Let's get this out of the way up front: Star Chamber is great. What's more, it's great because it combines elegance, interesting gameplay choices, and the attraction of card-collecting in what has to be one of the very best pure game designs of the year.

The combination of board game and card game is so well done that the two are completely inseparable but are utterly engrossing.

Star Chamber isn't flashy, but its presentation works well. It's essentially a board game with a heavy collectible card game component. However, whereas some such games use the game board simply as a tool to provide opportunities for duels between players who are using the cards, Star Chamber makes the board game the focus of the design and integrates the collectible cardplay in such a way that you can't separate them. The cards have no meaning without the context of the game board, yet without them, the board game aspect would be sterile and much less interesting. It's a testament to how well designed the game is that when combined, these two aspects make for a game that is much better than the sum of the parts.

The game is played out on a stylized board that consists of different types of planets, which are connected by jump lanes of variable length. There are artifact planets that generate something called "destiny," industrial worlds that generate production, and barren worlds that are just waiting for cards to be played on them, which can transform them into producers of valuable resources, such as technology. Asteroid fields and nebulae act as locations with special properties. Because everything is visible, players can see an opponent's position (but not his or her hand) and thus Star Chamber plays very much like a board game.

There are three separate ways to win the game, and this contributes to the game's incredible depth. You can achieve a military victory by conquering your opponent's homeworld; a cultural victory by amassing 30 more destiny points than your foe; or a political victory by winning three "power play" votes in the Star Chamber. This name refers to the political body represented in the game by a central location on the map, where no combat is allowed between opposing fleets and where players vie for influence to win votes that may bring them closer to political victory, closer to amassing destiny, or closer to gaining control of additional starships. Because winning these votes gains advantages that are not limited to single methods of victory, the Star Chamber mechanism is extremely flexible. This wealth of choices, all of which relate to every other part of the game, makes Star Chamber one of the year's outstanding strategy games.

The unit types and production rules are simple: planets can produce ships and citizens. Citizens control planets and confer voting privileges in the Star Chamber, while ships transport citizens, fight other ships, and blockade planets. Because there is no way (outside of a few specialized cards) to destroy citizens on a planet unless you go to a state of war, which allows you to produce bombers but costs you destiny, the tension between space power and planet control/voting strength is one of the game's central dilemmas, and it's yet another example of the outstanding design.

Ship combat is--like the rest of the game--very straightforward and not very luck-dependent. There are basically two classes of ships available to build (scouts and cruisers, although bombers appear once war has been declared) with slightly different characteristics for each race, as well as larger ships (dreadnoughts) than can be acquired via cardplay. Ships are rated for beam, missile, and cannon attack, and combat proceeds through a number of rounds where different types of weapons are fired in turn, so you can always tell how much damage a ship will do in a given round. The only luck factor is in targeting, because this is done randomly based on the relative strength of opposing ships and their damage state. Otherwise, it's clear how much damage a ship can inflict--and how much damage it is likely to sustain--in a given combat, and thus gaining advantages in combat relies on the skill of each player.

Starship combat is not visually arresting, but it has some interesting nuances to it.

The fact that we haven't described how the card system works until now demonstrates just how important the board game aspect is. However, the card portion is crucial, and it's what makes the game appealing, both in terms of strategy and in the attraction of collecting and trading the cards necessary to build better decks. There are five different colors ("techs") in the game, and each of the nine available races uses two techs. However, capturing artifact planets allows you to choose from any of the five techs, which that planet will then produce for you as long as you control it, and there are cards that allow you to produce non-native techs on some planets. Consequently, it is possible to create multicolor decks that incorporate some interesting combinations, and you're not limited to your race's techs unless you choose to be. The different races each have a unique characteristic (like cheaper citizens for humans in certain cases, or one free destiny each turn for the omior) that further affects strategy.

Describing the variety of cards in detail would be both impossible and pointless. Let it suffice to say that the cards serve to enhance and develop the underlying board game mechanics so that ships may have their shields, hull points, or jump factors increased; citizens may increase their influence; heroes can be created to lead fleets in battle; and any number of tricks and traps can be introduced. To defend a system, you can use cards to build new ships, or you can, perhaps, use a tractor beam to keep a powerful ship in an enemy fleet from making the jump to hyperspace. You can give personae more influence (to control planets or give more votes in the Star Chamber), cause planets to generate more destiny, or any number of other things. Almost all of the game mechanics can be affected by cardplay, which makes the game playable in many different styles since the victory objectives are so different. The fact that the game mechanics are anchored in the boardplay helps keep the cardplay unambiguous, since everything is laid out on the board, and there is no need to generate new types of units, card classes, or abstract relationships between cards.