3 Physicists and an Engineer walk into a Holodeck

The Pandemic continues but we wont let that hold us back from game night. I thought it might be nice to play something Star Trek for Rick as it was his birthday this week and we

can't meet up and celebrate his oldness. So we dialed up Star Trek Catan on Vassal. We attempted this last week and backed out due to the wonky "dice deck" that we didn't figure out. Rick added a dice roller to the module (hurray for open source), and we were ready to take off. Nick, Rick, and Chris are the Physicists and I the Engineer.

The setting for this game is Star Trek Original Series. This is a re-skin of the original Catan. There are new new pieces space stations and enterprises. The board is now planets rather than the terrestrial board. There is an expansion out there with a map board of explored space based the map in Kirk's quarters(we didn't use it today). The Resources have been renamed (oxygen, tritanium, water, dilithium and food) to all the things you'll need for interstellar travel. Then there are new things, the 10 support cards.

The support cards make the game interesting and have the possibility of making the game a little off kilter. Some of the cards have triggers that would let you use them 2 times before your next turn (I am looking at you Spock.). Or as it was in my case I kinda got stuck with Spock for longer than I would have liked. We found that the cards discourage trading of resources (a valuable part of the normal game). When you activate a cards ability the first time you may turn it over to use the ability a second time or return it an choose a new support card. After the second time you use the ability are required to return it and take a new one.

Star Trek Catan sets up just like normal Catan with the exception of the support cards (they are passed out at the beginning of the game one per player). With the support cards things moved fairly slowly for some reason. So several hours later one of us was getting ready to head to bed so it was up to Rick to win quickly so he could head to bed. I think all in all we liked it but we all were not huge fans of the support cards. Some were great and balanced other were a little over powered and some of them were never chosen.

All in all we had a fun time playing and think that its a fun variant of Catan. It would be interesting to tune up some of the support cards... maybe next game.