Stars of Akarios 1.5 wisely eases players into gameplay at a friendly pace. It begins with tutorial battles that also drop you right into the narrative, hitting the ground running.

Miniatures gameplay generally involves painstaking measurements for movement and lines of sight, and complex simulation systems. Well, Stars of Akarios’ accessible and streamlined miniatures gameplay is arguably the best gateway for the genre on the market!

Player ships can only move in specific patterns. You also have individual abilities and powers that heavily rely on your position. The strategy of Akarios’ space combat centers on maneuvering your ship.

You’ll need to carefully leverage specific movements with rotation, giving the ships real character and tangible weight. I find this the most rewarding part of the game! Can’t get enough. It’s the only way to successfully hit enemies, survive, find advantages, or defend objectives.

Likewise, the enemies also have great AI patterns for moving and attacking. Enemy AI cards smartly use rotation and unique movement instructions to ensure enemy ships are a real threat, and unpredictable. It’s hard for AI ships to end up lost, though it does happen.

You do have to assign dice to perform your actions, which I usually can’t stand. However, Akarios offers such a broad range of actions, you rarely feel like you lost your turn.

There are countless abilities, including side effects for your attacks like Target Lock. These keep the combat spontaneous and encourage cleverness, both in offense and defense.

However, Akarios also has planetary exploration with completely different mechanisms. Surprisingly, it dispenses with any kind of strategy. Instead, you’ll use dice to perform skill checks, wandering around unexplored cards that represent a unique planet location.

In this way, the dice boil down to currency. You can only spend them to explore so much before your pilot’s energy runs out.

While pilot stats contribute to skill checks, I still found this gameplay a dull companion for space combat. Even in action-driven entries from the corresponding storybook.

I think the rulebook mentions an option to skip these levels altogether. If that is available, that’d speak for itself. It’s a very contradictory gameplay style.

I did enjoy seeing the smaller scale of the story during planet exploration, with everyday beings, and discovering new narrative threads. The overall lore in Stars of Akarios is really fun! It’s alternately self-aware and grounded, in a good way, and it grows organically.

It’s also worth noting that the components have great details for proper immersion, even if the bases are a bit delicate. There are some small legacy elements, but they’re conveniently primed for multiple uses.

Final Thoughts

Stars of Akarios 1.5 is filled with thrilling, tactical space combat that gives every ship personality, and every move genuine consequences. It also delivers satisfying lore with compelling choices. However, while planet exploration offers fun storytelling, its slow and luck-based gameplay is a stark contrast. Still, I think Akarios is a worthwhile journey, with rewarding ship combat and dilemmas in the Trek-style universe you’re hoping for.

Score: 7.5