Goldenstar – First Impressions
Goldenstar: The Galactic Tournament is a competitive skirmish game where players enter their challengers into a tournament and compete across the galaxy in the hopes of coming out on top as the best.
It’s a king-of-the-hill brawl designed by Rafał Cywicki and brought to life by Bartek Repetowski. Published by Gindi, it’s an active Kickstarter game that is looking to fully fund and grace the shelves of happy backers in the near future.
I had a chance to play the game digitally and in person, and it was an intriguing experience full of vibrant color and merciless combat.
This is a game for 2-4 players that will test your tactical awareness when moving to new locations, your competence in acquiring the right cards to balance out your hand, and your tenacity in taking advantage of another player’s weakness when pursuing the mantle of the champion in the galactic tournament.
What It Does
The Goldenstar Tournament is an event organized by Galactic Empress every five years to honor Goldenstar, her favorite buddy cop movie. With combat arenas scattered across the galaxy, this tournament now attracts the most dangerous duos who’ve ever lived to fight for ultimate fame and glory.
Only the toughest of the tough will be ready for this. Players will start with two challengers, who provide their own flavor of violence to the tournament in the form of specialized decks and abilities. Those skill cards form one deck.
However, if you want to become a crowd favorite, you’re going to have to do better than that. Upgrade your deck with equipment from the Black Market and strengthen your challenger with traits as they perform well in the arena. When you have the chance, you need to knock down your opponents and maintain momentum.
The other players will be trying to do the same thing, though, so it’s up to the strongest and most enduring challenger to survive the final face-off and win the tournament.
How It Does It
Players take actions on their turn to move to and perform actions in locations, as well as initiate combat with other challengers.
Movement is key to successfully navigating the galaxy and either avoiding the presence of enemies or seeking them out.
Location actions enable challengers to heal, acquire currency, and also build passive strength to help in conflicts when opponents attack you there.
At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to the battles. Challengers, and the locations that they’re on, have a base strength that they contribute to every fight, but then players must evaluate the best cards to use from their hands in order to secure a win. One card is initially played facedown, but before it’s revealed players can also activate other cards in their hand and resolve them faceup. Only after that’s concluded will players reveal the facedown cards and tally up the final strength values of each challenger. The highest one wins, whether in attack or defense.
That’s the main aim of the game and everything else is oriented so that players effectively build an arsenal for combat. Defending is just as important as attacking, so players can charge recklessly into battle and leave themselves exposed during other players’ turns.
If you can juggle that fisticuffs puzzle, then you’ll do quite well in Goldenstar.
Why You Might Like It
Discovering satisfying combos between characters and capitalizing on certain location actions can make for meaningful player turns. Acquiring strong Black Market cards and developing character traits also enhance the variability with regards to what a player can achieve during battles with their opponents.
With the ability both to attack and to defend, as well as the contrast between the contested central locations and the safe havens on the player mats, there is a nice ebb and flow to the game when players have their backs against the wall and they’re trying to stage a comeback.
Why You Might Not
In two-player games, it’s easy for one player to develop an advantage that will prove overly difficult for the opponent to overcome. That momentum goes unchecked as there is only the one other player who pushes back. So player count will have a strong influence on the gameplay experience.
Because the map and the player interaction significantly shifts with player count, it will be interesting to see where the sweet spot is, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a two-player game.
Final Thoughts
Goldenstar has a very stylish aesthetic with memorable characters presented both with miniatures and with a unique playstyle for players to explore. The combination of these offensive, defensive, and support characters will open up some interesting gameplay opportunities.
An expansion is planned for the game so it will be interesting to see how that complements the existing content and how it improves upon the base gameplay formula.
As far as player experience, this is not something that I would play at two players, but three and four players would definitely have a tense clash in the locations as they vie for supremacy in the galactic tournament.
The deckbuilding part of the game is pretty light. I’d classify it more as a card-based skirmish game taking place on a modular board setup with unique character abilities and upgradeable decks. But you’re not really pushing through your deck like you would in Clank! or other staples in the deckbuilding genre. It’s more of a way to augment your movements on the map and your strength when fighting opponents.
There is certainly potential here. It’s got some room to grow, but this is a good start. I’ll be interested to see what development occurs after the crowdfunding game to tighten the gameplay experience and incorporate feedback from the community!
If you want to check out Goldenstar: The Galactic Tournament, visit the Gamefound page, learn more about Gindi, and read what the community thinks on BoardGameGeek.
What about Goldenstar appeals to you?
Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.