Star Trek Panic Review

I fully expect a “Panic” spin-off of every board game franchise in existence by the year 2020, at the latest. Some will be good, and some, not so good. Star Trek Panic sadly doesn’t do a great job at translating the unique tension and challenges of an episode of the space exploration show into a board game, though it will provide the occasional moment of fun.

Star Trek Panic takes the core engine of Castle Panic, where a bag of tokens keeps throwing baddies at you that creep closer and closer each turn, injects a Star Trek theme, and makes one major mechanical change. You now have missions you’re going after, which require you to expend certain cards and spin the Enterprise about like a top to point it in the right direction in deep space. Unfortunately, the attempt to integrate these new bits feels more like a spoiler cobbled onto the back of the Enterprise than a professionally installed new warp drive.

The first aspect of the game that will raise eyebrows is the vague scale of the thing. I’m supposed to be James T. Kirk, piloting the starship Enterprise through the stars. Fair enough. But why are there five Romulan and Klingon cruisers surrounding me and my crew at any given time, all while we’re trying to detonate a device inside the Doomsday machine? It’s confused about its scale, since mission tokens may be many light-years away yet occupy the same spaces on the board as close-range ships you can hit with phasers.

Oh well. So the scale is abstract. I could live with that if the rest of the game were enough to make up for this anomaly. The trouble is the extra Star Trek chrome (apparently added by USAopoly) bogs the game engine down past its breaking point. Yes, Castle Panic was perhaps too simple: play a card, kill a monster, repeat until the castle falls down or you die of boredom. But it embraced its simplicity to the point where that became its strength, and it ended up filling the 45-minute family co-op slot nicely.

The Star Trek version falls off the other side of the trail by adding too many instances of useless chrome, special modifiers, special missions, special actions, and the like. Now if this were that much deeper of a game, great. But it’s not. It retains the dumbness of the original while losing the appeal of its simplicity and accessibility. On most turns, there isn’t much of a decision for you to make: there are one or two good options that make sense, and you do them. The game is more playing you than you are playing it, which is a serious error for a game this long.

In addition, the new victory conditions of having to fulfill a stack of mission cards before the game is over means it lasts well past its welcome. Some turns, you’ll just be playing firefighter, repairing damage and fending off the enemy without being able to contribute to the mission. These all-too-frequent moments of treading water make it seem as if the game is going nowhere, making it feel much longer than it should.

Alright, enough complaining. If you can look past these deep flaws, Star Trek Panic can have its moments. Sending a security team to fight off boarders while cleverly maneuvering the Enterprise to its starboard side to take out that Klingon that just uncloaked—awesome stuff. Exploiting a reserve of Dilithium you’ve just discovered to repair a flickering shield just before the Romulans fire on you—moments like these are pitch-perfect.

The components, while gimmicky and sometimes not always very functional, are a delight to behold on the table. Steering the Enterprise about, groaning while you slap another explosion token on your port engine: these things and more just feel and look perfect because of the attention to detail the publisher put into the various bits and bobs included in the game. The Star Trek look and feel has been translated to tabletop format with love.

If you’re looking for a family game that is a step up from Castle Panic and its brethren, and your family has a long attention span and lots of patience, Star Trek Panic may work nicely. Loving the Star Trek theme certainly goes a long way toward alleviating its problems, as I still found myself humming the show’s themes and muttering, “Full power to aft shields!” while wrestling with the game’s sometimes incoherent mechanisms. Star Trek Panic is not a great game, but it is a fun one, if you’re willing to overlook some of its flaws.