Star Trek: Away Missions Board Game Review

Star Trek: Away Missions

WBG Score: 8

Player Count: 2-4

You’ll like this if you like: Warhammer Underworlds

Published by: Gale Force Nine, LLC

Designed by: Andrew Haught, Mike Haught, Phil Yates

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

By Steve Godfrey

At this point you’ll probably expect me to make some sort of stupid joke where I pretend to mix up two of the most popular space franchises because they’ve both got the word star in their title just for the cheap laughs. Well do you know what? I’m not gonna do it. Over the last couple of years of reviewing I think I’ve grown up and I believe I’m past such childish antics. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve just received a message from the USS Orville that a Vogon constructor fleet is making its way towards a Stargate bound for earth with a view to destroying it to make way for a bypass. So I’d ideally like to get this review out before then. Turns out planetary destruction isn’t good for the views. May the Schwartz be With You!

How to engage warp

For your first game set the board up as per the quick start guide. If not, see the rules to find how to customise the board set up. Pick the faction you’ll be playing with and set up the characters by filling in any of the holes on their boards with skill pegs. This base game comes with two factions. The Federation and the Borg but expansions will introduce others. Players will then pick their main objective on their double sided objective card. This will get you points at the end of the game if you complete it. Some will let you accumulate points throughout the game when you do certain things. Each player will then draw five support and five mission cards from their deck. Roll a die for initiative and the first player chooses one of their characters to activate. 

On a turn a player can take two actions. Move up to your activated characters max speed through normal spaces or turbo lifts but not through opposing characters or a space with two friendly characters. Take cover puts a take cover token on a character which allows them to roll an additional defence dice if attacked. This gets removed when that character moves out of that space. Special actions are any actions on cards or character boards. Mostly you’ll be using cards to complete missions that will get you those all important victory points to win the game. These generally need you to complete skill checks at particular terminals in the game.

To do this check the skill score on the character and take that many dice. You can then take an extra die if you share a speciality with the mission. For example, if the mission wants a security skill check and you use Worf, who has a security speciality, then you get the extra dice. Roll those dice, and any rolls of four or above count as a success. The card then gets placed in a score pile for the end of the game. Attack. To attack, choose your target and check line of sight (three words that send shivers up many gamers spines) here it’s pretty simple. As long as you can draw an uninterrupted line between the space you're in to an opponent's space (that doesn’t go through a friendly character) you can hit them. Pick your weapon and gather the dice it gives you and add them to your attack skill dice and roll them and line them up from highest to lowest on the dice track. The defender does the same with their defence dice and lines those up highest to lowest next to the attack dice. Then compare the dice. Attacks that are higher than the opposite defence dice score a hit regardless of what was rolled. So a 2 against a 1 will hit. However any unopposed dice needs a 4 to hit.

Damage is taken by removing pegs from that defender's character board and weakening their skills. When a character has no pegs on their board then one more hit will neutralise them and they are out of the game. If you happen to neutralise someone as the Borg then congratulations, they’ve been assimilated and you now have a shiny new recruit to the cause. With both skill checks and attacks/defence you can discard a card from your hand to re roll dice. You can do this as many times as you want. 

Once everyone has activated all of their characters the round ends. Remove all activated tokens, discard any unwanted cards from your hand and draw back up to five mission and five support cards. Roll a die for initiative and go again. At the end of the third round the game ends. Score all mission cards and your main objective and the player with the most points wins. 

Star Trekkin’ across the universe. 

I’ve got a certain amount of respect for publishers who try to make an original thematic game out of any big IP (intellectual property), especially one that’s as big and sprawling as Star Trek. It’s difficult trying to capture the essence of what fans love about it whilst still being a fun and engaging (pun not intended) game. 

When it comes to themes I think Gale Force Nine do a great job with any IPs they touch, well certainly the ones I've played anyway. Now I've got a decent knowledge of Star Trek and I reckon I know enough to do pretty well in a pub quiz, but not enough to get caught up in a deep dive conversation at a Trek convention. For example I had to look up who Shelby was (one of the characters in this box. I’ve only seen those episodes once). I’ll also commend them for going with this character because it’s thematic to the initial setting rather than one of the other more popular characters. 

