Star Trek Star Realms
- Board's Eye View
- Jul 14
- 3 min read
We've previously featured other iterations of Star Realms (Wise Wizard) on Board's Eye View. Since the game's first appearance in 2014 as a small two-player card game designed by Rob Dougherty and Darwin Kastle, it's become one of the most played deck building games and it's continued to evolve. The continuing development of Star Realms hasn't just involved growth through its many expansions, it's also seen some reinvention, including the launch last year of Star Realms Academy, offering a simplified version of the game that functions as a gateway introduction to deck building and a primer that even quite young children can play. Now, with this version published by Wise Wizard and UVS Games, Star Realms has been introduced into the Star Trek universe.
Star Trek Star Realms is essentially a Star Trek reskin of the original Star Realms game. It's played pretty much the same way as a standard Star Realms game: each player has a starting deck of 10 very basic cards, in this case representing non-aligned scout ships and raiders, plus a starting 'Authority' (ie: health points) of 50. You'll usually draw a hand of five cards; the raiders will let you attack an opponent, sapping them of 1 point of Authority and the scouts will each give you a purchasing power of 1 to spend acquiring more powerful cards from the central display. It's here that the Star Trek element is represented because most of the cards in the central display will be aligned to one of four Star Trek factions: Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Dominion.
These cards are all unique, showing ships, bases or outposts drawn from Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It may come as a disappointment to Trekkers that you're not in this game playing specifically as one of the factions - this isn't a game where one player controls the Klingons while another controls the Romulans. Players can acquire cards from any alignment to add to their decks, so it's perfectly possible that each player will end up with a mix of Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Dominion cards in their deck. But tho' players aren't forced to go with any one faction, the game gives a strong incentive to specialise because most cards have a powerful alignment bonus that only triggers if you have that card in play with a card that has the same alignment...
And the four factions do play to different strengths. Federation ships and outposts are more likely to let you rebuild Authority (ie: heal); Klingons let you cull your weak starting cards so they don't clog up your hand; Romulans add cards to your hand and Dominion ships and outposts often force an opponent to discard from their hands.
Whenever you play a ship card it goes into your discard pile at the end of your turn. Outposts and bases remain on the table, however, and any effects they have are in place as long as the card remains there. An opponent will have to focus their attacks on that card and meet its defence value in order to remove it (tho' then only to its owner's discard pile where it will eventually get recycled into play). Some outpost cards act as shields for their owner: you can't attack their owner's Authority until the outpost has been removed.
As with other iterations of Star Realms, the rules incorporate variants for different player counts, and the box includes sufficient starter cards for up to four players; tho' we still prefer it as a two-player game.
There are other games that generate an experience that gives you more of the feel of being in an episode of Star Trek; for example, Star Trek Fleet Captains (Wizkids), Star Trek Away Missions (GF9) and the Star Trek Adventures RPG (Modiphius). This game feels much more like Star Realms with a Star Trek veneer, which is unsurprising because that's exactly what it is. That said tho', it's a very good deck building card game and Star Trek fans will get an extra kick out of playing with all the ships et al from STNG and DS9. We're eagerly looking forward to seeing how UVS and Wise Wizard develop the game from here; with a Borg expansion already on its way...
