Before I get into the meat of this first post in over a month, let me give you a brief look into my life lately.

The reason I have not been posting is threefold.

1)   Day Job: I’ve been working 6 days a week for three months now and it has taken a real toll on my energies when I arrive home. 5 days a week at 11 hours at the day job and then a half-day on Saturdays. This is good money-wide and while I am still a temp there things look good for transitioning to a regular full time position.

2)   Writing: Despite the enormous number of hours poured into the paying job, I have also been very productive on my non-paying writing job. The re-write of my SF adventure novel hit 70,000 words and I figure I have another 30 to 35 thousand to go.

3)   Kerbal Space Program: This I blame on my nephew, or is it nephew-in-law? Is there such a thing? Anyway  he mentioned this program in a facebook post, I downloaded the Demo and good god this is crack for science/engineering types. I used to play a lot of first person shooters on my Xbox 360. That was perfect. I could fire up the machine and play for just 15-30 minutes and get in several games. Kerbal? Hours sucked away designing spacecraft and then trying to figure out why they blow up.

So on to the mini-review.

Last year for Christmas my sweetie-wife got for me a game I had wanted, Star Trek The deck building game, The original Series. (The Next gen version actually came out first, but I have little interest in that one.)

This is a game that is aimed directly at fans of the first show. It is a deck building mechanic, lke the very popular Dominion which invented the format. Players start with their own deck of ten card, and everyone’s deck starts identical. Each turn players play cards, using those plays to buy new cards from a common pool, adding them to their deck. Since nearly all the cards in the pool are unique, the decks diverge quickly.

The goal is to build a deck that is good a resolving missions, and that is set matching mechanic. Mission have various conditions of Attack, Diplomacy, Speed, or other factors that a player must meet in order to resolve it. Once that is done the mission is added to their victory pile, and when a player has scored 300 points that player wind.

The Missions are all episodes, and for the fans the missions usually have a nice tie into the plot of the original without stomping on the core game mechanic. Such as the mission “Spock’s Brain” requires the player to discard the highest value character before starting play.

This has become on of the Sunday games that me and my sweetie-wife play as a two player game, and it work very well. It support up to four players (and no more), but with more players the game tends to go very slow. As each card is special, there is a lot of ‘pick up the card, read it, put back, repeat’ when people are buying cards.

That said it is a  fun game and one I very much enjoy playing.