So I got to try out Star Trek Expeditions for the first time today. I read the rules a couple of times and then gave it a try.


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I went into the game with a few thoughts;

1) Without help right out of the gate, the Klingon ship was going to wreck our Enterprise............so getting the some of the boosts(+1 weapons and +1 shields) back to the ship was priority #1.

But don't take my word for it...........here are the #s;

= Shields, = Long Range, =close range


The Klingon Battle Cruiser
13 13 13 12 12 11 11 10 10 09 09 0
06 06 05 05 05 04 04 04 03 03 02 0
9* 8* 8* 8* 7* 7*06 06 05 05 05 0
*= Critical Hit: When a close range attack hits by at least 3 deal 2 damage instead of 1.

The Enterprise
09 09 08 08 08 07 07 06 06 05 05 0
07 07 06 06 06 05 05 05 04 04 03 0
8* 7* 7* 7* 6* 6*05 05 04 04 04 0
*= Full Power to Phasers: When a close range attack hits by at least 3 move both ships one space to the right on the Orbital Track.

Combat being only one part of the game it isn't complicated and it is done with 1 die rolled for attacking (the Klingons heal 1 on a roll of 1 and do not attack and the Enterprise actually gets a 7-1 on what would normally be a 6..........they get the 7 for the roll but after the action the ship/character takes a click)

2) There are no dial spikes or late dial up swings............#s just go down and as such, are fairly easy to anticipate.

3) Uhura's special action, to Draw a card and then keep it or give it to any other player........seems like gold. The idea of pulling a card and then giving it to the best member of the away team sounds like a winning formula to me.

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So what happend..................well I think a few things early in the game really decided what way our team was going to go.

-First time playing, we went with the easiest challange level Blue: Acadamy Cadet.

- Kirk was able to get a sizable Command crew(+5) quick (thanks Uhura!) so the initial challanges for him were very managable.

- The +1 Long Range Weapons and +1 Shields (which are face up so you know where they are righ away) were right beside each other..........and the other +1 all weapons fell into our lap on turn 3 (I think).

- Uhura's ablilty was almost as good as we thought it might be.......and she pulled a couple of Ship Combat cards (Heal a click, re-roll, and or +2 to any roll) so most of our initial focus was to make sure we were all set for the challenges on the surface and take it to the Klingons so we could at least feel safe about how the battles could go........(needing to rolls a 3 is not a good idea .............when they can only really hit with a 5 or better a 6....that is better)

- Kirk got a hold of some more battle cards and spent 4 straight actions taking care of the enemy using the special to knock them back in orbit......after that it was really down hill for the space battle.

- Spock, wasn't sure about his special and didn't use it at first....and got stuck at some challanges that would have cost us some Mission points if he left before the team completed it..............turns out that when you don't have any points in a certain catagory you just ignore the penalty. Spock turned out to be the away team member we used the lest effectively.

- After the Space Battle was done..............it was a lot easier to focus on the Location Challenges.

End of the game we scored 16 or higher in each catagory and passed the Acadamy test with flying colors.


We're looking forward to trying it out again on the next leve but it seems like it's a blast.

The only thing that we noticed that was off was the Klingon ship seemed to be missing a small piece (a side gun possibly?).............other than that everything seemed to be just fine.


If you guys want to know anything else just ask.

Looking forward to hearing some other peoples experiences with it.

Cool. I'm considering buying this game, but having not played it yet, it's good to get info from those that have.

Having played it about 5 times now, Uhura seems to be the MVP every single game. And yeah the Enterprise is p.o.s. compared to the Klingon ship, especially with my rolls.

you know that offended me at first (as a trek fan how dare you make my enterprise so much weaker) until i realized it was done with an eye toward the items and cards the players can play


as for the game, my one play through so far, we spent less time focusing on the ship combat, and instead focused on completing the planet challenges. our enterprise was almost destroyed completely, but we kept it at only -2 and still completed the planet challenges

so it is cool to see how you can approach success in the game in different ways

Yeah, my take was that you can beat the more powerful ship if you pulled all the tricks and tactics you can...........seems more interesting/more of a challange that way.

That is something I really like about the game so far.

I'm not overly framiliar with the co-op board games in general but this is enjoyable experience.


This has me increasing my interest to see about the Fleet Captain..........I like the competion aspec of games and it sounds interesting.

You know, before I tried playing cooperative games, I thought they would be dull, lacking the competitive element. Turns out I was wrong about that.

The first co-op game I played was Castle Panic. I picked it up despite it being cooperative, in large part because it also promised a competitive element. That is, if the players don't cooperate to some extent, everyone will lose (guaranteed!) but there is still a single winner of the game at the end. This requires to cooperate, somewhat, while trying to cooperate in such a way as to keep yourself on top. Too much trying to be on top and you get trampled by orcs, so look out!

I rapidly learned to enjoy the cooperative aspect of the game, as did most of our gaming group. We continue to play it regularly and it's whetted my appetite for more cooperative games.

ST:E is, thus, the second cooperative game I've picked up and while I've only played it once, I had a ball playing it.