If their previous Doctor Who game is anything to go by then they definitely put a lot of effort and research into their themes. In that game alone there are some pretty deep cut references. They seem to have some real fans working on these games and if nothing else the fans will get a kick out of seeing some of these cool thematic elements and little nods to some of the more obscure references, all whilst appealing to more casual fans of these shows/movies.

I’m talking about the theme a lot but getting that essence right in games like this is key, even if the game is solid, if you’re using a well known brand like this you need to make it feel like it and if you don’t get that right, even on a surface level, then you’ll be sure to alienate a lot of your core fan base. It’s a tough balancing act to get right that unfortunately a lot of IP based games don’t manage to pull off. Star Trek: Away Missions, thankfully does get it right. At this point I’ve only used the base game but the two factions involved in that box really feel like their on screen counterparts. 

Resistance is useless

The Borg slowly stomp round the decks like some horror movie villain posing the ever looming threat of assimilation. I don’t know if having seen the Borg on screen helps, but seeing one of those figures getting closer to you felt genuinely tense and imposing. Mostly because if a Borg neutralises an opponent they take control of them for their collective. They’re not all about assimilating others though. Even though they have a couple of missions based on assimilating opponents units, they’re more about taking over areas of the ship. That doesn’t mean that the player in control won’t go for your characters though because their hive mind ability (the active Borg can give one of their actions to another one) is a great way of helping complete their more difficult skill cards, so the more Borg they have in the collective the better. These particular mission cards ask you for multiple accumulative successes to complete and aren’t always possible in one round with one Borg so to get through more missions you’ll certainly need to sacrifice part or all of another Borg's activation to complete those cards. 

Unlike the Federation who have lots of specialities, the Borg start off as blank slates but they’ve got lots of opportunity to upgrade themselves with those all important skill boosts. I love how customisable this makes them. You can put any one of them in a space and throw an appropriate upgrade on them for a boost, where the Federation have to spend time manoeuvring certain characters into position if they want those boosts.

Adapting is the other important game in town. If you compare the Borg to the Federation you’ll quickly see how squishy they are compared to their human counterparts. Maybe having robot parts isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? However, completing some missions will get you adapt tokens and these will be used in conjunction with some support cards that will let you add additional dice in combat, defence, skill checks etc. So before you know it those squishy Borg will be a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you consider that more of the metal mickeys will be populating the board every round. 

The more difficult the task, the more sweeter the victory.

The Federation on the other hand are more than happy to wander round completing missions and keeping themselves to themselves, after all why would you purposely start a fight with the Borg? When it comes to combat, the Federations main phasers are set to stun but don’t be fooled into thinking that they won’t bring out the big guns when need be as they have a good array of firepower to equip if you want something with a little more kick. They’ve got a few missions that rely on neutralising a target but for the most part they’re all skill checks and some of them require two separate checks to complete. I.e. Complete one at one terminal and then complete another at a different terminal with another character. Their whole thing is very much cooperation. It creates a lovely chess-like puzzle as you try to manoeuvre your characters into position to score as much as you can. Even more so when you’re trying to do it with the characters who can get you those skill bonuses. In fact a lot of their support deck is all about cooperation. It’s composed of healing cards and a good assortment of cards that grant either extra movement or ones that give movement to other friendly characters. It’s certainly thematic and really helps get into position to score those higher point cards. 

Set phasers to fun

I’ve seen people mention that the game isn’t interactive enough and that potentially combat doesn’t happen often enough and in some respects that can be very true. In regards to that though this game very much reminds me of Scythe wherein the focus is very much on manoeuvring and objectives and combat is there as an objective and tactical move but certainly isn't intended to be used as a long term goal. Again, this for me all feels very thematic, after all I never really saw Star Trek as an all out action show. Of course how much combat there is in the game completely depends on how, as a player, you want to approach each game or even how you go about building your deck of cards should you choose to do that. But the fact that this game isn’t just about combat is one of the reasons I enjoy it as much as I do. 

