Star Trek Game (1979)

Original Release: 1979
Developer: Michael Gray
Publisher: Milton Bradley
Platform: Board Game

This board game definitely has some interesting ideas. It’s another one I had to recreate in Tabletop Simulator, although it doesn’t have the nice Enterprise shaped player pieces or the artwork on the cards (I found the text for the cards, but not the artwork). The board itself is lovely, looking like a display console showing a galaxy map. There’s some lovely artwork of the Enterprise, too, but that gets covered up by tiles.

The tiles feature warp paths in two colours. While in a sector, you can only swap between the two routes at your starbase or following the route to another sector. It creates a lot of thought when planning your route, especially later in the game as you need to land on explored systems exactly. The only downside is how movement is determined: rolling two dice and moving that amount.

Movement is the major part of the game, too. You get dealt four mission cards and need to complete three of them. The cards will have flavour text like “defeat Klingons” or “deliver serum” along with other instructions, but these don’t actually mean anything in terms of the game. You just need to discover these on the map and head to them.

As you move, you will reach unexplored stars. You can reach these without using your full movement. You draw a card to discover what is there. Three cards will send you back to your home base (something another player can do if they land directly on your space), but the rest are different kinds of stars, outposts or advanced civilisations. Once a system has explored, however, you can only land on it with an exact roll – which makes it harder to complete a mission if you weren’t the one to discover it.

If you roll a double, you can move an opponent instead of you, however this just hurts both of you and isn’t very useful, even as a player has finished three of their missions and is heading back to their base.

Despite so much depending on the roll to move mechanic, this is a pretty decent board game. It would be interesting to build upon this with some different movement mechanics.