This is a varied collection of interesting ships of different sizes and purposes, presented in the standard High Guard manner - deck plans, stats, etc. I picked it up as a source of ships for use in my Fifth Frontier War campaign - I want to have a store of ships I can throw in here and there for the sake of variety, and it's been great for that purpose. I think it'll also be helpful in my Pirates of Drinax campaign (which I'm going to run in several months).

If you want a collection of mostly-new ships, from different polities and of different sizes and purposes, it'll serve your needs.

I backed the KS for this, and downloaded the PDF, I believe, on the day it came out. I also received the boxed set. I like the physical contents of the box and the box itself; I like that I have vehicle cards for chases; and the erasable character cards look like great tools for convention play. I like the counters, too, and can easily imagine a tabletop arrangement with a consistent look of red and black, counter representing cards racing through city streets, all supporting espionage adventures.

And then I read the rules and tried to make sense of them.

I think presentation of the rules suffers from two major issues, both of which greatly inhibited my ability to understand them and to imagine how they'd work at the table. First, they are really poorly organized. The core mechanic, or that which passes for it, isn't fully explained until about halfway through the book, well after the too-long character generation section, meaning that when reading it cover to cover, by the time you're deep in the chargen weeds you still really don't know how the stats and skills and such actually work. Other reviewers have pointed out missing tables and 'dead references,' and there are those, too, but my bigger issue was in how the rules were laid out: they are chopped into pieces and spread throughout the book, making it hard to conceptualize the game as a whole, and I've read the book alomst twice already.

The other major issue with the rules is the lack of examples. There are a number of examples of rules in play, as is common in games over the last decade plus, but the writers were really inconsistent in which rules they decided to explain through examples, providing them for what I considered to be the easy, obvious stuff, but not doing so when it would have been really helpful.

Beyond the presentation of the rules, I am not thrilled with the rules themselves. I like the idea of "Lucky 13" as a core mechanic, of sorts, but the reality is that there isn't a core mechanic - not in the sense of what you'd find in WOD or d20 or 2d20 or Savage Worlds. Most times you roll an attribute die + skill die + maybe something else die (for equipment used or a GM deciding to give you a boost...but there's no real explanation for why or how the GM would do this), and meet or beat 13. Sounds simple, right? But wait...sometimes it's not 13...sometimes it's higher, and can increase based on player dice failures (yes, you read that correctly: when the dice are not friendly, the game gets mechanically harder by raising the baseline difficulty for everything). And sometimes the GM can shift your dice up or down a type - as in, you have a d8 for a skill but because of the situation you get downgraded to a d6. And remember that third die? Well, if you have an "asset," like a good weapon or something like that, it'll have a die rating to use (and there's virtually no guidance on how to decide what these ratings should be on things outside of the book), and you add that to your pool. If you lack an asset, the GM can opt to give you a "Decision Die," which is bigger for easier tasks and smaller, down to d4, for harder tasks. Your GM might decide to give you this, or not. And so if you have a d6 for a stat (average) and a good skill (d8) and no asset, and your GM decides to not give you a Decision Die...good luck rolling 13 or 14 on d6+d8.

Thus, there are three different ways to adjust task difficulty: change the types of dice to be rolled, change the number of dice to be rolled, or change the target number to be meet or beat. That's not a core mechanic: that's a grab-bag of different probabilities, with no guidnace in the book as to how and when to use them gracefully. Note: there is no GM section at all.

Beyond the lack of a coheremt core mechanic (how very 80s of the designers), there are multiple crunchy subsystems for car chases, underwater fighting, underwater shooting, and so on. Through these there is a clear simulationist thread shot through the game, with an unncessary amount of complexity - coupled with few and inconsistent examples - adding nothing that seems enjoyable to the play experience.

I have no idea whom the designers worked with as they edited and revised the game outside their circle, but this smacks of a rush job, with many rough edges...essentially this feels like a Beta test rather than a finished product. I've no idea and I will not conjecture as to why there is no GM's section, zero setting information (zero aside from mentioning the shadowy "ICON" for which everyone works), few examples of rules in action, and missing tables and referenced content.

