Star Trek: Ascendancy

Picked this game up on first play, loved it immediately. Feels almost like sins of a solar empire as a board game (one of my all time favorites). I believe my rating will increase as more factions are released.

To boldly go where no one has gone before ... fight for Ascendancy in the galaxy.

Fine game that grinds a bit in play speed and interaction early on. It does ramp up later, however, and this makes for some exciting large strokes of strategy and conflict. The galaxy building is brilliant and evokes the feeling of exploration. The warp concept is also really great - allowing you to move quickly across space. In general, it has a throwback feel to the Game Master series from the 80's. On the negative side, the random tiles and encounter flips (albeit really evocative) are uneven at best and this can make for some frustrating moments - especially early on when trying desperately to gain production - the most essential resource. Still, for a light wargame that uses the Star Trek theme very well (the races are well done), this is good fun if you have the time to play it out.

The most interesting part of the game is how the map is built up during the. You start with your homeworlds approx. 50cm apart from each other and start exploring from there. As long as the link to a world has been discovered from only one other world, the exact location of that world is uncertain. Once you create your first triangle or a loop of worlds, the positions become fixed.

When it comes to exploring, it is also totally random, and you cannot tell whether you’ll be finding barren or rich worlds or having random encounters with hostiles. This is also where I got totally myself screwed in the one game I have played. In a matter of a few turns only I found myself in a situation where all my choices became obvious or should I say irrelevant but I still had to endure the game for 2-3 more hours. With no real catch-up mechanisms the luck of draw proved to be decisive here, which I do not fancy too much for a game this long. It would not matter if the random elements influence the outcome of the game in an epic final battle or if the game lasted for 30-60mins only, but here we have a relatively long game that can be decided by random events really early. I know that it is somewhat unfair to judge Star Trek Ascendancy on the basis of one unlucky game only. However, I there are further problems in the game:

1. Researching proved to be a rather disappointing as well, since you have no real techtree. Instead you can research random techs that may or may not be of help to your cause. Thus I felt a relatively severe lack of control when trying to fight my way back to the game after unlucky exploring.

2. The goal of the game is to generate culture points which you can trade for ascendancy tokens. This mechanic felt a little bit detached from the rest of the game. I totally understand it, but it would have been nice to see some variance in the victory conditions, especially considering the fact that the three factions (Federation, Klingons, Romulans) all play differently.

3. Although having watched a fair share of Star Trek myself I am not clearly a buff enough to get all the references to the ST universe. I am sure that if you are well familiar with all the series and movies you will get much more out of this and you will not mind the shortcomings of Start Trek Ascendancy as a game. To me the game appeared as series of mostly unrelated random events which was not enough to keep me entertained after falling behind in the race for victory.

Fantastic 4x strategy game on a tabletop - every game is different making every game unique and interesting! Would highly recommend to any Star Trek fan!

I've only played a couple times, but I love it thus far. There's a few nuances to the rules, but pretty straight forward for the most part.

The map/exploration system makes the gameplay very interesting.