An excellent online collectable card game that plays out on a space map and has multiple ways to win.
For those of you new to Star Chamber it is an online collectable card game, meaning you puchase virtual packs of cards which you then assemble decks to play with. The game itself plays out on a space map with multiple planets connected by jump lanes. Each turn player build and move ships and population around the map with the goal of defeating their opponent. Players also draw cards from thier deck each turn which the use to affect the map based game play. What the cards do is highly varied, but includes things like improving your existing ships with additional shields or weapons, and affecting the political aspect of the game which I'll get to later. In order to play these cards you need to use 'tech', which is equivalent to 'mana' from Magic The Gathering. There are several different races you can play, the choice of which determines with 2 of the 5 possible techs you specialize in.
There are three basic methods of winning the game. First is a straightforward military victory that you achieve by conquering your opponents home world. The second is a destiny victory. Destiny is essentially a score which you get primarily by controlling special types of planets called artifact worlds. If your destiny score is ever 30 greater than your opponents you win. The final method of winning is by politics. Every sixth turn of the game there is a voting session at a particular planet on the map call the Star Chamber (hence the name of the game). One of the three items up for vote is called 'power play', which aside from giving you some neat bonuses if you win gives you a power point. Accumulate three power points and you win. The amount of votes you have depends on the amount of population you've brought to the Star Chamber, which is always a trade off since you need population elsewhere to capture new planets and make your existing ones work most efficiently. In general the Star Chamber is also the once place on the map where no fighting takes place, although fighting near the star chamber is very common as players try to stop their opponents population from coming in to vote.
Overall the game plays quite well. The idea of merging a CCG to a map based game is a great idea. Game balance is also excellent. While good deck construction is always helpful there are not obvious degenerate combinations that would make the game unfun to play. This is of course a CCG, and while the client is cheap (currently $30) and comes with 2 starter decks and 3 boosters if you really want to excel at the game you'll need to buy many more booster packs, which run at about $2.50/pack which includes 15 cards (11 commons, 3 uncommons and 1 rare).
Community wise players of the game are in general friendly and helpful, and the developers of the game regularly appear in the chat areas to talk to players and play games with them. One strike in the negative department is that the website in general is abysmally designed, especially for new people coming to check out the game. While this has improved marginally with the new release, substantial improvements are still needed simply in terms of being able to quickly find basic and new information about the game. None of this affects the game play at all, and I would encourage potential new players to not judge this excellent game by it's website.