…to boldly go where no man….where no person has gone before. An extremely famous quote, if you’re a Star Trek fan, which if your reading this you probably already are. This is going to be an article that will give you a base summary of the new Star Trek 2E (Second Edition). So sit back, drink your Romulan Ale and enjoy.
As game mechanics go, Star Trek 2E is quite different from its counterpart Star Trek (1E). When Star Trek came out in 1995 it brought a completely new type of CCG, asides from what was currently available, Magic: The Gather, Star Trek brought a different format. It had a design with it that made it unique unto itself. With Star Trek 1E you would bring with you to a game, 6 different Mission, a deck of at least 30 cards and a side deck of Dilemmas… as the game progressed along there were more “side decks” added. A Q-Tent, Battle Bridge and a Tribble side deck. These were not necessarily needed to win, but they helped in some way shape or form.
In 1E the game started by people showing their Missions then picking their dilemmas and placing them under the Missions as they saw fit, this was a good concept for the game and very original, but as it went this one of the most boring and time constrained parts of the game. As everyone was running similar dilemma piles, you pretty much knew exactly what you wanted and where you wanted to put it. You could make the killer Wall (which means that you would have a way to kill a personal or two, then you block them with a wall that they can’t pass) this was a simple concept in 1E because you knew exactly which dilemmas to pair up with which dilemmas. Well that’s all about to change in 2E as you’ll see in my article
With that the game went on and people started making their decks. Everything from Classic Star Trek with James T. Kirk to Voyager with Tuvok. Everything was out there and everything could be made… Borg, Cardassian, Hirogen, Holographic and of course Federation everything was available. Essentially if you wanted to run through a series of events that were like a TV show you could make your deck do that. As the game progressed people started straying because there was too much of the same thing and everyone started playing similar decks. This became a stagnant for the game, but Decipher, the creators of Star Trek and other games, made its changes as well. Instead of continuing down this road with the old game, and everything making its new change as well Decipher decided to make a new game as well… thus Star Trek Second Edition was born.
Turn Sequence of the game is another new factor that makes the game more streamlined.
With that being said, there are several different steps.
1. Play/Draw A Card – When your turn starts you get the 7 points of which you can play personal, ships or event, or if you want you can draw up cards. You MUST spend all 7 points. If you can’t spend them by playing cards you MUST draw and if you get something you can play then you may, or you can continue to draw. Just remember at the end of your turn you MUST discard down to 7.
2. Order phase – This is when you can use cards that have an Order phase on them or when you move your ship, attempt a mission or begin and engagement or combat. (Engagement – Space Combat, Combat – Ground Combat)
3. Discard – This is when you dump extra cards from your hand if you still have more than 7
This is a more streamlined version of the Turn Sequence of the game, for a more detailed look please check out decipher.com and click the Star Trek section of their website and that will lead you to more information.
Star Trek 2E brought back a lot of what Star Trek 1E had when it came out. A lot of fun and uniqueness to it. It brought back the Mission (what’s Star Trek without a mission) and it brought back the Dilemmas, again what’s Star Trek without Dilemmas… but this time however Decipher changed that. Instead of picking the dilemmas that they wanted to put under a specific mission they have their own separate pile. This makes the game more interesting in the fact that it’s more random. Allow me to explain what I mean. If you beam down to attempt a mission you will most likely bring enough guys to attempt that mission. So let’s say they beam down 7 guys to attempt a mission. That then allows you to draw up to 7 cards from your dilemma pile… which consists of a minimum of 20 cards, but I find that 35-40 is a good number…then you look at what type of mission it is, either Space or Planet then you look through your dilemmas and in the upper left hand corner of the dilemma there’s a number ranging from 1 to 5 that’s a point cost. You get 1 point for each person attempting the dilemma so 7 go down you gets 7 points. So lets say you draw into your 7 dilemmas and get 4 planet and 3 space, well you can’t use the 3 space since they are attempting a planet mission so those ones are placed back under your dilemma pile, face up so that they can be used again later (when you encounter a face up dilemma you reshuffle and continue to draw) so lets say the 4 dilemmas you draw total up to 7 points, 1 3 point dilemma, 1 2 point dilemma and 2 1 point dilemmas. For this example we’ll use the following dilemmas: Trabe Grenade Randomly select a personal who has Leadership or Security. If that personal has Cunning <7, he or she is killed. Chula: Echos Randomly select 3 personal. If the highest Cunning among those 3 is even, then all 3 are stopped. Chula: Pick One Save Two Randomly select 3 personal. Choose to return one of those personal to opponents hand, or to have all three of them stopped and finally Assassin’s Blade Unless you have 2 Security or Cunning >26, your opponent chooses a personnel (except Android or a Shape-shifter) to be killed, then all your other personnel are stopped and this dilemma returns to it’s owner’s dilemma pile.
