I looked forward to the Star Trek collectible trading card game with great anticipation, but was disappointed by the shallow play. I expected little from TSR's Dragon Dice, but was pleasantly surprised by its depth. Now along comes a collectible dice game in the Star Trek universe, published by the same folks who make The Legend of the Five Rings collectible card game (which they claim is the third most popular CCG after Magic and Star Trek, but which I haven't yet played). This dice game gives us a promising system and exciting (if somewhat deterministic) gameplay, but it ultimately collapses under its own weight. Our first game took four hours to complete. Our second game only cut that time in half, despite being well-versed in the rules by that point. The fast-paced gameplay offers many decisions throughout, but there's a legitimate argument that those decisions are illusory. It is completely playable out of the box and manages to capture the feel of commanding a starship far more effectively than the card game. But these are lumbering starships and not nimble runabouts.
Star Trek: The Next Generation Collectible Dice Game doesn't seem to go out of its way to be collectible. Starters come in two flavors, the Enterprise-E or the Borg Sphere from the First Contact film. Both starters give you everything you need to play the corresponding side in a battle, and in fact you use all but one die in the course of play. After playing the game, I felt no compulsion to run out and buy more dice. With other collectible games, there's often the feeling that if you just get more, more, MORE, you'll have greater options and an improved chance of winning. Although additional dice would extend your choices here, a need for more hasn't been overly built into the game's design. This is good news, meaning that you can plunk down your thirty bucks and wind up with a complete, playable game.
So what do you get for your moolah? Dice, of course, and lots of them— 25 polyhedral dice of the 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-sided varieties. But wait, there's more. The dice represent various systems on a spacecraft— weapons, shields, warp core, sensors, etc. A slick fold-out control panel gives you places to put those dice so you know what they represent. A fold-out screen hides your dice from enemy eyes while you plan your strategy, also providing a convenient place for reference information. Unfortunately the information they put on the screen is not the most frequently needed, and supplementary reference sheets (provided) are also required.
Turns begin with each player rolling his command die (Picard or the Borg queen), yielding a special ability for the duration of the turn: increased movement, weapon power, faster attacks, etc. The effects are different for each ship, although both include the ability to "direct" a subordinate officer. Unfortunately, this ability requires additional dice not included in the basic sets, and booster packs were not available at press time. So, for now, rolling that ability is essentially useless. Once the command dice are rolled, each commander hides his ship behind his protective screen where his control panel is safe from prying enemy eyes. Secure, he makes his command decisions.
Normally, each player's ship produces 16 points of power each turn. These points are used to activate dice. Six-sided dice require one point to activate. For every two facets more a die has, an additional point of power is required (so a 12-sider needs 4 points of power). Powered dice are moved to the "active" sections of the control panel. As they get used, they're moved back to "on-line" sections, making it easy to see at a glance which dice any player has at his disposal.
If you want to power up more dice than your 16 points allow, there are two ways you can get more power. Each player starts the game with 11 points of reserve power. This battery can be tapped at will, and excess power not allocated to other dice can be used to recharge your reserve. It's best to use caution when draining your reserve, though— it acts as a buffer between your ship's systems and your warp core and can help prevent your ship from blowing up.
The second way to get more power is by boosting your warp core's power output. This damages your warp core, though, reducing its condition by 1. As your warp core degrades, the amount of power your ship can produce decreases. In effect, you're doing your opponent's work for him. But dammit, you need that power now! You can almost hear Geordi's voice warning you about the strain on the engines. On the surface, this seems like a clever mechanism to offer players a choice in their play style. In practice, I'm not sure how well it works. I don't see why players wouldn't choose to crank power up to 20 every turn for the first few turns. The extra power can mean powering up an additional weapon, doing more damage to the opposing ship and more than outweighing the damage to your own warp core. Holding back means risking an opening for your opponent.
When both captains have distributed their power, the screens come down and the rest of the turn consists of a series of "volleys." In each volley, a captain may roll dice from a maximum of two systems— movement and one other. Movement is abstracted into a linear track representing positions from highly aggressive to highly defensive. Both ships start at neutral positions, and must face foreward to move to a more aggressive position and aft to move to a defensive one. Ships' positions affect weapon effectiveness, adding positive or negative modifiers to damage rolls. A ship's rotation determines which shield absorbs incoming fire.
Movement dice have three values on them. The first is used for ship rotation and movement. The second adds a bonus to weapons for that turn. The third value functions like the first, but is only used when reacting to the enemy ship— many dice can be rolled on the other player's turn. But each die can only be rolled once per turn. Different movement dice are better for various purposes. Some are good for reactions, others for general use, and still others for extreme situations. The best rolls usually stress the engines, giving the captain a choice. A cautious caption can decline the roll, but the die is still used up for the turn. A riskier move accepts the roll, but rolls again to see how the ship holds up. Another stressful result forces the die to be moved to the "damaged" section of the control panel.
