Star Trek: Away Missions The Original Series Expansions Review

boardgamequest.com:

Here we are, back again with more Star Trek: Away Missions expansions. This time, what is old is new. The Original Series (TOS) gets its first representation in this game in the form of two expansions covering the entire TOS cast: Captain Kirk and Commander Scotty expansions. Naturally, they included Picard in the game first, but they couldn’t go long without addressing the elephant in the room that is the original captain. Like the shows is Picard still better than Kirk? Or does the Shat come out ahead for the first time?

Like the previous sets of expansions, there are two away teams, complete with minis, character boards, core missions, support and mission cards, and any necessary tokens. This time, however, both sets are Federation and are focused entirely on the Original Series cast. The Captain Kirk expansion has the classic trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (with Chekov as the Specialist), while the Commander Scotty expansion rounds out the cast with Scotty, Sulu, and Uhura (plus Red Shirt Mr. Leslie… R.I.P.).

Similarly to the four preceding expansions, there are new core missions and supporting cards to push you toward new strategies. Both sets have a double-sided core mission, as well as 70 cards that help you with the strategies of the new core missions. Following the trend of the second wave of expansions, these two do also have a prebuilt pair of decks, which are great for getting you into the action without a lot of setup time. Good to see that they realized this was important after the first expansions lacked it.

As usual, the integration of these with your existing content isn’t too hard. You can either use the team and their cards right out of the box in place of one of your previous teams, or you can build your own decks from the larger card pool, based on whatever core mission you select (of which the Federation now has 8 options available due to the 4 double-sided cards). You can also substitute in a Specialist (like Geordi or Shelby) from a previous