Lately I have been playing a lot of Arkham Horror, and it's not by choice. That frickin' game is popping up like the bird flu at every single gaming group I attend. I show up for someone's "Game Night" and somehow Arkham Horror hits the table! Now I'm not one of the jerks who sighs and rolls their eyes when someone proposes a game that I don't like very much. I try to get into it; I'm there to hang with the peeps mostly. I just wish we could play a game I wasn't so burned out on.
So this is why I was super-stoked when a friend of mine invited me by to play the new Star Trek: Expeditions game. I knew nothing about it, other than "it was co-op". So I showed up all happy, with a pep in my step, ready to get my co-op on. He started explaining the rules to me, showed me the board layout and turn sequence and all that stuff. I realized that the gaming consisted of you and your friends traveling around a board and making skill rolls while a turn counter clicks down. The game ends when the counter is out and you tally up your points for making rolls and see if you won.
Son of a bitch! This damn game was Arkham Horror with a facelift! I can't escape it!
But, I still had to play the game. And as part of my resolution to myself, I had to review it. And that's going to be tough - because this game is 100% mediocre. Therein lies the problem. I don't know about you but writing reviews about crap I don't really care about is hard. I mean, if I love something I can blast out paragraphs about the mechanics, why they work so well together, and also compliment the components and all that good stuff. You know, a real gusher of a review. And if I hate a game it's a lot of fun to sit around and pick it to pieces, making jokes about broken rules and why it's so boring and maybe twist around the title of the game to make a subtle feces reference in there somewhere. (I don't like to directly say a game is shit -- I like to imply it, you know? Keep it classy.)
So when you get a complete pudding of a game like ST:E you get stuck. I don't want to write one of those reviews where I paraphrase the rulebook and summarize a turn and say, "Overall I thought it was pretty good. I award it 3/4 golden lampshades," or whatever. I like to put my own stamp on things and really give you a feel for my individual reaction. But there's nothing here to stamp down on. This game feels like a clone of Pandemic or Arkham Horror with a few very minor changes.
But the thing is, I used to love Arkham Horror and Pandemic. So now I'm second-guessing myself. Am I only down on Star Trek: Expeditions because it's a bland copy of two games I'm kinda sick of? Might you, the cool person of discriminating taste who is reading my review, enjoy ST:E if you haven't played Arkham Horror or Pandemic; will you get a few yucks out of mechanics that are (to you anyway) fresh and exciting?
I dunno. In a lot of ways Expedition feels like first season Riker, where it's got some stuff you've seen before and some other stuff you haven't seen, but overall it's just kind of bland and not really living up to it's potential. This game needs to grow a beard, get out there, and be it's own deal. Maybe play the trumpet or something.
Well I gotta review this thing so now that you've read my doubts for a couple of paragraphs I guess I should get into it. So, lemme remind you that all my reviews assume that you have passing familiarity with the game mechanics and components.
Theme
I went into Star Trek: Expeditions completely cold, knowing nothing about it. So I was super-surprised when I saw Chris Pine and the Crew of the Sexy New Enterprise (that's what I've come to call them, it's sort of like Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch) from the 2009 movie on the box. I figured that the game would be Star Trek Next Generation/DS9/Voyager. And frankly I thought that Trek 2009 is a terrible choice for the Star Trek theme, because there has only been one movie with these characters.
Now don't get me wrong here, I thought the new Star Trek movie was pretty darn good. And I'm not a Star Trek super-fan (called a Trekker or a Trekkie...I can never remember, one makes them mad and one they are ok with. So if you're a Star Trek super-fan, please pick the correct one for me.) I watched Next Generation and DS9 on TV occassionally, and missed a lot of episodes. But I've still spent a lot of time with crews from the TV shows. Now, I've also seen the Star Trek 2009 movie once. So I've spent about 2 hours with the movie characters, as compared to dozens of hours with the television cew. And to be honest I don't have the same sense of attachment to New Kirk and New Spock as I do to Picard or Sisko or even Chief O'Brien. In fact, you could go so far as to say that I don't really care that much about them. But here they are, front and center in this game. And it's like, who gives a hoot? I barely know this crew. They all spent 90 percent of their Enterprise time furrowing their brows and being intense, or falling, or shooting. Those important beats that make a character stay with you (Sisko being a total badass, one of Picard's "screw you" speeches to Q, Riker being a super-awesome pimp all the time) haven't happened for the new Enterprise crew. Except maybe the new Dr. McCoy. He established himself pretty quickly.
Anyway the story of Star Trek expeditions is that a neutral planet is having political stability issues, ecological issues, and medical issues. So it's up to the crew of the Enterprise to show up and sort all this nonsense out, otherwise this planet might join the Klingon Empire. Oh and also one Klingon ship is hanging out in orbit too, and he doesn't like you meddling with this potential ally planet and decides to blow you up.
Let me just start by saying that I don't really like the game's actual linkage between theme and mechanics because, in a whole bunch of cases, THERE ISN'T ONE. Let me give you a typical example: every turn you turn over a "Star Date" card. This card basically acts as the game's decision engine; certain cards have the Klingons fire on you, advance the game toward the end state, or whatever. Well, sometimes the cards say, "Cannot beam this turn." And that's it.