Outside of being thematic, Star Trek: Away Missions is just a lot of fun. I love the puzzle of trying to get your people in position to try and complete missions. Succeeding is great but failing them brings its own agonising decision of whether you’re going to discard a card to try and re roll some dice. Granted that may be an easy decision at first, but the more you fail the more you find yourself hesitating, can you afford to discard another card to try again? should you just accept your fate and walk away? Or should you try again?, because you can’t possibly fail a third time right? 

I really like that the game ramps up as the rounds progress and makes each one an ever desperate clamber for points. You generally never know how well each other is doing, well, unless one player's score pile is looking a little light, but you’ll all be trying to eke out one last card just in case that’s the one that takes the game for you. 

There's Klingons on the starboard bow.

As I mentioned earlier this set only comes with the two factions. At the time of writing there are 7 additional sets that have been released. Another Federation box, two Klingon and two Romulans. These are all The Next Generation based sets and there are 2 more Federation sets but these cover the original series (I’ll be reviewing those two boxes soon so watch this final frontier…err space) so at the moment I’m giving this game an 8. There's enough replayability in this core box to keep you going for a decent amount of games. The variation of the tile setup, the missions, playing both factions and even doing a little bit of deck building with the extra cards. But that’s only going to get you so far before you’ll be gagging for something extra. Of course this isn’t designed to be just these two factions so eventually you’ll want to think about getting some expansion sets. At the time of writing this I’ve only really used the two Original series expansion sets so I've not really managed to dive into everything this game can offer in terms of variability with different factions. I do think that this is where the game will really start to shine though. Even if you only get one box of Klingons and Romulans I think that will give you that bit of extra choice you need to make the game pop. 

With more choice comes the need to store all of this stuff and that’s something that the core box isn't designed for. Which I’m still a bit torn on if I’m honest. In one respect I would have loved it if they'd designed the insert with some future faction storage in mind (not everything of course.) On the other hand, having each one in their own separate boxes does make them easier to grab at a glance for a quick plug and play style game. Although this goes out of the window a bit if you’re changing up a team or wanting to create some decks. Let’s hope for some kind of storage solution in the future. 

Star Trek: Away Missions is billed as a 2-4 player game but the 3 & 4 players games need the addition of a few extra tiles to create a bigger map so you’ll essentially need access to another core box which I think is a big shame. Unlike games like Star Wars Rebellion or Memoir 44 that are 2 player games with rules in place for more players (which personally I think should only be played at 2) I would love to try this with more players. I think having more players running round the map could be a lot of fun and at this point I really hope Gale Force 9 see their way to releasing an additional map pack, a) to have a change or setting and b) to add in the tiles we need to play at the higher player counts.

Don’t get a big head

So certainly the most divisive thing you read about in the game is the miniatures. They’ve gone down a more cartoony bigger head approach and the be frank, your either gonna love them or hate them. They join a pantheon of marmite board game miniatures along with the Marvel United minis. Personally I really like them, it makes them easier to tell apart from a distance when they’re unpainted and it adds a bit of character to them. I’ll admit that it is a bit of a contrast when you consider that they’ve used screen shots on the cards and then used non realistic minis but I do think the scale is needed, especially if you’ve got no plans to paint them. The Borg are a little harder to tell apart being as though they’re very similar looking so you’ll have to reference the card with the model art work. It the names/numbers on each base go a way to helping. 

It’s life Jim but not as we know it.

If you’re a fan that’s been on the lookout for a fun and thematic Star Trek game (that isn’t based on ship to ship combat) then Star Trek: Away Missions is well worth checking out. The core box does a great job of pulling you in and giving you a fun experience that, even though it’s enough on its own, it’ll leave you eager to pick up more factions and really open it up to the final frontier. 

Right, I’m going to board my own enterprise, open it up to warp 6 and gonna find me some Klingons!.......by which I mean I’m gonna drive to my FLGS to get some expansions.