I'm disappointed, really, because I was looking forward to this and assumed that it would be a reboot that took into account the developments in rules systems over the decades, and would faithfully stick to balance point between gritty espionage and Bond-style action that the original two games sought to maintain. I'm not sure what kind of a game, in terms of story, this seeks to be, as it's just a book and box full of rules. And I'm not sure how this game will operate at the table because I'm still trying to figure out how the system works.

Although I would have been frustrated by a delay, I'd rather have been told that the game was going to take another few months to get right, instead of getting this, which offers a lot of potential but comes up really short.

I have run this once, and have read most of the book. We intentionally left out formal starship operations, given that we were all new to the game and didn't want to wait to play it. Here's the bottom line: it runs easily at the table; the mechanics help to establish a vibe that feels right for Star Trek; and the subsystems (character generation, combat, research, etc.) all make sense within the demands of Star Trek. I am very impressed with this as a game - that is, an entity of mechanics, systems, and reference material - and as a resource for telling stories within Star Trek. As other reviewers have stated, it's a beautiful product, well-organized and nice-looking, and I've had no trouble finding whatever I need in the PDF. I'll certainly buy the physical book, but this has enabled me to read the rules and run it now rather than having to wait.

As a final note, I played the FASA version extensively BITD, and still own almost all the LUG books, although I only played that version a handful of times. I have no experience reading or playing the Decipher version. All that said, these are the best Star Trek RPG rules I've played, hands-down, and an excellent ruleset, regardless.

I was a big fan of Chill 1e from Pacesetter, not a fan of 2e from Mayfair (too much math; ugly art), and was excited about the Kickstarter for 3e. I won't bore you with more narrative of how I got here, so here's my review: it's a great game. I've run it for some friends for several sessions and we've all enjoyed it thoroughly, running different kinds of horror stories and finding that the core mechanic works well in a variety of situations and contexts. I just ran two games for mostly strangers at a local game convention and got rave reviews - so much so that some of the players from the first day bought the book that night and came back to play in my other session the next day. I'm a decent GM, but the system made it easy to get new players up to speed, contributing creatively, and with very little introduction from me.

I like games that provide players and the GM with consistency of resolution and flexibility in application. Chill 3e provides both. The core mechanic is simple, intuitive, and works for the style of game - heavy on the story and atmosphere, lighter on rolls - that Chill seems best to promote. That mechanic, and the systems related to it, are flexible enough to be applicable to just about anything the players could want or GM could devise. Much like Gumshoe, which ensures that players end up with the clues they need to move the investigation forward, Chill guarantees a "vital clue" with every type of investigation roll, regardless of how one rolls. This is a good thing because adventures are boring and frustrating when players go nowhere because they fail a roll for an important clue. Chill eliminates this possibility entirely. If the roll is successful, you get your vital clue...if it's a really good roll you'll get that and something more, and if it's an amazing roll, you'll learn even more. But if you fail you still get that vital clue, and something extraneous that might slow you down...and if you botch your roll you'll get a vital clue and a false lead, and then it's up to the player to figure out what's what. I think this is a simple, clever way to ensure that the plot moves forward while plugging in opportunities to take fate into consideration.

The book itself is very nice, although some of the creature art wasn't so great. The photos throughout the book are quite good, with some even genuinely creepy. I wish the creature art were better, but I'm not going to complain, because it's the stat blocks that I'll use, not the art. The section on creature powers (the Evil Way and 'aspects') is great, making it very easy to create customized foes. Instead of levels or HD, a monster has an 'Evil Way Score' that provides an idea of how formidable it is, and all abilities and powers are rooted in this score. It was easy to create a ghost, for example, that could do what I wanted it to do and be as threatening to the party as I wanted it to be. This should make adventure design easier.

I also think the amount of the book spent on SAVE history and current world hotspots will be very useful to me over time as I run the game, and that background was clearly the work of a passionate group of writers - I appreciate that.

If you liked the original (but realize that the rules are so so so clunky after 30 years) and want an update with a hefty dose of modern story-focused mechanics, this is a good game. If you want a horror game that's easy to run and learn, this is a good game.