Star Trek: Expeditions Review

Although he catches a lot of flak these days, designer Reiner Knizia is one smart cookie. A PhD of mathematics, Knizia has a great head for the, well, mathy side of game design. His designs are at their best when they're at their most mathematical, betting or auction games like Ra, Medici, or Colossal Arena. These games are 100% statistical analysis; even Tigris & Euphrates has a significant card-counting component.

While Knizia games usually let the players drive the action—your opponents' valuations of the current auction lot being the principal point of tension—2000's Lord of the Rings proved that he can also design a solid cooperative title, one with a surprisingly strong narrative arc and sense of immersion. Star Trek: Expeditions, a cooperative game inspired by the Star Trek universe (old and new), gave him a chance to show that lightning can strike twice. (As both Dr. Knizia and Mr. Spock might point out, lightning is actually more likely than not to discharge at the same location repeatedly if the strike zone offers a path of least resistance.) And he blew it.

Actually, I wouldn't place the blame solely on the designer. The game is plagued by the typical WizKids ineptitude, which I'll come back to, but I'm not leaving Knizia completely off the hook. Expeditions violates the Prime Directive of cooperative games: they must pose a challenge. The numbers here are just too mathematically perfect for the "players versus game" standoff to carry any real weight. It's a holodeck melodrama with the mortality failsafes fully operational.

The basic idea is that the Enterprise crew (Abrams universe) have arrived on a mission of diplomacy to the planet Nibia, which is on the cusp of joining the Federation. You are eager to welcome the Nibian President to the United Federation of Planets and help them bring a swift resolution to their global energy crisis. But when you hail the Presidential Palace, you find his demeanor surprisingly cold. An away team (composed entirely of senior officers, naturally) beams down to the planet's surface in the midst of a bloody revolution just as a Klingon D7 Battle Cruiser decloaks in the planet's orbit....

Which is a fantastic setup for a game, I have to say. And here's the first place where Expeditions seems like it should be awesome: you have 3 story arcs going on simultaneously (rebels, energy, and political), and each one can branch into up to 4 potential outcomes depending on your actions. You'll also have to deal with a random set of 6 (out of 16) supplemental crises, such as a broken-down transport vehicle or an outbreak of Nibian Leprosy. Large cards representing these major and minor crises are shuffled and distributed face-down onto the 15 spaces of the board, so you never know exactly where the rebel hideout is located or what you'll encounter along the way. Each of these cards is paired with a face-up Discovery Token, also distributed randomly. Discovery Tokens can either be used to enhance the Enterprise's fighting capabilities or discarded for a onetime benefit, and they are often key to getting the best outcome from each event.

The game oozes Star Trek flavor. Challenges like providing clean water to a remote village or amorous entanglements with the ambassador's wife feel like they were lifted straight out of the original series, and there's nothing more Star Trek than beaming up and down all over the planet. (This is one of the publisher's major gaffes: the faces on the box are from the new universe, but the writing and design are clearly inspired by the original series.) The game's timer is powered by a deck of "Stardate" cards, while the players can collect "Energize" to improve their effectiveness while they attempt to resolve the crises presented by the "Captain's Log" cards. The difficulty levels correspond to the Trek universe's 3-stage alert system: blue, yellow, and red.

The game even makes good use of the (pretty much mandatory) WizKids Clix system. A little window on the figures' bases (yes, this game has prepainted miniatures for the 4 major crewmembers as well as the 2 ships) provide their base stats in the 3 abilities that the crises might test: yellow for Command, blue for Science, and red for Operations. As you might expect, Captain James T. Kirk scores highly in yellow, a master of charisma and close-quarters combat, while Science Officer Spock performs better in blue. However, these values are not constant: as your character takes "damage," you wind the base down a number of clicks, revealing their new, reduced stats. Beaming up to the Enterprise and spending a few turns in Sickbay will get them ship-shape and ready for action. The Enterprise and Klingon starships also have Clix bases representing their short-range and long-range fighting capabilities, as well as their shield strength. As the crew resolves the conflict on the ground, the ships will battle it out in orbit, with the Enterprise's destruction being the chief way the players might lose. (The other two are running out of time on the Stardate track or completely borking one of the 3 main missions.)

So far, there's surprisingly little math for a Knizia game. Ah, but you haven't heard about how challenges work. When trying to resolve a crisis, the player gets a target number and color—say, 22 in Operations—and attempts to meet or exceed it by doing a shitload of addition. You start by rolling two special "Federation" dice: instead of a 6, these dice have a 7-1, indicating a roll of 7 but a mandatory hit to your Clix base. You then add your character's relevant stat and extra points for (deep breath) Crew Card bonuses, Crew Card keywords, character keywords, Discovery Token keywords, other players in your space, Action Card bonuses, and if you still fall short, you can take hits to your Clix for those last lousy points.

This process is fun. Everybody loves getting bonuses. What's not fun is the fact that it's virtually impossible to fail a major crisis. If you don't meet the target score, you lose a few Clix and try again next turn. If you meet the qualifying score for the less-than-optimal story branch, you can voluntarily fail and try for the better one next turn. But even on the first roll, the numbers aren't hard to meet. This means that, despite the many potential plot branches, you'll be seeing the same ones every...single...game. Some missions require you to be holding certain Discovery Tokens to get the better outcome, but since those are faceup on the board, that doesn't add much challenge. The only ones you will ever fail are the crises that need to be completed before a certain Stardate.

Despite promising mechanisms and great Star Trek flavor, Star Trek: Expeditions turns out to be boring and repetitive. Only the hardest difficulty provides any real tension, and it mostly does that by pumping up the (already difficult) Enterprise/Klingon ship battle. In spite of several layers of randomness, every game delivers the exact same experience. Here's where WizKids could have rescued the game by providing new packs of missions—the game was even advertised as the basis expandable system—but instead, they've abandoned the property completely, releasing only one mini-expansion that adds Scotty, Sulu, and Chekhov to the lineup.