The Delta Quadrant

With the Star Trek CCG Nationals in two days’ time, I’ve been reading the Decipher website a lot.

One of the new announcements that they’ve made concerns the upcoming expansion that will feature the debut of the Voyager crew to the game.

Voyager presents a difficulty to the Star Trek CCG basic game, in that the series worked completely differently to other Star Trek shows.

Previous shows all featured the adventures of Starships (and a space station) that were always in or near Federation (or United Earth) space… there was always a Starbase or friendly planet nearby. Which means that the game could employ Space Stations and Homeworlds as bases of operation, from which characters and Starships could be sent on their way.

The Voyager series was quite different, in that the ship was stranded on the other side of the galaxy, far from any friendly facilities.

Decipher has announced how this will be incorporated into the game.

Playing with the Voyager sub-affiliation will allow players to operate without any Headquarters Missions. There will be one Mission that will be mandatory: The Caretaker’s Array… a completable space Mission to which the USS Voyager can report.

Voyager-icon personnel and shuttles will be able to report directly to the USS Voyager, thus mitigating the ship-stranding strategy used in some Dilemma piles.

Another exciting development is the advent of this card:

This is the second card to introduce a new winning mechanism (the first was Up the ante). You need four Space Missions (one of which would be the super-easy Caretaker’s Array) and you win! Yay!

The only major danger I can see is when facing the ship-destroyer strategy. If you have a Finding our way handy, you can bring in a new ship, or else evacuate to shuttles… so this too has been mitigated to a certain extent.

The Voyager deck will make some major changes to how the game works. It sucks a little though that USS Voyager can apparently only report to the Caretaker’s Array. I’d love to use it in my Fed deck… I wonder if we’ll see an Earth-icon version of USS Voyager, or perhaps an alternate Voyager-icon Earth or Mouth of the Wormhole. (Why Mouth of the Wormhole you ask? Shame on you… if you paid attention in the Voyager pilot episode, you would have noticed that the last place Voyager docked before being whisked away to the Delta Quadrant was our old favourite station: Deep Space Nine.)