Star Trek - Ascendancy

With a bit of grief from the other halves and Slyon leaving the country to avoid gaming and marital clashes, the collective assembled at Steedo's to play Snakes-eyes new and shiney Star Trek Asendency! We were playing with the Cardassian expansion for a 4 player game. 

We allocated the races randomly. I was the Federation, Snake-eyes the Romulans, Steedo the Klingons and DK the Cardassians. 

Snake-eyes had also invested in a rather nice official gaming mat. 

The game is a 4X game - Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. 

Intially turn order is randomly decided by cards - until contact is made them players can bid for first what position they want to play the round in. 

The turn is a build phase - ships, resource generators, pay for research, then a command phase were you can find systems, move ships and create fleets, try to take control of a system, initiate combat or invade systems. But with never enough resources or command points to do what you want.  

Some pictures of the game - top shows early game no first contacts made. Bottom left the Feds, Cardassians and Romulans have made contact and have exchanged trade agreements. Bottom left an explore card has caused the Klingons and Cardassians have had to exchange systems - which was of no benefit to DK.  

The exploring stage did leave DK and I frustrated as he was finding anomalies (worth points to the Feds), when he wanted to find planets to invade (worth points to the Cardassians) - these little tweaks to each race was where the game tried to inject a Star Trek theme (the Romulans had to research and the Klingons had to fight with no retreat or surrender). 

The game plodded along quite nicely - with no one appearing to be getting ahead. Steedo was amassing Klingon fleets, so not one made contact with him, where as DK and I had to make contact to  gain a trade agreement to earn production points to build ships!

Then DK pulled an explore card which made him swap a system with Steedo - this an Steedo and Snake-eyes quietly collecting Asendency tokens (5 needed for a win - checking for a win is done at the end of the round, so more than one faction can "win" in the same turn, but then it goes to number of systems controlled).  This change really mixed things up leaving me as the Federation having to play against type and attack the Romulans and Cardassians in an attempt to win by controlling two other home systems. 

The initial plan went pretty well - taking Romulus and holding off the counter attack (and effectively putting Snake-eyes out of the running). The second part was successful as Cardassia Prime was taken, but the lack of command cards prevented the vital reinforcements being moved to stop DK (very much in character) take it back (by levelling the place to the ground and destroying all the resources!) - a move which ended my chances of victory, but served it up nicely to Steedo .... 

Bloody Klingons!

Overall a good game - shared some similarities with Twilight Imperium (but lighter and a bit quicker). I think we would play it quicker next time (Snake-eyes has now bought the Ferengi expansion). Plenty of replayability with this as the explore part of the game is random (perhaps too random for some DK) and the game basics are the same for all factions, with some changes to made each more Star Trek. 

I would like to play it again, but I think next time no one will be left by themselves to quietly collect points so that their win can't be stopped.  

Morts