Top 10 Star Trek Board Games

boardgamequest.com:

Some intellectual properties really suffer for a lack of good board games. Fans of Transformers, G.I. Joe, and others have often been starved of good board games for their favorite franchises (at least until recently). One that has not had that problem, however, is Star Trek. It has a long and varied history with board games of varying qualities going back decades, almost to the Original Series’s initial run. I’m always game to try a Star Trek game, so when it is offered I rarely refuse. These are some of my favorites. Honorable mention goes to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game and the unmatched Robert O’Reilly (especially his Gowron eyes). No offense, Chancellor, but there just wasn’t room for you on the list!

Before getting to the top 10, I would like to bestow this prestigious award on what is quite possibly the weirdest Star Trek-themed game ever created, and I use the word “theme” lightly. Very lightly. You roam throughout the galaxies (yes, plural) attempting to make peace between… I am not entirely sure. Some unnamed aliens that are fighting. You collect dilithium that gives random bonuses or penalties and… yeah, I never quite figured out how it was supposed to go. The rules aren’t exactly clear. But hey, the Enterprise-D on the box cover looks great!

The Star Trek take on a deck-building game came early on in the days of the genre, just a few years after Dominion. It doesn’t do a whole lot to innovate, and has some wonky rules which the later expansions corrected, but to date, it is the only deck-building game to tackle Star Trek. It isn’t without merit, however, as it does have scenarios that switch the game up from the Infection scenario covering the wide range of alien diseases from the Original Series to the Klingon Civil War from The Next Generation. The highlights to me are the Borg scenarios, based on Best of Both Worlds and First Contact. They are pretty brutal, but feel accurate to the source material and are very