Star Trek & Gaming : A retrospective.

As with the Babylon 5 Universe, much interest surrounded the Star Trek franchise with regards to gaming. The TV series alone features large set piece battles in deep space between Federation ships and alien vessels, so it comes as no surprise that fans would eventually want to recreate these battles in game form.

For this look at gaming in the Star Trek universe, I will not be looking at video game adaptations, as there have been a lot made over the years and warrant a piece of their own, instead, I am going to have a look at some of the more notable entries in the tabletop gaming and CCG aspect.

Star Fleet Battles - 1979

First produced by Task Force games in the U.S.A, Star Fleet Battles is a follow on work to the unlicensed 1972 "Star Trek Battle Manual".
Using miniatures or counters, this was the first real attempt to produce a space combat game set in the Star Trek universe as it was prior to the release of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in 1979 (essentially including everything featured in the Original series, plus the animated series)
The game follows the usual premise of having the players make a fleet for whichever race they choose (the game also contains rules for creating your own unique race and designing their spacecraft) , designing a scenario, and then fighting it out to see who is best.
The rules themselves are quite complex, leaning more towards fleet level actions and stressing the importance of looking after ships and using equipment and tactics as opposed to just charging in guns blazing, but game play can sometimes get bogged down with the more RPG aspects, requiring dice rolling to see which sub systems on ships are affected and applying modifiers to dice rolls etc.

Nonetheless, Star Fleet Battles continues to be one of the most, if not THE most popular Star Trek based tabletop miniatures game on the market, with various source books, rules updates and rejigged editions of the core rule book being released at semi regular intervals.
Although numerous "official" SFB miniatures have been released over the years, numerous miniatures companies make ships which are compatible with the system, and, with the advent of generally available 3d printers and 3d computer design, just about any ship can be made available for your fleet, all you need is some minis, a few hex bases, and you're off!.

Star Trek: The Customizable Card Game - 1994

Published by Decipher inc, this CCG is unusual as it is one of the few licenced Star Trek products to use imagery and plot lines from the TNG and movie era.
Using a play system which would later be adapted for their "Star Wars" card game, like all CCGs it requires players to purchase packs of cards to build gaming decks with.
In terms of actual game play, players would begin by placing cards from their "seed deck" which would take the form of locations and/or objectives to form a "spaceline", which they would then use cards from their "main deck" to travel along to complete missions, partake in ship and land battles or to fulfill some objective to secure victory points in order to become the winner.
Although the game enjoyed considerable popularity, with over 15 complete booster sets being released, as well as several different editions of the game and numerous variant methods of play being officially sanctioned, many players criticised the game play, citing that it was excessively complicated, especially so when a mechanic was introduced that meant that players would find themselves needing to construct additional side decks to accommodate "Q continuum" or "tribble" cards.
In many respects, ST:ccg played like a hybrid of a CCG and an RPG, many players found this a refreshing change, however those who were used to games such as Magic: The Gathering disliked the games various RPG like mechanics, which tended to make games somewhat long to play, especially in multiplayer games. That said, at its peak, ST:ccg was the third most popular ccg on the market, behind M:TG and Pokemon tcg.
The end came somewhat unexpectedly in 2007, when Decipher inc announced that they were discontinuing their ccg systems to concentrate more on their RPG and board game products, within a year they had disposed of their entire range of ccg products and had removed any mentions of "Star Trek" from their website.
The game still enjoys a cult following to this day though, with numerous "virtual" sets and rule updates being created by fans.

Federation Commander - 2005

Produced by the Amarillo Design Bureau, Federation Commander is essentially a simplified version of Star Fleet Battles, intended to make games quicker and simpler for those who do not have the time or patience to get to grips with SFBs somewhat complex rules and play style.
Using many of the same rules as SFB, FC is again set in the Star Trek universe as it was before 1979 and refers to itself as taking place during the non-canon "General War" period, thus providing a handy-dandy "get out" clause as to why everyone wants to kill each other.
FC uses the same miniatures and set up as SFB, and enjoys some popularity, with regular expansion books, boxed games, scenario packs and a thriving fan based home brew community providing feedback to the developers. The game is also somewhat unique in that it releases "booster packs" of cards containing ship tracking cards and equipment add ons, at the time of writing, there have been about 30 different booster sets for players to add variation to their fleets with.

