Star Trek: Missions Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Star Trek Missions, a reimplementation of the card drafting game Fantasy Realms. Published by Wizkids Games, Star Trek Missions will have you drafting cards to try and score the most points via combos.

In 2017, WizKids Games published a little combo builder called Fantasy Realms. To be honest, I had not even heard of this title until Red Rising was released last year. Publisher Stonemaier Games said his inspiration for Red Rising was based on Fantasy Realms. I’m not sure if that bit of publicity helped the remaining copies of Fantasy Realms fly off store shelves, but WizKids has gone back to the well in their newest game.

Leaving the trappings of fantasy behind for sci-fi, the newest theme for a fantasy realms inspired game is Star Trek: Missions. While not a straight-up reskin, Star Trek: Missions does not hide in one bit that it’s based on Fantasy Realms. In fact, it even has the same designer: Bruce Glassco and clearly states it on the box cover. Is this a worthy successor? Let’s find out.

As I mentioned above, I have not played Fantasy Realms, but I did read up on it to prepare for this review. From my research, it appears that there are two things different in Star Trek: Missions. First, instead of one deck, there are now two: a galaxy deck, and a new (smaller) mission deck. The other thing is that none of the cards in Star Trek: Missions has a default point value. Every card needs some other card to score points.

To play the game, each player starts with a hand of 7 cards (5 galaxy and 2 mission). On their turn, they either draw a card from the discard area and then discard a new card; or draw a card from the galaxy (or two from the mission deck) and discard an equal number of cards to the discard area.