Each ship has unique weapons systems, and each weapon die can only fired in certain directions. The processs is simple— just roll the die. Any number of weapon dice can be rolled in a single volley, but they all have to be of the same type— you can't fiire phasers and torpedoes at once. If the die shows a number (and all but one face do), the weapon hits and does damage equal to the rolled number plus any modifiers from other systems and ship position. The facing shield of the enemy ship is reduced by the resulting value. If the shield can't absorb it all, the extra gets through to damage the ship. A special die dictates which system takes damage.
Damage is assigned to dice in the affected system. Each die can take up to its point value in damage. For example, if six points of damage hit a ship's engines, an 8-sided (2 point) movement die can take two points and be knocked off-line, two more to become damaged, and two more to be destroyed and removed from the game. Or two 10-sided dice could be knocked off-line, etc. If a system takes damage and doesn't have enough dice to take it all, the extra is deducted from the ship's energy reserves. If this too runs out, the ship's warp core is reduced for each remaining point.
Each ship has two flavors of repair dice used to recover damaged dice and recharge shields. Regaining dice is like damaging them in reverse, each die moving one step closer to readiness every time you spend its value in repair points. Each player gets some free repair points at the end of each turn.
Players alternate volleys, Borg then Enterprise, until the Borg and then the Enterprise pass. Any dice still powered up move to the "charged" control panel area. Charged dice can be used in later turns as if they had been powered up that turn..
Of course, each ship has special qualities which make it unique. For the Enterprise, that special something is a pair of six-sided dice comprising the ship's sensor array. These dice provide benefits even greater than the command die— powerful boosts to weapons, direct conversion of reserve power to shields, increased movement rolls, or even selecting a die result without rolling it.
The Borg Sphere's repair systems are stronger than the Enterprise's, plus it has a couple of fun abilities the Enterprise lacks— assimilation and redundancy. When a weapon hits the Borg, the Borg can attempt to assimilate the technology if its assimilation die is powered up. If the roll succeeds, the Enterprise must hand over 1-3 dice of the type which just hit the Borg. The Borg can't use them, but neither can the Enterprise unless it uses repair points to get them back. The Enterprise can still allocate damage to assimilated dice. The Borg can assimilate non-weapons dice if they hit the big E while its shields are down.
Redundancy represents the Borg's ability to reconfigure their ship on the fly. The redundancy die lets the Borg player swap a number of functioning dice for damaged or destroyed dice. Destroyed Enterprise dice can never be recovered, but as long as the Borg's redundancy die is functional the Borg player can regain lost dice and adapt his ship to his needs.
Star Trek: The Next Generation Collectible Dice Game wisely strips the Star Trek franchise down to the essence which is best suited for this milieu— starship combat. No mucking about with away teams, diplomacy, holodecks or prime directives here. The control panels, done in a graphic style consistent with the TV series, help create the feeling of sitting in that plush center chair (or, I suppose, a sterile Borg cubicle). The alternating volleys let each player get their shots in while providing ample opportunity for drama. There's nothing quite so frustrating as powering up your weapons, only to have the enemy punch through your shields and damage your weapons before you can use them.
The subtle differences in the ships' configurations and the special dice unique to each ship make different strategies possible for each captain. Results in our games have been precisely the opposite of how I expected the game to run. The Borg seem to have the more effective ship. They can recover dice more easily and neutralize opposing weapons. Their torpedoes are special, designed to bring down opposing shields. Borg torpedoes never damage the Enterprise. Instead, any damage beyond what the facing shield can absorb is distributed among the remaining shields. The Enterprise is thus in a constant struggle to keep its shields from collapsing. The Borg weapons fire in at least two directions, while the Enterprise torpedoes can shoot only fore or aft (although each phaser fires in all but one direction). And the Borg ship always goes first. Yet despite these seeming advantages, the Enterpise has won all of our local games. Admittedly a small sample size, but curious nonetheless. The Enterprise's weapons can all damage the Borg ship itself, but the phasers are weaker than the Borg's beams and the torpedoes limitations have already been mentioned.
I like the feel of this game quite a bit. It's exciting to take down the enemy's shields and force him to scuttle his internal systems. Perhaps the most significant stategic decisions in the game are made when allocating damage. Do you knock out a bunch of cheap dice, or fewer big ones? Do you destroy a single die, or merely damage a bunch? When are your engines more important than your weapons? Since all your dice are useful, these aren't easy choices.
Unfortunately the game just takes far too long for what it is. I don't see how the game can play in the 30-45 minutes 5 Rings claims, unless both players just charge at each other with weapons blazing. If either player takes a defensive posture— an attractive option once your forward shield drops— the game takes much longer. This is partly because the defensive bonuses are greater than the offensive ones, so two ships at opposite ends of the helm track results in a defensive advantage.
Forthcoming expansions promise Klingons and other races, with special dice for cloaking devices and other esoterica. Multiplayer battle might be intriguing if the game length problem can be overcome. 5 Rings has put together a cohesive, expandible system with the flavor and ambience of space battles from Star Trek: First Contact but, alas, the running time of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.