Star Trek: A Call To Arms - 2011

Coming out at roughly the same time as their "Babylon 5: A Call To Arms" gaming system, and riding the wave of interest following the release of the "reimagined" 2009 Star Trek movie, Mongoose publishing had a stab at using their established "ActA" system with Star Trek.
Almost identical in gameplay to the B5 game, again players would build a fleet and using measuring tapes, dice and miniatures, fight a battle in the Star Trek universe.
Like its B5 counterpart though, Star Trek: ActA vapourised when Mongoose decided to cease production of miniatures wargames in order to concentrate on their much more successful (and cheaper to produce) paper and pencil RPG systems.
That said, ST:ActA was never as popular as B5:ActA, but still enjoys a lot of online fan interest, with "official" minitures changing hands on ebay for good prices now that they have been long discontinued.

Star Trek: Tactics - 2012

The Star Trek licence was next picked up by miniatures game manufacturers Wizkids.
Star Trek: Tactics was essentially a version of their highly successful "Heroclix" game, using ships from the Star Trek universe coupled with their "clixbase" game mechanic to produce a quick to play starship combat game.
Over the course of its run, Tactics had three distinct versions, numbered one to three (Tactics I, Tactics II and Tactics III) all of which added additional rules, races and ships. As standard, the game was available in "boxed" format, containing all the game play essentials, with additional ships being purchased in "blind bag" format, in the same way as Heroclix is sold.
Although the game enjoyed a small level of popularity, it never really took off, as most players saw the game system as being too simple and too similar to Heroclix to accurately represent a space combat game.
Officially, ST:Tactics has not been discontinued, however no new releases for it have been made since 2013.

Star Trek: Attack Wing - 2013

Wizkids were not done withe the Star Trek licence just yet, and, following on from their successful "Star Wars: X-wing" game, they adapted the rule set to produce this game.
ST:AW allows players to use a points system to build fleets and give the individual ships crews and equipment. Generally a fleet will consist of about 3 or 4 ships, and uses Wizkids' proprietary "FlightPath" manoeuvre system (a series of bespoke movement templates to represent sharp turns, shallow turns and straight manoeuvres, used in conjunction with "manoeuver dials" to plot ship courses for the turn) as well as red and green D8s to represent ships firepower and defensive abilities.
Numerous cardboard tokens are included with the games starter sets and expansion packs which are used in game to represent shields, targeting markers, sensor pings and alert conditions, all of which are used in relation to actions performed by ships.
What makes this game unique is the use of semi-collectable playing cards containing ship, crew and equipment data. Each card is allocated a faction and a point value, which players must choose when building their fleets, in this sense, it eliminates the need for record sheets etc as used by other similar space combat games. Many cards used in this war will have different versions, either using different artwork, or representing different versions of the same characters/ships from different points in the universe history.
The game comes as a "Boxed" starter kit, and players can purchase "Expansion" packs containing a single ship, plus cards, tokens and scenarios for use with that ship. Wizkids have also made special "Prize" ships and items available through Organized play events, which are usually based on episodes or storylines from the various TV series.
This game still enjoys some popularity, with new ships being released on a rough 3-monthly basis, however some players (myself included) have criticised the games system for not following the "feel" of the Star Trek universe. Many of the problems with the game system include numerous "grey areas" created by new items and characters being released which cause problems or conflicts with existing basic game play mechanics, leading to unbalanced game play and unbeatable combinations of ships and equipment. most notable in the games failures is the fact that the rules, although perfectly ok for X-wing type "dogfights", do not lend themselves terribly well to being a fleet/squadron level capital ship combat simulation. For example, there is little to nothing by way of combined actions or fleet bonuses, aside from the aforementioned "unbeatable card combos" that crop up and spoil it for everyone.

Nevertheless, when played "as intended" ST:AW can be an enjoyable game, albeit one in desperate need of an overhauled "2nd edition" rule set.

Babylon 5 & Gaming: a retrospective.

I'm on a bit of a B5 kick at the moment, and this, in conjunction with my renewed interest in wargaming in general got me thinking about the various attempts to bring the B5 universe to the tabletop.

