Traveller Customizable Card Game: Two Player Starter Set

At first I only read through it and admired the cards, without managing to build decks and actually play it. Even so, it struck me as a polished and promising design, far more of an LCG than the CCG label in the title would suggest. Its kinship with Decipher’s old Star Trek CCG is obvious, but Traveller seems to have an interesting direction of its own.

Each player’s deck is essentially their starship: they crew it, improve it with upgrades, and send it out into the Galaxy. The aim is either to complete missions or to take up piracy, so the game is built around the idea that your ship is the foundation for everything you do.

A lot of things happen almost simultaneously, and that is what makes it feel as though it would shine most in multiplayer. With only one core set, though, building three respectable decks is nearly impossible because there are not enough copies of essential cards. In two-player head-to-head, on the other hand, it plays perfectly well. The starter decks also tend to lead to deckout more often than victory through victory points, which needs fixing but does not strike me as unsolvable.

Its biggest thorn is familiarity. The icons are not forgiving to a new player, the icon reference becomes almost a life raft, and teaching it to the person across the table is no simple task. You need to burn through one or two games before you really understand what is going on. Once it starts to click, though, it conveys the theme of space exploration very well. It is not Netrunner, nor does it need to be; as a brisk, spacefaring social game for about an hour while waiting for everyone to arrive, it has every chance of working nicely.

Updated session

The later experience did not overturn my first impression: I moved from “this looks interesting on paper” to seeing that the game genuinely works well with two players. The main conclusion remained the same—very promising, but demanding on first contact because of its icons, and limited for multiplayer when there is only one core set.