In other trek-related news, tonight I played
Star Trek Fleet Captains with Ando and a mutual friend of ours. It is
really fun, once you learn the rules. And for god's sake, if you buy this game, do photocopy the rulebook or find a copy online and print out a few copies so that multiple people can read the rules - because holy shit, the way some of them were written could have been done better. Once you get past the learning curve the game is both really good and has a bunch of novel shit in it that I can only assume makes subsequent games run better.
A good example of this from tonight's game was the movement rules. We had read them wrong and so played the game with the wrong information. Ando reread a section in the book and realised this and suddenly a lot of options opened up that we previously considered closed.
The core game is a 1v1 or 2v2 competitive game. One side starts as the Federation, the other the Klingons. The galaxy is randomly generated with the almighty power of hex tiles. You have a small fleet of ships and most have special abilities and a number of different stats which you can change to deal with situations as they arise. The game is part exploration, part empire-building, part combat, but it all combines to give a really good Trek flavour. The Romulan expansion opens up the game by adding a third faction, making the game a 1v1v1 or 2v2v2, with rules for espionage. The only real criticism I have of the Romulan expansion is that the titular faction has a heavy advantage when it comes to espionage and sabotage, something which the Feds and Klinks don't get to anywhere near the same degree.
