Rogue Review - Star Trek Panic

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilization, to boldly go where no one has gone before…

Star Trek Panic by Fireside Games is a cooperative board game where you take on the role of the TOS Enterprise crew and must complete a series of missions. All the while you face wave after wave of enemy ships, all gunning for you. If you’ve ever played Castle Panic it’s much the same concept. Except much more intense.

The basic ideas between Star Trek Panic and Castle Panic are the same. You have a circular board with the Enterprise, or a castle, in the center. Around you are three rings. Bad guys appear in the outer ring and move inward every round. They are trying to kill you. You have to kill them right back.

In order to destroy an enemy ship (Klingons, Romulans, and Tholians) you need to play a card with the appropriate location. Phaser cards have a direction (Forward, Port and Starboard, or Aft) which correspond to a third of the board as well to one of the rings (close, medium or long ranges). You can only hit an enemy in a ring that matches your phaser. There are also photon torpedoes, which can fire into any ring in the front arc but do two damage instead of one.

Like Castle Panic, you have outer defenses, shield, and inner defenses, hull, that the enemy ships will slowly destroy. Unlike Castle Panic, enemies do damage to you each round, not just when they get up close. Each round, every enemy ship on the board will fire at you, doing 1-2 damage to the section facing them. It takes two damage to bring down a shield and two damage to destroy a hull section. If all section hull sections are destroyed, the Enterprise is destroyed and game over. To add insult to injury, if an enemy ship fires on an already destroyed hull section, you have to discard cards from your deck. If you run out of cards, game over.

Also unlike Castle Panic, you are not defending a static castle but a starship. Starships can move. On your turn, you can rotate the Enterprise one section. This allows you to change arcs so that if you had some forward phaser cards and only ships in your side arcs, you could rotate and bring those ships into position to be fired on. You can do this anytime during your play card phase, meaning you can fire a side phaser, then turn the ship and fire a forward or aft phaser.

Your goal, however, isn’t actually to destroy these ships. In Castle Panic, the game ends when you eradicate every monster. Star Trek isn’t about wholesale slaughter though. Your objective is to complete five missions (or 10 if you’re feeling masochistic). Each mission is inspired by a TOS episode and has a variety of game effects. You could be facing the Doomsday Machine and have to develop a clever strategy to defeat it. This is mostly accomplished by committing cards to a mission, ie not being able to play them for their usual effect. Most of the cards have a Command, Science, Engineering, or Medical symbol on them. Missions will call for a specific number of each.

Each mission will also have some additional complication. For example, one is searching for a ship in distress. Two tokens are put on the board face down on opposite ends of the board. You don’t know which one is the ship and which one is a false reading. You only have a limited number of rounds to get to the ship before the mission fails so you have to guess correctly. And if your ship has taken to much damage, it becomes literally impossible.

That’s right, if the Enterprise has three hull sections destroyed, it can no longer move. This is one of the game effects that I honestly can’t decide if it is perfectly balanced for ensuring the game remains a challenge or is far too frustrating and just creates a negative play experience. Every round, enemy ships are firing at you. If you don’t have cards that match where the ships are, rotating the Enterprise can help you get into position. There are also cards that you can play to rebuild damage sections. But this is hard to pull off. Typically, once the Enterprise is damaged and can no longer move, it’s probably staying in that state.

On one hand, this is good for building the tension. But in practice, it feels like it just bogs the game down. You can’t complete missions that require you to move the ship. So if you have one of those, the only thing you can do is wait it out. And hope the next mission you draw doesn’t require movement. We one time got into a state where we were one turn away from completing our last mission and then we took some damage and could not move the final space to complete the mission. We went through five more missions that we couldn’t beat because of this before we just gave up.

On a brighter side, Players also take on the role of the Enterprise crew, each of whom has a special ability. Captain Kirk gets extra cards when he tries to complete a mission. Scotty gets to repair a section of the ship for free. Sulu can move the ship twice on his turn. These abilities can be transformative and incredibly powerful. Or have no effect because they just don’t trigger, such as being unable to move on Sulu’s turn or having no damage on Scotty’s turn.

Overall, I’d give the game a 3/5. It can be a fun game, it’s very well themed, and I love cooperative experiences. It is an improvement over Castle Panic in many ways because it’s harder to get into a state where you know you’re going to win and you just have to play it out. But it also can go the other way, where you know you’re going to lose and you just have to wait a potentially long time.