The universe of Babylon 5 is, like Star Wars and Star Trek, a vast and quite detailed one, with various races all sending ships of various sizes and types zooming around the big black until invariably at some point they will meet up and start shooting at each other for some reason. Hell, the TV show did this a lot, so therefore it should have been a fairly simple task to transfer the on screen action to the tabletop with a minimum of fuss and make it enjoyable enough and popular enough for it to be a decent seller.
Unfortunately though this didn't seem to happen, for many and various reasons...

...and so it begins....

Babylon 5 Wars

The first "official" stab at making a playable B5 miniatures game came courtesy of Agents of Gaming (AoG). Launched in 1997, B5 Wars (as it became known) is considered to be part of B5s official "canon", being as much of its development was overseen by J. Michael Straczynski himself, who took a fair bit of interest in it.
The game itself follows the usual wargaming formula of players building fleets to a set number of points (usually making a fleet of between 3 and 15 ships, depending on size, point cost and/or scenario requirements if being used), and then having a space battle using the games somewhat complex rules.

This was one of the things that proved to be the games undoing, as its first edition was deemed by the gaming public at large to be much to difficult to be able to play with any level of enjoyment, instead of epic battles in the B5 universe, play ended up being a series of book keeping tasks, tedious dice rolling activities and arguments over vagaries within the games core rule set and expansions.
Within a year of the games debut, a "Second edition" was released, which dispensed with some of the more tedious rules and streamlined or clarified the remainder, however, even with these changes, game play was still difficult and somewhat unrewarding.
Another problem with the game was availability of miniatures. While the game recommended that for the "best" experience you should be playing with official AoG miniatures, AoG were happy for players to use tokens in lieu of actual models, which for some ships and/or factions within the games source books was the only way to play them as miniatures were either not available for quite some time, or were never released, leading to much frustration amongst fans of the game.
On the subject of miniatures, B5 wars miniatures that had been released were somewhat difficult to obtain, this, added to AoGs problems in finding miniatures sculptors, as well as a somewhat disorganised release schedule, meant that even though the game was nominated for an Origins award in 1999 (It lost to Diskwars, another game which has since faded into relative obscurity) , it still wasn't a big hit, and production of miniatures and source books was discontinued in 2001.

I personally owned a couple of B5 Wars miniatures, although I didn't pick these up until the early 2000s, at what I can only describe as a significant markdown from their original asking price, and they were still sealed in their boxes, never opened or assembled.
Although the pictures on the boxes made the promise that the miniatures contained within would look awesome once assembled and painted, the reality couldn't have been further from the truth.
Made from some kind of white metal, the miniatures themselves were covered in so much flashing that it was in some cases, difficult to tell what was and wasn't supposed to be there, added to this problem was that for some unknown reason, I could not get the parts to stick together properly, regardless of what glue I used, and I tried a hell of a lot of different ways to get them to stick together, up to and including using solder and a blowtorch, which did nothing but melt the miniature and render it completely unusable, but by then I didn't care about it anymore, and the whole lot went in the bin.
As for the games rules, I laid hands on a copy of the 2nd edition rulebook at one point and tried to read through it and understand the game, but it was a rather boring and tedious process, and I just gave up on it.





Babylon 5: Fleet Action!



AoGs next stab at a B5 Miniatures game came towards the end of B5 Wars' life in the form of B5:Fleet action!.
Appearing in mid 2000, B5:FA was intended to compliment B5W insofar as it allowed for larger fleets to be used for battles than B5Ws "small skirmish" type action.
The miniatures for B5:FA were much smaller scale and more often than not single piece miniatures that used "standard" (ie, Battletech sized) hex bases.
The rules for B5:FA were fairly different to B5W, emphasising fleet level tactics over individual ship tactics, however again AoG fumbled the ball, as on paper the FA rules were simpler, in practice, especially so after source books started coming out, they became rather difficult to understand and once again, required a lot of tedious book keeping exercises, head scratching over rules problems and lots and lots of tedious and, more often than not, unnecessary dice rolling. The problem of rules vagaries became more prominent once the source book containing the Shadow fleet came out, who, due to the way their rules worked, made it difficult, if not impossible for them to be defeated.

Again, like B5W, miniatures for this game were difficult to come by, with many promised miniatures never appearing, although unlike B5W miniatures, FA miniatures seemed to have better quality control and the few that did require assembly glued together quite well with just normal super glue.

