Star Trek: Five Year Mission [Board Game]

It has been a very long time since I've written a blog post. I've said before, there will be far less of them than there were before. I wish I could return to the old three updates a week, but I can't. There will still be big reviews, just not as many. There will also be little chance of me reviewing individual episodes of TV shows (which makes me sad).

Crew members 4 - 7 for both TOS and TNG.

All of that being said, today I'm going to write up a rather short and sweet review for a new board game.

Star Trek: Five Year Mission.
I would have pluralized that. You can play as either the crew of the NCC-1701 or the NCC-1701-D. That's more than one mission.

4 out of 5 stars

I enjoyed the game quite a bit. My play group went through several plays of the game at the lowest level. We lost all of those. At the end we kicked it up a notch to Lt. and finally won one.

The game is harder than we thought it would be.

The game is rather simple.
Each player takes a member of the crew of the Enterprise, either TOS or TNG (or mix em, why not?). Each player then takes 5 dice (2 red, 2 blue, 1 yellow). Missions are dealt from their respective decks; blue, yellow, and red alert decks. Some missions are critical (Prime Directives), some are timed, some trigger more missions. You win when you have points equal to your chosen difficulty rank (10+), so long as you have not failed 5 alerts. On each players turn they refill their dice and roll them. Dice are assigned to alerts by the rules that govern them. They are rather simple, and straight forward so I'm not going into them here.

Alerts in play, partially completed.
Photo from RPG.net.

The game is fast, rather difficult, and fun.

But there are a few small issues.   

#1. They needed to include more than 1 timer. While only 1 timed alert can be actively counting down at a time, if you complete it before the timer runs out you have to pause the game to wait on the timer so that you can immediately activate the next timed alert. It's a bit irritating. I need to find the timer length so I can just run a phone timer.

#2. Communications Failure. The alert that says you cannot communicate with other players; no speaking, no signals, nothing. It freakin' sucks. It is almost impossible to not communicate in some way. If the card had simply said 'no talking' it would have been fine. This as it stands is too damn irritating. You cannot even chide people for playing wrong. Bad card.

That's really my biggest problems with the game.

I enjoy it, but it has a few minor errors. House rule past those and it will certainly be better.