layout instructions (p. 4). Sort the appropriate Stardate cards by sequence number with card #1 on top, place them near the Market, and place the indicated number of Glory tokens on the visible Stardate card (p. 4).
4. Resources and Starting Hand: Take 1 Dilithium, 1 Latinum, and 1 Glory from the supply to form your personal resource pool, along with your action tokens and Mission Completion tokens (p. 6). Finally, draw 5 cards from your Draw deck into your hand as your starting hand (p. 6).

Turn Structure

Play alternates between players, with each player completely resolving all four steps of their turn in the following order before passing play to the opponent (p. 8):

• Resupply Step: In the order of your choosing, trigger every Resupply operation you have in play, excluding beamed cards (p. 9). All effects are mandatory unless indicated otherwise (p. 9).
• Control Step: If you have one or more secured neutral Location cards (having at least 3 tokens there and at least 2 more than your opponent), you may take control of one of them (p. 9, 21).
• Action Step: Use this step to play cards, activate table operations, and spend actions (p. 10, 11).
• Clean-up Step: This step is broken down into substeps: trigger Clean-up operations, handle Stardate resolution if a Stardate card empties, place Glory, and finally discard, draw, and refresh your cards (p. 12).

How the Game Ends

The game continues with players taking turns until the end of the game is triggered in one of two ways (p. 8):

• Resolution: Emptying the last Stardate card triggers a Resolution (p. 8). Continue playing until the second player has finished their turn, then both players play one more turn each before proceeding to final scoring (p. 8).
• The Burn: If the Incident deck empties, the game ends immediately with the Burn (p. 8). The player with fewer Incident cards (in their hand, Discard pile, Draw deck, or Captain’s Log, but not their Reserve deck) wins, and ties proceed to final scoring (p. 8).

(Note: Specific details for final scoring calculations are partially outlined in the text references, but the complete step-by-step scoring breakdown relies on page 24, which is not fully detailed in the provided excerpts.)