If you tried coop games and didn't care for them, well, that's fine, everyone has their own cup of tea, right? But don't discount them because you think they'll be dull without competition. Give them a shot. You are competing, you're competing with the lay of the cards, and the guy who didn't put nearly enough Repair cards in the Energize deck. GAHH! : - )

How's the oreo bases???????

Agreed. This has also made me interested in more co-op games as well.........but I would like my fleet of ships to blast the frack out of my opponents as well.....................is it wrong to mix sci-fi terms?


Decent. Of the 6 dials all of them turned easily and no slipping..........and only 1 (the Enterprise) I couldn't take apart.

I will say right here and right now that I love the Champion-style bases (I still don't like calling them "oreo" dials, they don't look like Oreos already!). They are easily the easiest dials to turn in this history of the game, and the sticker alignment in our box was perfect (possibly related to the little nubbin on the edge of the sticker?)

They are quite a bit harder than the previous dials to get apart, or maybe I just haven't mastered the trick of the new dials yet. However, I'm hoping that they give me much less reason to ever need to take them apart!

Had a very Pandemic feel to the game which is another good Co-op game (if you're interested in them now). At first it all seems overwhelming, but once you get the hang of it, it goes smoother.

Uhura's power is great, but Spock and Kirks are good as well, I rarely used Bones special power (I usually will play Bones until we get a Scotty so thats a bit disappointing), but because of his double medical, he usually was doing missions all by himself and passing with flying colors.

Biggest problem I found is time management, We tried to boost our shields and such as well at the beginning of the game, while having others go around and scout missions, but most of the "on or before turn X" missions we didn't pass on the preferred track, and doing the Rebel 3D mission is pretty rough. In the end we finished with 16s or more in Energy and politics and only a 15 in Rebels, with 2 days left and the Klingon ship destroyed.

Playing again tomorrow, should be fun.

Thanks for pointing me to another co-op game.......I just might check that out.

We had the same feeling when we started..........it looked like it was going to be alot going on but the turn actions were taken care of after the first turn around the table and with the little card to help you calculate all of the bonuses for challanges the only thing we had to check the rules for was the ship battles........and even that was easy to understand.

Uhura's special was golden and she also has the best Red # so yeah, she's probably going to be a lock for every single game...........doubtful that she'd be left off our away team when the expansion comes out.

Kirk got silly lucky to start with in our game so I'm not putting much stock in it. His two first cards were +2 crew cards(+4 to start with!). Then he beamed down to the planet to one of the ship upgrades, found a Command challange......beat it, picked up the upgrade. Bones picked up the other ship upgrade and moved into his space so Kirk could take them both up with one trip.......then Uhura pulled a bunch of 'battle bonus' cards and passed them to Kirk.....and he proptly started to show the Klingons what for. That is crazy luck. I need to see him when things are normal. Because of the way cards were drawn(positively) we never really needed to use his special until the very end where we opted to toss all of our crew on Spock to take care of the last couple of challanges.

Bones........he has a 14 for medical challanges. His special was nothing we planned on using but we found we were sharing spaces a lot (we liked the +2 bonus) and when we had a action to spare we used his power........I suppose this kept most of the crew on the planet more often then not.

We freely admit that we missused Spock(by ignoring his special) and that will be one of the things we focus on right from the get go next time.


I'm really interested to see what the expansion crew members do(Scotty able to heal the ship, possibly?)......and thankfully it will allow the away team to be increased to 5 memebers




Yup. We got lucky with the cards and we stumbled onto 2 of the 3 locations within 2 stardates..........didn't find the polotics one early and I think we only managed to get the 3C ending........but we got 3As in the other 2 and destroyed the klingons so it's wasn't much of a loss. But that was on easy.......I hear that is rather significant.

We went out of our way to not look to much at the cards before our first play through so we didn't realize that some of the star date limits were as.....um....limiting as thery were. I think Spock will help with this in our next game.

Good luck, let us know how it goes!

So got to play for the second time today..............this time we tried moving up to Lv2 Starship Captain.

We opted for the same character order (Kirk, Uhura, Spock, Bones) as it seemed to work well for us last time.

Things of note that happend this time;

- Moving up the difficulty to Starship Captain and having turns where beaming was not possible was a PAIN! It wasn't so much a monkey wrench as it was a King Kong wrench. As a result the stardate cards would, on occasion, dictate our turns every now and again.........taking out our frustrations on the Klingons, pulling Energize cards, or using sick bay were the stand by actions when we were stranded on the ship. As much as I disliked it.......it did make the game far more challangeing, which I suppose is the goal.

- Got a combination of horrible/great luck right out the gate. The first 4 stardate cards did not have any stardate icons..............but did have 3 Klingon attacks. Lucky for us after 3 long range battles we were both down 2 but we had already pulled a pair of 'repair the Enterprise' cards so we were felling OK about that. That could have been alot worse. All of that before we could get the +1 shields, +1 Long range, and +1 all weapons installed on the ship.

