The Newest Star Trek Board Game Is... Star Trek Catan!?

It's definitely a big year to be both a Star Trek fan and a board game fan. There's the very well-received strategic miniatures game Star Trek: Fleet Captains, the cooperative Reiner Knizia board game Star Trek: Expeditions, an interesting take on deck-building with Star Trek [Deck Building Game]: The Next Generation, a HeroClix compatible theme called Star Trek - HeroClix: Tactics... and now, just announced, we have Star Trek Catan!

Click through the jump for a picture of the board and components, as well as some information about the gameplay.


I personally never think of The Settlers Of Catan as anything except the base game. It's so solid that I haven't even taken the dive into the huge world of Catan expansions (yet). And I've never even thought about ways to re-theme it. But this looks like it's a pretty seamless re-theme (except the roads look like a little bit of a stretch in the tiny image below). At a glance the gameplay appears unchanged, and that they just swapped the art and components, but upon further inspection there has been one small change to the base gameplay.

The one new element in Star Trek Catan compared to the Settlers version is a set of character cards, each featuring one of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Scott, Uhura, Chekov, Chapel, Rand or Sarek. Each character card has two special powers that the holder can use on his turn, such as a forced trade.

So is it just a grab for cash like the Monopoly re-themes, or something better than that? Does moving something into space make it better? Will this draw in new players? I guess we'll see.