Star Trek: Discovery - Black Alert board game first impressions

Back in late September, WizKids shipped their Disco themed board game based on the four mirror universe episodes of season one, striking while the iron is room temperature. I, of course, purchased this game as soon as it was available to me, and yesterday evening I got the opportunity to play it for the first time when I brought it along to family game night, much to the scepticism and jeers of my sisters.

So, let’s talk about it!

(Probably worth noting that we did play it after two games of Wingspan, and it would be difficult for most board games to compare to that)

Concept:

As mentioned, the game largely inspired by the episodes, “Despite Yourself”, “The Wolf Inside”, “Vaulting Ambition”, and “What’s Past is Prologue”, from season one of Disco. Players take on the role of either the characters of the Discovery, or their mirror universe counterparts aboard the Charon. It’s an asymmetric game where each side has different abilities, limitations and goals. The Starfleet characters need to zip around the board to complete three missions, while the Terran Empire wants to successfully infiltrate the Discovery three times.

It plays two to four players in teams of up to two. For this game, I played as the Starfleet side, with my opponents being paired together as team Terran Empire.

Components

• Everything here seems decent enough. There were no obvious production flaws in the copy of the game that I own.

• The standees for the various ships you move around the board, specifically for the Discovery and the Charon are both dark images on a dark background, so you kinda lose the image of the ship, and instead just have an oddly shaped red or blue bit of cardboard.

• Maybe I’m getting old, but the text on a lot of the components seems a little small.

• Personally I’m not a huge fan when licensed games just use stills from the show/movie/comic/whatever as game art, but I get why they do it. It’s cheaper, and has immediate familiarity with fans of the thing, who is likely whom you’re trying to sell the game to. Still, it seems lazy.

• This is a hugely nit-picky of me, but players can collect resources which can be spent to enhance actions or complete missions for the Starfleet side. Those resources are dilithium, intel, and tritanium. If you’re going to have a “Star Trek: Discovery” themed game, why not go all in and have one of the resources be fungal spores? Cowardly. Anyways, the little bits of plastic you collect to represent those resources are fine.

Rules

• This is where my biggest issue with the game is. Some of the rules are not particularly clear, and some are outright missing. Basically things would come up, and I would have to patch in a rule based on what I felt made the most sense in the moment.

• The the most egregious issue is the Threat cards. These come up for both players, and there is a section in the rule book on them, but it’s too vague. The cards are divided into three sections, though one of those is only a small circle in the upper right corner. The rules are more clear on how the Starfleet players interact with the cards, but what specifically the Terran players are supposed to do is basically guess work. Even the initial brief description of the Threat cards only mentions the Discovery. What’s needed here is a diagram in the rules with a specific breakdown of each section of the card and what circumstances they’re supposed to be used in.

• Similarly, a better designed rules document would have breakdowns of the other cards. Most of them seemed fairly straight forward, but I could see where someone could struggle. For example, the Command cards have a circle in the upper left corner with a number in them that is their “Resolve” value, which is used when bidding on Challenges. While it’s called out in the rules that’s what the number is, I think it would be easy to overlook for someone learning the game, if for no other reason than that there are a lot of different mechanics here that make up the whole.

Gameplay

• So, I think there’s a lot of neat mechanics here, which is why I was interested in this game beyond just the Trek aspect.

• Players control characters from the show. Starfleet has: Saru, Burnham, Stamets, Detmer, and Tilly. The Empire has: Georgiou, Lorca, Killy, Landry, and Stamets. Each character has a unique ability which can only be used once per game. Some of the abilities feel fairly powerful, but I’m not sure how well balanced they are. Each player chooses a single character, or in a three player game, the side with only one chooses two, and has to play two hands. I do think the game could be more interesting and a better representation of the show if all characters were in play.

• The board is made up of a number of hexagons tiles which are placed semi randomly and can be moved or rotated by certain effects available to the characters. Each side of each hexagon connects it to other points in paths that make up the mycelial network that the Discovery is able to travel along. These paths can be looping around or lead to dead ends. And the Discovery players are able to rotate any of the tiles on their turn. By contrast, the Charon and the other two Terran Empire ships controlled by the Mirror Universe player move from one hexagon to the next in a pretty straight forward fashion. My only quibble here is that the Discovery usually isn’t able to move very far because it needs to stop at Nodes along the network, and that means that they’re mostly limited to moving one tile at a time.

• The board has two sections representing the interior of each ship divided into five different locations, and what I really like here is that characters can jump from one ship to the other provided both are on the same tile, and mess with them by stealing resources or doing damage. You can also capture the opposing characters and briefly confine them to your bridge/agony booth.

• A stumbling block for me was the action economy, which can make turns feel pretty ineffectual. During a turn you draw cards up to your hand of three, move your character from one place on the ship to another if you choose, perform the action associated with that ship space, and then clean-up which only applies if a specific type of card is used during the turn. Things that qualifies as actions include rotating a network tile, or collecting resources, or moving one of your support ships for the Terran player. You can play cards in your hand as a free action, but you don’t always have cards that are going to be applicable, and then they feel like a dead hand, waiting for the opportunity where they’re useful to come up. Frequently I would take my turn and afterwards be like, “I guess that’s all I can do.” On the plus side, turns do seem to be pretty quick because of it, but it would be nice if say, moving the ship counted as a free action.

Conclusion

I asked one of my sisters for her impressions while writing this, and her reply was, “I don’t think the rules are super clear. I’d play it again now that we understand what you’re supposed to do, and I think it’s a pretty neat concept despite all the Treksplaining, but it was definitely frustrating trying to figure it out.”

I think there’s a decent game here, and that it replicates the scenario we see in the show very well, but with the rules document not covering some pretty essential bits of information, there’s no way I could recommend it to anyone. Especially not someone who is maybe a huge fan of “Discovery” but a casual board game player. I’ll almost certainly play it again, but it’s not about to become a staple of my weekly friend group board game night, or the occasional family board games nights.

Components: 9/10
Rules: 2/10
Gameplay: 7/10
Overall: 6/10