So now are dilemmas are chosen and our order follows: Chula: Pick One Save Two, this will hopefully stop all the people that are attempting the mission. Or at least stop 1 personnel so you have 1 of the 7 stopped. Trabe Grenade will go second, hopefully pulling a Security and killing him off, this way it will be harder to get past Assassin’s Blade, finally we’ll follow it up with Chula: Echos to hopefully stop 3 people, a lot of the people in the game have even Cunning so your chances are pretty high there. Why, you say wouldn’t you put this one first… no specific reason, I just think that making them hit this wall before the final dilemma is better, no specific reasons, just my choice. And the coup de grace Assassin’s Blade, by now your opponent should only have 3 or 4 people going on and will most likely have only 1 Security and the Cunning should be low enough that you can kill someone. Also, you’ll notice that this dilemma says return to its owners dilemma pile. There are several that say this, and a lot of the good dilemmas that get a lot of use do this. The problem usually falls to them not getting stopped and the dilemma getting stacked under the mission, which brings me to my next thought on Mission Attempting and Dilemmas. Oh, another thing those 4 dilemmas that you encountered, after each encounter you stack that dilemma under the mission and it remains there for the rest of the game.
After you’ve hit the wall of dilemmas the first time out, your stopped, that means that those people that attempted the mission can not do anything until the beginning of your next turn. So if you had more people on the ship that could beam down and attempt you could do that before you end your turn, but let’s assume that you don’t. So now it’s your next turn, you deploy more people, draw more cards or play events… you’re now ready to attempt that mission again. As you remember those 3 dilemmas that are stacked under the mission are passed (Remember, Assassin’s Blade returned to the Dilemma pile) you attempt the mission again with 7 people however this time instead of getting 7 points worth of dilemmas you only get 4 points, this makes attempting the mission a little easier for the person, but still poses some problems … will he be able to get past it again, or can you stop him with 4 points. Either way he will eventually get passed all the dilemmas and have enough skills to solve the mission. Thus getting him 1 step closer to winning. Oh, to win you need to solve 1 Mission that is Space and 1 that is Planet and still have 100 points (that usually means another mission or bonus points, explained later)
This first on our list is the Bajorans they bring the wonderful Bajor which is their starting Mission. As well Bajorans bring diversity of skills, but mainly from what I’ve seen a lot of Resistance, which is good for getting the higher end strength missions. As well the Bajorans bring us a Benjamin Sisko, Odo and a Kira. Set them up with a small amount of non-aligned personal and you could start making some Resistance runs.
The next group on our list, and my personal favorite, the Cardassians and they bring us to Cardassia Prime that’s their starting Mission. As everyone knows Cardassians are famous for capturing and torturing their captives, well Decipher didn’t leave that out for them… everyone from Madred to Garak hang out in the normal Cardy deck. The implore cards like Condition Captive and Torture to make themselves better and they have regular Cardassians that allow themselves to get bonuses when you kill a captive. Capture = Cardassians plain and simple.
Now we move to the Federation Decipher set them up with three different sub-sections. First there’s the famous Next Generation crew which has Data, Picard, Riker, Worf, Troi and Beverly which is famous from the TV show and movies, then there’s the Deep Space Nine crew which brings us another Sisko and Worf, Miles, Julian and Judzia and finally the Earth faction which has Admiral Janeway, Luther Sloan and others that were secondary characters from the TV show. Now with each faction they have their homeworlds. One Earth allows Earth Faction and Federation DS9 characters and ships do deploy there. The other Earth allows for Next Generation characters and ships to deploy there and there’s Mouth of the Wormhole which allows DS9 characters and ships to deploy there. So that being said if you wanted to play with both Miles O’Brien and Beverly Crusher you would have to use both Mouth of the Wormhole and Earth so that they can deploy to their respective headquarters, once they’ve deployed then they can meet up in space and work together.
And now Klingons, weird that Worf, who’s a Klingon, isn’t Klingon, he’s Federation. But I’m sure somewhere down the line he will get his Klingon colors. If you want to fight, this is the group for you. Pure strength, plus they have one of the best cards in the game Warrior’s Birthright it’s an event… To play this event, you must command three (Klingon) personnel. Plays on your mission. You may meet Integrity and Cunning requirements of this mission and each dilemma you face at this mission using Strength instead. Now if that’s not an AWESOME event for someone who prides themselves on strength then I don’t know what is.
Next up Non-Aligned this is the group of people that work in any deck, they can be deployed to any headquarter and so can their ships. This faction really doesn’t need the assistance of anyone else as they are the only group that has a majority of the people that have 2 skills for example Kamala, The Perfect Mate has 2 Anthropology which means she has Anthropology x2 which is need for one specific dilemma, but she’s also useful for other reasons because at the beginning of your order phase you can duplicate any other skill that you have in play.
And finally the Romulans, they bring us our Treachery and deck manipulation through their treachery. Romulan decks tend towards attack in space, unlike Klingons who attack on the ground, the Romulans have higher attack rated ships so that they can make more use of their superior firepower in the skies above. If you want to make a good Romulan deck I would make sure that I included some attack cards since their just so good at doing that.
So with that being said, and a little information on Star Trek Second Edition (2E) you now need to check out h and see what they have to say on their game. As for me the comparison between Star Trek 1E and 2E is a HUGE difference they made 2E so much better, less complicated and more fun. If your looking to get into a new game that relates to one of the oldest and by far one of the best TV shows then look no further to Star Trek Second Edition. Head down to you local store and pick up your Starter deck and booster packs today and then you can boldly go where no one has gone before.