Unfortunately, before B5:FA could have the creases in its game play ironed out, the Babylon 5 TV series was cancelled and AoG lost its rights to produce B5 material, and it ceased production in 2002, with AoG declaring bankrupt soon after.

I had a small Earthforce fleet for B5:FA however i found it difficult to actually play any games due to the limited availability of miniatures, and the limited number of players here in the UK. The game wasn't bad per se, but it wasn't terribly user friendly either.

Both the AoG B5 miniatures games still enjoy a cult following online, with many home brew source texts and rules addendum's being published by fans.

Babylon 5 Collectable Card Game

Although not a miniatures wargame, the B5 CCG was probably the most successful B5 Game to be released.
Like other CCGs before and since, the B5 CCG required players to purchase packs of cards to build gaming decks with, and offered a variety of strategies by which to win. One noteworthy thing about this game was that it actively encouraged games to be multiplayer matches, that is, more than the "standard" CCG trope of being just 2 players, it also encouraged players to work together in some fashion in order to win.
The game itself turned up in 1997, and over the course of its life had 8 full sets released at retail, with various promo cards being released as tournament prizes for organised play.
It was also noteworthy for incorperating elements of RPG type play into its mechanic, as well as for quite closely following the storyline of the TV series.
Quite rightly, the B5 CCG is regarded as being one of the best CCGs ever released, as its fairly simple rules coupled with complex strategies make it an interesting game to play, even for the casual gamer.
However, the CCGs fate was sealed in 2001 when Warner Brothers, the owners of the B5 franchise, pulled the rights for Precedence Entertainment, the games publisher, to produce any further B5 related materials, and also ordered them to destroy any remaining stock they had.

I started playing the B5 CCG in about 2001, it wasn't a bad game but it did take some getting used to, especially if you were used to playing games such as Magic: The Gathering and/or Pokemon TCG. At one point following the games discontinuation you could buy whole boxes of starter decks for as little as £2, with booster boxes going for as little as £5 as games retailers sold off their remaining B5 CCG stocks cheap in order to offload stocks of a game that had been abandoned.

Oddly enough though, Precedence Entertainment closed it doors at roughly the same time as AoG did after losing their B5 licence, as none of their other products enjoyed the popularity as the B5 CCG.

Babylon 5: A Call To Arms

ACtA, as it came to be called, turned up in 2004 as a "compliment" to Mongoose Publishing's Babylon 5 RPG.
Fan reaction to the game overwhelmed Mongoose somewhat and they were very surprised at how quickly the games popularity soared, to the point at which the game won the 2004 Gamers Choice award at Origins.
This was because, unlike B5W and B5:FA, ACtA was actually a good, user friendly game, with a fairly reliable miniatures supply containing miniatures that were of good quality and were easily obtainable via games shops or purchased from Mongoose directly.
A "second edition" version of the game was published in 2007, representing updates in game rules and actually incorporating feedback from players (!!!) , as well as expanding available source materials.
However, the good times were not to be long term, as in early 2008 Mongoose announced that they were no longer going to produce miniatures or rules updates for the game, citing that the cost of miniatures production coupled with the amount of stuff needing to be produced was no longer cost effective for them, and, as such, they were disposing of their entire stock of ACtA miniatures at a discount via their website.
This decision affected all of Mongooses miniatures games at that point, so as well as the ACtA miniatures ceasing production, miniatures for other lines such as their Starship Troopers game were also sold off and abandoned, with Mongoose deciding to concentrate on their pencil & paper RPG systems instead.

I never played or physically held an ACtA miniature or book, as it was released and vanished during the time when I wasn't interested much in wargaming, but from what I understand the game was much better than the previous efforts and still enjoys something of a cult following to this day.



Its a shame really that despite the rich history contained within the B5 universe and so much enthusiasm for it amongst fans that it has been difficult to produce and sustain a B5 wargame of any description, but I can understand why larger games companies are hesitant to take the task on as B5 hasnt enjoyed the mass popularity that similar things such as Star Wars and Star Trek have, plus with no plans to relaunch the series, and the lackluster reception of spin off series' it seems that gaming in the B5 universe will be limited to dusty old legacy games, RPG books and home brew rules for quite some time to come.