To Boldly Go & Second Contact
- Selwyn Ward
- 15 minutes ago
- 5 min read
I'm a pretty much lifelong Trekkie. I watched the original series and suffered the decade-long hiatus between that series' cancellation and the first Star Trek Motion Picture, with Filmation's well-written but crudely animated Animated Series in between. More movies followed but it was the best part of another decade before Star Trek Next Generation arrived to revitalise the franchise, and, in that pre-internet age, I still remember the excitement of receiving videotapes mailed from the US during the STNG's first three seasons before the BBC finally decided to screen the show in the UK. I eagerly watched all seven seasons of STNG, Deep Space Nine and Voyager and the four seasons of Enterprise. There was another long gap before the next iteration of Star Trek but I continued to follow Discovery, forgiving its many flaws because it in turn gave us the excellent Strange New Worlds. It's been a long road, getting from there to here, and we've enjoyed Picard, Prodigy, Starfleet Academy and the tongue-in-cheek but firmly canonical Lower Decks along the way. I've more grudgingly accepted the 'Kelvin Timeline' movie reboot and would prefer to consign Section 31 to the alternative timeline or 'mirror universe' that spawned its main protagonist.
That's a long preamble but Star Trek is an institution that spans 60 years: 52 seasons of television, 14 movies, several high-quality fan films, hundreds of novels, comics and inevitably much merchandising. And of course there have been numerous games: both videogames and boardgames. The latter have varied considerably in quality. Early on, there was the usual run of tedious roll & move games that traded on the IP without demonstrating any appreciation of Star Trek or its appeal. Palitoy brought out one in the 1970s and we featured the meritless The Final Frontier 10 years ago on Board's Eye View after I found a copy in a charity shop. Decipher published the Star Trek Customizable Card Game (STCCG) which started off well but, like so many collectible card games, sadly succumbed to expansionitis.
More recently the flame has been taken up by Wizkids, Gale Force 9 and Modiphius, each of whom has made excellent use of the IP to create games that genuinely feel like Star Trek and which have obviously been born of a love of the franchise. GF9 have given us Star Trek Away Missions and the epic multi-player Star Trek Ascendancy. Meanwhile, in addition to enjoyable light fare, alongside the push-your-luck Lower Decks Buffer Time card game, Modiphius have continued to expand their Star Trek Adventures role-playing game to deliver a highly accessible RPG where games are deliberately structured like episodes from one of the TV series.
But it's Wizkids who have really carried the torch for Star Trek board games. They published the Star Trek Fleet Captains space battler and they reskinned the classic game Mage Knight into Star Trek Frontiers, and it worked astonishingly well. Over the years, they've continued to release a steady stream of board games built around the Star Trek IP and covering a wide range of tastes and play styles, including the Discovery-themed Black Alert, the Star Trek Missions adaptation of Fantasy Realms and Geoff Engelstein's Star Trek version of Super-Skill Pinball. They've continued to publish more tactical ship-based Trek games in their Into the Unknown series and they really hit the heights with Captain's Chair, in which David Turczi and Nigel Buckle have built on the engine used in their Imperium deck-building games, published by Osprey, to create a thematically rich Star Trek card game for 1–2 players. The original game gave us six Star Trek captains to play with, spanning various TV series and Trek races: Picard (STNG), Sisko (DS9), Burnham (Discovery), Koloth (Klingon), Sela (Romulan) and Shran (Andorian), and now with To Boldly Go and Second Contact we have a total of nine more!
Tho' each of the new captains can be pitted against any of those in the original Captain's Chair, Wizkids have published To Boldly Go as a standalone game. You can combine it with the original game, treating it as an expansion, but equally you can jump straight in with it without owning or ever having played the original Captain's Chair. There have been some small tweaks between the two games but the core game is the same, each captain has their own individual deck and all can draft cards from the common shared decks. There is guidance in the rules for combining the decks, just beware that combining the common decks from both core games may slightly skew the odds of drawing cards with the specific traits needed for your captain's missions.
The six captains in To Boldly Go are Kirk, Khan, Archer, Georgiou, Soval and Rebner. Not all of those will be immediately familar. Soval is Vulcan, Georgiou was the captain in the opening episode of Discovery and Rebner is Pakled; a race touched on in STNG but more fully developed in the Lower Decks animated series. Archer is the captain from the Enterprise prequel series. Kirk and Khan will need no introduction but it's worth noting that both reflect the movie versions of the characters (ie: Wrath of Khan) rather than the original TV series.
By contrast, Second Contact is a conventional expansion. To play it you'll need either Captain's Chair or To Boldly Go. Second Contact gives us three more captains that can be pitted against each other or any of those in the other two games: Pike (Strange New Worlds), Freeman (Lower Decks) and the Lower Decks version of Riker. One novelty in Second Contact is the introduction of 'Reward' cards that don't feature in Captain's Chair or To Boldly Go, and there's a teaser in the rules that we can expect to see this aspect developed further with future expansions.
As in the first Captain's Chair, each of the captains plays differently, and the rules helpfully rank the complexity of their individual decks on a 1-10 scale: at the extremes, To Boldly Go ranks Georgiou at 2, with Khan ranked 9. Khan has an individual board unlike any of the other captains where he is marking off traits found on cards that are acquired. The card for Khan can be flipped to his wrathful side... In a further nod to Wrath of Khan, the Incident cards in Khan's deck all include quotes from Moby Dick. Second Contact's Pike, Riker and Freeman are ranked 5, 6 and 7 respectively on the complexity scale.
To Boldly Go and Second Contact are dripping with theme and flavour, to the extent the rules even cross-reference the specific TV episodes on which some of the cards are predicated. Tho' the game is obviously a labour of love, the designers haven't allowed themselves to be so hidebound by canon that it gets in the way of gameplay: no-one need mither over the fact that the characters come from time periods separated by more than a century, nor by the fact that not all were live action. If Strange New Worlds can establish a crossover between its live action characters and the animated characters from Lower Decks then there really is no reason to complain that this game follows suit.
Every new captain that gets added to this game substantially increases the number of possible pairings but without subjecting Captain's Chair to expansionitis because David Turczi and Nigel Buckle have wisely avoided the temptation of tinkering too much with the core rules. The six captains in the original game and in To Boldly Go give 15 different pairings; combining the two gives you 66 different pairings, and adding Second Contact raises the number of different pairings to 105. But there are plenty of interesting starship captains still out there in the Star Trek universe: Janeway, Lorca, Decker, Weyoun, Dathon, Jellico, Braka, Shelby, Garrett, Kruge, Chang, Bok, Duras, Dukat, Nero, Locutus... so I reckon there's light years' more mileage in this excellent two-player and solitaire Star Trek game.
(Review by Selwyn Ward)
