That's the appeal of the Star Wars PocketModel trading card game by WizKids, the same company that launched a thousand ships with its popular Pirates of the Spanish Main game. As in Pirates, ships are built from pieces punched out of polystyrene cards. The full-color ships are assembled in minutes, and are drawn from the Fall of the Republic and Rebellion eras.

The game is sold in booster packs containing eight cards and up to eight ships. Each ship is worth 1-5 "build stars" and has a base displaying its game stats: attack, damage, defense and shields.

Players assemble 30-star fleets, 20 stars of which are immediately deployed to a simple battlefield while the rest are held in reserve. The field is comprised of opposing home zones for each fleet divided by a central contested zone.

Players support their fleets with a deck of 30 cards. At the start of the game, three of these cards are dealt face down to the home zone and become objectives for the opposing fleet to destroy, while another three become the player's hand. Cards come in two varieties: combat cards that are used to enhance ships and objectives that provide ongoing game advantages.

On each turn, players can deploy an objective from their hand, replacing one already in play. They then choose from one of three actions: move (move ships to an adjacent zone) combat (attack enemy ships) or strike (attempt to destroy an enemy objective).

During combat actions, players choose a ship, select its target and play a card to help their ship's attack or defense. When all cards are played, the attacker rolls two six-sided dice. The sum is added to the ship's attack value, and if the final number beats the opposing ship's defense, the shot deals damage. The opposing ship is destroyed if it takes more damage than it has shields.

The process is similar for Strikes, though the attacker can't use any combat cards and the "objective" doesn't get to shoot back: If the attacker beats the defensive value written on the objective card, the card is destroyed. The first player to destroy all of an opponent's objectives or ships wins.

An interstellar identity crisis

Star Wars PocketModel is a straightforward, easy-to-learn "beer and pretzels" (or "soda and chips") game that casual gamers will find a welcome change from more complex fare like Magic: The Gathering and Star Wars Miniatures: Starship Battles.

Assembling the ships is a blast, and the fleets look good deployed on the dining room table. The game plays quickly, and any rules questions are easily resolved by checking out WizKids' excellent online tutorial. Games play quickly, and the flavor-text on the cards works with the impressive array of ships to lend a suitably Star Wars-like feel to the game.

There are potential problems, though. The first is confusion surrounding the nature of the game: It looks like a miniatures game but plays like, and is billed as, a card game. Yet at the same time, the dice mechanic is something common to tabletop strategy games, and the zone movement makes it feel like a minis game. The end result can be frustrating to veterans of both genres, as card players bemoan the unpredictability of dice and miniatures fans rail against the lack of strategic movement and the need to build a deck to play.

Finally, gameplay can be too simplistic. Ship-to-ship combat, with its accompanying card play, is fun, but strikes against objectives are too easy. Since objectives can't fight back and a player only needs to destroy three objectives to win, all it takes is one or two ships with high defenses and good attack values to lay waste to an opponent's holdings and win the game. It makes for fast games but frustrating ones as well.

Maintaining a good defensive fleet, led by a capital ship of some kind, and working quickly to play objectives with high defense values can help mitigate this, but objectives are still too easy to destroy. The game cries out for objective-based defenses such as ship-disabling ion cannons, special limitations on attackers (e.g., only X-Wings can attack the Death Star) or objectives that take more than one hit to destroy.