For some reason this really bothered me. Why? Why can't I beam this turn? Can you give me just a basic, "Oh it's an ion storm/asteroid shower/Scotty spilled coffee on the console" reason? Well, the game won't do that. You can't beam and you'd better just start accepting that.
The board is also really tacky. It's just a picture of the Enterprise orbiting a generic planet. At the start of the game, you take a bunch of mission cards and cover the planet with them. So when you start the game, you're standing on the Enterprise orbiting the mysterious Card Planet. Maybe the Card-ashians live on it. Ho ho ho. Anyway, it looks like crap and destroys any sort of "space adventure" feel you might have.
The actual cards themselves just have portraits of extras from the Star Trek movie on them. They don't really feel very Star Trekish to me. There are not any action shots or anything like that. Just pictures of extras looking grim.
One thing I did like is that there are "core missions" that go along with the storyline from earlier. Things like negotiating with the rebels or finding decent fuel sources for the planet's industries, that kind of thing. If you mess up a mission in the chain, or if you take too long to finish a mission, you get different later missions about the same subject. So if you blow your negotiations with the rebels, instead of your next mission being a peacekeeping delegation it might involve protecting the president of the planet from being assassinated. So I appreciate that STE is trying to add a little narrative in there. But it still feels very dry, because of the very simple math-oriented gameplay. Also, there's a chance that you will actually be unable to get a "good" result for a mission (more on this in the gameplay section).
At the end of the game, you tally your scores for each type of mission and get a little blurb of narrative from a reference card, but to be honest it felt completely bloodless. So while I appreciate the branching stories, overall the theme to Star Trek Expeditions seemed very pasted on and not very well integrated with the mechanics.
Gameplay
Actual turn-by-turn play of Star Trek Expeditions goes fairly fast and streamlined. You basically have five choices:
1) You can help the other players in the same space as you by trading items or adding to their abilities.
2) You can shoot at the Klingons if you are on the Enterprise. This is good, because otherwise the Klingons randomly shoot at you and if they blow up the Enterprise, game over.
3) If you're on the planet and in a space with a mission card you can turn over a mission card and attempt to beat the mission.
4) You can hoof it around the planet and beam to or from the Enterprise.
5) You can improve your dude (or dudette in the case of Uhura) by drawing from a deck of improvement cards.
Beating a mission is mechanically very easy, it's just a target number. You take your character's skill, add a pair of six-sided dice rolls, and add your upgrades, and compare it to a target number of the mission. Of course this is a co-op, so they don't make it easy to beat those missions. Oftentimes you need a five or seven on both dice in order to beat the target number.
Did I say a seven on a six-sided die? Yeah, I did, instead of a six the Star Trek Expeditions die has a seven, which is nice. But if it comes up your guy takes a point of damage because he really gave it his all. Usually a point of damage doesn't matter, though.
Anyway like most co-ops the early game is people feeding each other upgrades or upgrading their own characters and deciding whether or not you want to blow up those stupid Klingons. Then you get to executing the plan, but of course the game throws you a few wrinkles and you have to deal with it. Most notably the "Cannot Beam this Turn" cards, which really screw everyone over and come up just a little too often. In our first playthough, we had two missions that we got a "bad" result on simply because Person X said, "Oh I'm bad at these kind of missions, Person Y can do this mission on their turn" and on Person Y's turn they randomly couldn't beam down to the planet to do the mission; the timelines are so strict on many of the missions that waiting even a single turn causes the players to get a bad ending. I was not very happy with this mechanic at all, the beaming mechanic was very important and to have it constantly going on the fritz necause you pulled a weird card just seemed stupid. The mission clock also advances randomly, so sometimes everyone can take a turn and the missions don't count down; other times a couple of guys take a turn and suddenly you're looking at getting the bad endings on a bunch of things because the clock ticked forward for 4 turns worth of time instead of 2 turns.
Look I know that co-op games need random elements but it's really hard to make plans when players might be locked out of moving around or deadlines suddenly jump forward a couple of notches without warning. It really sort of breaks down group cohesion and everyone sort of shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well I'll do my best with XYZ, but who knows the game might just screw us over."
To counter-balance this I really do feel like the game threw a bunch of different threats at the players (the Klingon ship, the three different mission types when most characters are only realistically going to attempt one or two types, etc.) and made you scramble to defeat them. There was plenty of table talk and that's important in a cooperative game. Sort of how like, in Pandemic, you are trying to lock down a certain kind of virus while all the other viruses are getting even tougher, and one player nervously says "uh guys if you do that won't we have this other problem?" and everyone has to readjust.
But ultimately I just felt that the dry, math-heavy nature of the missions combined with the capriciousness of the game engine made for a mediocre play experience. It's definitely not a BAD experience, but it is kind of bloodless and euro-gamey. Some people don't mind that at all and those people will enjoy Expeditions.
Summary
If you read my introductory paragraph you pretty much already know how I feel about this game. I felt using the crew of the Sexy New Enterprise was a mistake as they simply do not resonate as well as the other crews. The theme is tenuously tied to the mechanics. The game can sometimes feel dry, capricious, and mathy. On the positive side, the game is good at presenting multiple threat vectors at the players, and making everyone at the table work together to overcome the game systems. It's not a bad game but I don't think it's a must-try either.
So there you go. I didn't get to make a "set phasers for fun" joke and plus I think someone already did that. So I'm just going to say, as always, thanks for reading.
