As a game, Rocketmen is very similar to Pirates. You are given a certain amount of points to build a fleet of ships to run around the table, visiting asteroids and mining resources. Your mission? To destroy the other player's home base or render them helpless by destroying their fleets. meanwhile, you will mine resources from the playfield to but additional ships from your reinforcement pool.

The movement gauges are right on clearly arranged information cards that come with the ship (maybe, see below). As a miniature game goes, it is very accessible and easy to adjudicate moving and firing ranges.

The main strategic addition to this game that was not present in the pirates game is pods. Each ship has a certain amount of pod spaces that the players can equip with either shield pods or weapon pods. This allows for a more customized strategy. The pods also serve as a way of tracking damage to the ship - run out of pods and get hit once more - BOOM!

The pods concept is neat in that future supplements may have new pod types that will allow more choices for the older ships.

The basic rules are not the final rules, again following the Wizkids template started with Pirates, but has plenty of meat to it - there are full rules for mining, boarding, combat, and such. The later rule set will likely add some new dimension to the game, but the temp rules are fairly similar to the advanced rules for the previous game.

You may have notice I speak well of the game and its rules. I also think the look and feel of the game captures the two-fisted pulp sci-fi feel it is going for. There is one problem with the game thus far, but it is a doozy and is why I gave the game a 2 for Style.

Any collectible game that has multiple cards per unit depends greatly on sorting and quality control. Here it comes...

----SORTING WARNING---- The game comes in a pack that should have a crew card, an asteroid, a resource card, and two ships (there are fighters squads that count as a single ship for purchasing purposes, but make several smaller minis).

The problem comes that the display that I bought had a great deal of missorts. I had ships that did not come with the information card to use them in the game - I got bases without the ships that are supposed to go with them. I got some packs that did not have the number of cards they were supposed to have in them. I am sending WizKids a list of what I am missing. Hopefully, they will have a system for fixing these errors or their customers are going to be unable to use many ships...

This is a serious lapse in the game. It is a near-ruinous problem. I bought an entire display of this game based on my trust of WizKids from there previous games (I have never had a n issue with Pirates and only one issue with Heroclicks).

When I had my Heroclix problem, a deformed figure, I wrote to Wizkids to ask what could be done to fix it - they responded with an email that discussed their returns policy. I ended up thinking it was too much trouble to fix a minor problem. This is not a minor problem. I will let you know how the process of getting it fixed turns out...

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