Star Trek: Five-Year Mission Review

Here at Miniature Market’s Review Corner, I run a pretty tight editorial ship. One of the things that I have forbidden our writers to do is to turn in wishy-washy, “objective” reviews that don’t directly and honestly assess a game. Usually, we end up on the positive side of opinions because everyone gets to select what they write about, and folks tend to want to write about things they’ll like. Mayfair Games’ new Star Trek: Five Year Mission was one that I picked out for myself because I love Trek (especially the Original Series and The Next Generation, both covered by this title) and I like dice games. Looking over the materials and comments before its release, it seemed like a light and fun co-op game with enough of a smattering of Star Trek to give it some atmosphere. Can’t miss, right?

Well, it turns out you can because Five Year Mission simply isn’t one that I can endorse and it’s squarely in the “disappointed” column as far as 2015 releases go. It’s a tepid, uninspired design that mediocrely trundles along dispassionately. It’s blandly competent and it may muster at least a sort of passive interest for its entire duration- not unlike a bad season one or season two episode of TNG.

It’s a fun concept to have both the Enterprises and crews of the two best Trek series as well as tons of cards that reference classic episodes, plotlines and characters. In fact, the best thing about this game is that Trek fans will find that it is very much a conversation starter as everyone reminisces about the Salt Vampire, the Gorn, the Squire of Gothos and other classic material. Everyone is going to do their best exaggerated Kirk impression as they resolve conflicts and most likely Reading Rainbow will come up at least once per game if Geordi LaForge is in the character mix. Players at least have agency to make their own fun with this title.

But man alive, talk about a lackluster product and a ho-hum design. Everything about Five Year Mission feels like the kind of licensed game that gave licensed games a bad name before companies like Fantasy Flight Games and Gale Force 9 started doing them right. It’s a box filled with a deck of cards and a bunch of standard D6s in three colors- no custom components at all. The large character cards have stills from the shows, but everything looks strangely low resolution and cheaply presented. It’s not an expensive game, at least.

As far as the mechanics go, don’t come in here looking for Star Trek because it’s not here. The great themes of exploration, diplomacy, humanism and positive futurism are nowhere to be experienced. On a turn, each player will draw an Alert card (blue, yellow or red) and add it to its corresponding column. Then they will draw up to five dice to replenish any used on a previous turn, but any injuries sustained lock up dice in a holding box on the character card. The drawn dice come from a common pool that all players share and deposit into as “actions” are taken. Then it’s the big roll, which defines which actions you can take. Each of the Alert cards indicates which dice results it needs to be resolved- some need a specific color, some a specific number, some a die higher or lower than what is depicted and others need a set to be played all at once. Any dice not used are placed in the player’s action box and may be used next turn or re-rolled at their discretion.

So the idea is that players collectively use these action dice to settle up these Alerts before they fail, which most commonly happens if a fourth one is drawn and there are already three in the column. Five failures and the titular Five Year Mission is cut short. Winning is a matter of choosing a difficulty level and completing enough Alerts with scoring icons and in specific sets of colors to meet the chosen condition.

There is some strategy and planning involved in deciding which dice to roll out of the held actions and which colors to pull during the replenishment phase. There are also crew-specific abilities that can be used once per turn and the condition of the Enterprise is tracked on a separate mat- if you don’t keep it repaired, you can actually lose the ship. Its condition also determines which Alert card you can add to the array- the more damaged the Enterprise is, the more serious the overall situation is and you might be stuck drawing red Alerts until somebody commits some dice to fixing the damage.

The Alerts have a couple of special functions. Some draw other Alerts when drawn, a Prime Directive (Starfleet symbol) prioritizes an Alert over all others, and some do things like prevent players from communicating with each other (cue “confused Uhura” image). There is a gimmicky “urgent” alert that puts a sand timer on a card, pressuring players to complete it before the timer runs out and it fails. That’s about as exciting the game gets. Other Alerts grant single-use special abilities that can fudge or re-roll dice or perform other special functions.

That all sounds very gamerly and maybe even interesting, but the gameplay is patently boring. It isn’t nearly as compelling and dramatic as Knizia’s excellent Hobbit dice games (or his Star Trek: Expeditions game for that matter) and it is definitely not as robust and dynamic as Elder Sign. And it is certainly nowhere near as fun and raucous as King of Tokyo. It is more toward the lower end of the ranking of current dice games, and I would likely prefer to play one of the versions of Yahtzee out there that have a very light whiff of a setting applied to it if only because they don’t even really try to put on gamer airs.

The problem may be that this game is best viewed as a very, very light just-outside-of-mainstream dice roller that really has nothing to do with the expectations of the hobby gaming market. Those accustomed to more richly detailed, highly contextualized designs are more likely to balk at sorting out why rolling a certain set of plain old D6s is how you beat the Borg. Those who are not familiar with the more advanced games on the market that have stronger settings and themes may not be as concerned with the lack of specificity or the generally low quality of the product.

If there’s a positive spin to put on this game, it’s that it plays anywhere from one to seven players in about 45 minutes. It’s tough to find decent games that play so many in a reasonable timeframe, and it also supports players dropping in and out quite seamlessly. This makes it actually quite ideal for more social situations such as at a convention or among non-gaming friends and family. And it is really easy to play, although the return on such a low investment doesn’t really pay out a profit for those looking for a great Star Trek game.