The Final Frontier of 2009 Games

As I briefly mentioned, the last board game I played in 2009 to finish off my "play all games" challenge was Star Trek: The Game. It's a trivia game I've had for something like 15 years without ever taking the shrink wrap off of it. I don't remember if it was a gift from someone who knew I liked Star Trek, or something I bought for myself at some toy store that's probably long out of business; either way, I suppose the thought was in the right place. But really, even though there are plenty of geeks in my circle of friends, few are geeky enough for a Star Trek trivia game.

Bravely, two of my friends sacrificed so I could complete my task. And as proved the case in a surprising number of the other "I can't believe we're playing this" games of 2009, there was some fun to be had in the experience, if not in the game itself.

The game board is a massive hex grid with four planets set on the four corners. You must fly your starship from the center out to each planet. After each die roll, you answer a trivia question to keep your turn. When you land on a planet, you answer a trivia question to score credit for reaching that planet. Once you've tagged all four planets, you return to Starfleet Command in the center of the board to win the game.

There are five different decks of trivia cards. On your way to the first planet, you must answer questions from the "Warp 1" deck. On your second, you go from the "Warp 2" deck, and so on through progressively harder questions in each category.

This is where the humor value came from. The "Warp 1" questions were laughably simple. We're talking "people who've never seen a single episode of Star Trek in their entire lives could probably answer 75% of these questions" simple. I think an actual question was "in the episode 'Elaan of Troyius,' what planet was Elaan from?" Or if not literally that, something of a very similar "who's buried in Grant's tomb?" nature.

Warp 2 wasn't that much tougher. It moved on to the sorts of questions you could take blind stabs at and get maybe 50-50 accuracy, so long as you knew the names of the major characters on Star Trek. Or if you paid attention, some detail in the way a question on one card was asked would help you answer a later question about the same episode on a later card. All the players in the game passed Warp 2.

But then Warp 3 started to get rough. And Warp 4 had me scratching my head a fair amount of the time.

And finally came the "Docking" cards, the ones you had to answer on your way back to the center to win the game. There were multiple questions on each card, and every time, your opponents could choose the question to ask. Now fortunately, we were all trying to end the game as quickly as possible, so my friends were always trying for the easiest question on the card, the one they thought I would have the best shot at knowing.

But even then, the game moved into "tell us a story" territory. A sample question: "At the end of the episode 'The Galileo Seven,' it appears that the shuttlecraft is not going to be able to reach the U.S.S. Enterprise, nor will it be able to land back on the planet. What action does Spock take as a last ditch effort to save them?" And the answer they're looking for? "He jettisons the remaining fuel and ignites it to create a flare, alerting the U.S.S. Enterprise to the shuttle's presence. The action is decidedly emotional, but come to by logical means."

So, I mean, how much of a stickler could you choose to be here? If someone answers, "he jettisons the shuttle fuel and ignites it," could the questioner be all "I'm sorry, your answer is incomplete" if you don't include that "decidedly emotional" nonsense? Again, we were trying to get the game over, so no one ever Trebeked me like that... well, not seriously anyway. We did have a few good laughs over moments like "oh no, I'm sorry, we were looking for 'Kirk fakes his own death, then disguises himself as a Romulan and sneaks back aboard the ship to steal the cloaking device."

In any case, it was good for a few laughs, and thankfully not that long to play in the grand scheme of thing. Still, it's only a game for the most devoted of the devoted Star Trek fans. Meaning I'm putting in the "get rid of me" game pile.

As I fully expected.