- After having it confirmed that you do not reshuffle the Energize cards we were more conservative about pulling them in general and using Uhura's special in perticular...............she participated in the challanges(being the active player) much more this time. We still dumped all of the battle applicible cards on one player(Kirk) and when the opening happend vs the Klingons we got rid of them quick..........ending in Kirk spending his full 4 actions for a turn to KO the enemy.

- We only went through about 1/2 the energise cards this time.

- We did run into two battle traps this time....one where we lost the Enterprises shields(no good at all! Took care of that right away before we got attacked.......again, quite lucky) and the other was the Ship could not move(no issue at all.............we left it alone until we had actions to spare.

- Lots more clicks of 'damage' this time around.....a combination of rolling more 7-1s (including a 14-2! ) and Uhura pulling vicious stardate cards.......she actually made it to click #8.

- We finished on Stardate 20(Which I think was faster than last time...but we weren't sure), and had over 16 in all catagories before we added the +7/+7/+7 from the space battle. But we did only manage to get 1 3A completion this time..........and a few of the dated timelimits we challanged on the date on the card.

- We still didn't get much use out of Spocks special..............but he did manage to get to almost every challange we would have wanted him to try and also rolled rediculusly well...............lost of 5s which are better longtern than the 7-1, if you don't need the help.

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So after two games;

- The game is still great.
- Bones (despite being awesome in medical challanges!) seems to be the least useful to our away team......coupled with the fact that Spock's the one with the 11..........looks like Bones might be an early favorite to be replaced by some of the expansion characters when they come out.
- Klingons are still @ss-hats.
- Passing tokes (when in the same location) and having one person bring them up the the ship saves lots of time and when possible it the way to go.


Next up is Lv 3 Starfleet Admiral..wish us luck.

I got back from Europe after an extra day Amsterdam layover on Sunday Night and found the game waiting at my doorstep.

Played it last night for the first time and loved it despite not being able to see clearly (eyes still massively tired).

Oreo bases were awesome.

We played 3-Player (random no Kirk) on BLUE. I think we Won, not sure about all the rules yet. Scored near top level, but the game was rather fun.

We did make one play mistake healing Bones with Bones special ability.

Not sure, what do you do with the Stardate cards on Blue when you run out (I presume you just reshuffle them which is what we did)?

Do you do the same wiith the Energize Cards?

We found that Spocks special power was awesome!! Allowing us to chart our strategy while the Enterprise got pounded into near oblivion with our bad rolls.

Also can you use/discard the (shield) discovery tokens after rolling for the Klingons attack to cause it to miss?

Interesting..............haven't heard of one of the characters sitting out yet.

Yes, re-shuffle them.

Sadly no, no reshuffling the Energize cards.


Gah! We need to learn to use him better.


Yes. In addition when you discarde on of the upgrades for the action you also get the regular bonus.....which hasn't come up for us yet but it suprised me.

Played 2 more today with a friend of mine who has experience with Co-op games, so explaining the rules was much quicker. First round we played Blue, and pretty much obliterated 3A on everything, and between moving and getting the special Enterprise attack we ended up on like +4 and aced everything.

We then moved onto Captain difficulty. While the game was more challenging we ended up hurting ourselves. Our Ship got down to its 10th click, but that was because for like the first 4 battles we rolled 7s while also getting hit, so we kept taking 2 clicks of damage. And if that wasn't enough, we'd often roll 7s on healing and sometimes 2 on challenges. There was an insane amount of 7s rolled it couldn't help but be funny. We dedicated about 3 or 4 turns trying to draw Repair cards (didn't realize you didn't reshuffle, but by the time we went through the deck we had already healed and didn't draw too much anyway), and got lucky when one of the supplemental missions was the one where you heal 2 clicks on your ship. Otherwise the game actually went pretty well for us, we only failed to get to the timed Energy mission, but because our ship was damaged right off the bat we didn't move up the orbital track so only got a 15 on the Rebels score. However we got 3 bonus points in both Politics and Energy to eek out a victory with 3 days left.

Also something else that was humorous was that Bones was the only one to draw the No Beaming this turn cards, felt apropos.

While I love Bones, aside from that first Rebels mission he really doesn't do much. I think Scotty if he has a Repair the enterprise power will be golden (And I imagine Transportation and Engineering Skills), I'm already eagerly anticipating the expansion. I know they'll have more supplemental cards, but I wonder if they'll add more main mission cards.

I'm still surprised you haven't figured out Spock yet. He's probably the most strategic piece (Uhura being the most useful) especially early on when he can uncover 2 or 3 places between looking and landing, he can avoid those trap cards, and find the next location card rather easily. Plus he does like a Third of the missions on his own, I think 2/3rds of 3As.


What are your guesses the new characters in the expansion will have?

I already guessed that Scotty would have Engineering and Transportation skills, with the Repair the ship special ability.

Figure Sulu will have Combat but I don't know what else with the available skills, and perhaps a special action that will allow you to move the ship once without initiating a combat. (probably too powerful)

Chekov is a tough one; maybe Analytics (for his affinity with Math). I have no clue what his special would be, maybe lower the required roll a specific mission.