I played with my son and his friends a few years ago. It was an absolute blast. Having our living room changed into the bridge of a starship was so cool. We had our big screen up on the wall showing the main view, so the captain sat in this big chair and yelled orders at everyone.

Yes, i had a 5/6 player game with some friends all in one room.

Being anything but captain was irritating. And being captain made other players hate me.

The game play itself was a little easy, mostly because we wuickly broke the system and murdered everything...

I had a similar negativr experience in large fleet combat in eve online. You sit waiting for the Fleet commander (FC) to give orders. Lose all sense of agency, like my job is to sit there and wait for someone to tell me to press F1.

Valis and I played a very similar game at total con a few years ago. Concept was awesome but execution was terrible. Will check this one out.

Yes. They actually updated it recently. I've played it a couple times with some friends and we reorganized the basement to make it look like a bridge haha.
The trick to remember is losing is actually more fun than winning so make sure to play it on hard difficulties.

Awesome! We have a my family and a friend's family get together. It fills all the bridge stations and gives us two fighters. We've had very little problem with glitches (just one really and we assumed it was a cloaked ship and took our beating with dignity).

Everyone is specializing in our group. I usually play the engineer and love the position. Nobody knows what I am doing but I get the occasional "Whoa!" and "Wow" in response to bumping power into vital systems at the right time :-)

For engineer it is definitely more fun getting killed (or at least nearly so) since I am damage control to the ship.

We tend to trade off being captain. It is funny listening to each captain give very specific instructions to the player in his/her preferred station. (ie I always address engineering first "Engineering, boost power to warp, please" "Helmsman, go to warp 1, please")

My friend and I are talking about building a gaming table (Geek Cheap) to support this game as a well as Pathfinder and such. Found plans for one with a TV embedded horizontally and electric outlets at each position around the table. Bum Kim has a youtube video "DIY gaming table for $150.00" (it's more like $250.00 plus a TV, but WAY cheaper than $3,000 to $ 10,000) for Carolina Gaming or Geek Chic's heirloom quality tables.

Engineer is definitely one of the most fun roles. So much power, without being in charge... Just trying to balance all the needs of the ship.

We have a running gag that the Engineer is a thankless role and that they're always taken for granted. They are probably one of my favorite roles too though.

I also like science, even though they don't have a lot of power they have most of the information and it's fun to yell out information.

I don't like Helms, because I suck at it and still haven't lived down driving into a black hole.

Weapons is pretty fun too, during hard difficulties.

Update to the Comms role is the main thing I want to see in future updates since they can't do a whole lot yet.
We once had two ships setup and we had the two comms officers get headsets so they could communicate with each other though, which was fun.

That sounds like fun. I think we are moving in that direction when we get more people playing.

Yeah, engineer is thankless, but it's still fun.

Science officer is one that I'd like to play eventually. My wife took that one.

Fighters are a pain. Auto-docking after an engagement would be a big plus. One of our more cavalier captains flew off and left my nine year old instead of waiting for him to figure out how to dock.

Our helmsman is actually a pilot, so we can't do much better than that.

It seems nukes are way too powerful for game balance.

Yes, nukes are broken...

I don't think we had any figthers.