Star Realms is a very solid card game that has been going strong for ten years now. Designed by Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour Champions and Hall of Famers Darwin Kastle and Rob Dougherty, the game aims to combine the easy-to-learn structure of a deck-building game with the head-to-head action of a traditional trading card game, and by and large it succeeds. With its thematic focus on starships and space stations, it seems like a natural for a Star Trek reskin. Or does it?
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
The game works like most other deck-building games. Each player starts with a basic deck consisting of eight Scout Ships and two Raiders. Cards provide one or more of three different currencies: Trade, Combat, or Authority. Trade is what allows you to buy better cards for your deck from a common row in the center of the table. Combat is used to attack your opponent’s Authority total, unless they have an Outpost card in play, in which case you have to destroy that first. Each player starts with 50 Authority, and the first player to drop to zero loses the game.
The Star Trek version reskins the original game’s four factions with the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and the Dominion, and the cards for each are surprisingly on-theme given that this is a straight reskin without any redesign. Federation cards tend to be defensive, with most of them giving you Trade to buy more ships, and additional Authority to keep your score from falling too low. The Klingons are all about Combat, with a lot of cards that allow you to eliminate cards from your deck, keeping it lean and mean. The Romulan cards favor Combat over Trade, but have a fair amount of each, and focus primarily on allowing you to draw more cards on your turn, perhaps reflecting their sneaky nature. The Dominion cards are heavily weighted in favor of drawing cards for yourself and forcing your opponents to discard, increasing your options while reducing theirs.
Cards come in only two types, which keeps the game simple and moving along at a quick pace. Ships do their thing and then leave play at the end of the turn, while Locations remain from turn to turn, providing resources and game effects until your opponent spends Combat to take them out. Some Locations are further designated as Outposts, which offer extra protection in that they must be destroyed before your opponent can attack your Authority directly.
By Any Other Name
The different factions form a great shorthand for spotting the cards you need for your deck. Short on combat? Look for the red-bordered Klingon cards. Need to heal your Authority? Blue-bordered Federation cards are what you want. The game offers an incentive to focus on one or two of the factions – many cards have secondary game text that only goes into effect if you’ve played another card of the same faction. However, you can’t really choose to only buy cards from one faction, or even two, as each faction’s cards tend to focus on one or two game elements to the exclusion of others, and more importantly, there might not always be cards from the faction you want in the trade row.
In the original Star Realms, where the different factions don’t have any backstory, mixing and matching isn’t a problem thematically. The factions are really just colored borders indicating particular groups of strategies those cards will support. But a seemingly random mixed fleet of Klingon, Romulan and Dominion ships may prove to be a little jarring for the invested Star Trek fan, or at least more difficult to make sense of.
The Menagerie
Card titles and images are drawn from the length and breadth of the Star Trek universe, from the original series to at least the early seasons of Discovery and Picard. It’s a particularly nice touch that, where there are multiple copies of the same card, they may have the same title and game text but the ship name and image are different (this is especially fun with the images on the three Romulan Neutral Zone cards – one from the original series, one from Next Generation, and one from Star Trek: Nemesis).
The card borders and iconography are nicely designed. The illustrations appear to be frame captures from the various series and films, which unfortunately makes for some inconsistent image quality – frames from the films and later TV shows are nice and sharp, but images from the earlier shows are often blurry and indistinct, owing to the relatively low quality of the source material.
It’s a pity that the spaceship-focused nature of the game means that none of the actual characters or stories from Star Trek are represented in the game. The original Star Realms later added Hero and Event card types, so maybe there’s hope if the Star Trek version does well.
The Alternative Factor
If you already play Star Realms, there isn’t going to be anything new here for you, unless you really think the game would be improved by switching to Star Trek branding. The Star Trek: Star Realms set is a card-for-card reskin of the original Star Realms two-player game, with the only difference being that they’ve included enough starter cards for four players, and there are counters instead of cards to keep track of each player’s authority score.
If you’re looking for a game that provides a heavily Star Trek-themed experience, you may want to look elsewhere. While the cards for the four factions are surprisingly thematic in terms of their gameplay effects, the mix-and-match nature of the game, and it’s focus entirely on head-to-head combat, means that once you get past the card names and images there isn’t much here that reflects the exploration and problem-solving that are the essential elements of Star Trek.
If you’re a Star Trek fan in search of a simple, light card game, then Star Trek: Star Realms might be for you. As long as you’re okay with the somewhat non-Star Trek focus on ship combat (and nothing else), and aren’t bothered by the game’s somewhat nonsensical mixing of factions. Perhaps you can create a story to make sense of why the U.S.S. Enterprise and a Romulan scout ship would be attacking a Federation space station. It is an infinite universe, after all…
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