Star Trek Away Missions - the Q Campaign

This game looks like it will have a little more going on in terms of Q interfering with the game. Each player gets 3 tokens representing Q-liens, Q’s clockwork soldiers who will activate like characters during the game, moving, making attacks, and blocking spaces to make movement around the board a little more tricky. As an added incentive to make use of our Q-liens, each time one of them deals damage to a character (they can’t attack each other), that Q-lien’s player gains 5 bonus points. In addition, we’ve got a different set of Immortal Q cards that will be randomly drawn at the start of each round. The Q miniature will be placed on the board, with the cards having various effects depending on where Q is positioned and who is in his line of sight.

For this game I’ll be using the Romulans led by Sela vs my opponent’s Klingons under the leadership of Gowron. The game allows for very minor swap-outs of characters, but we’re just using each team right out of the box. The card decks that each player uses can be customized as well, with each set providing a stack of extra cards, but again we’re using the suggested starting cards since we haven’t really played the game enough to know what cards will be better to use.

For our first round we draw Hide & Q, which gives characters in Q’s line of sight an extra die for attacks, but one fewer for skill tests. This will greatly assist the Klingons, since most of their missions involve attacking. Luckily I’m the first player this round, so I can place Q back in a corner where hopefully he won’t give my opponent too much of an advantage.

This game goes much better for me that the previous one. The Romulans are a lot better at accomplishing missions, even with my opponent’s Klingons shooting at me. I am able to creep around the Engineering section of the board and knock out several missions, then use the Q-liens to get in my opponent’s way, forcing her to spend actions attacking the tokens rather than my loyal Romulan forces. She does, however, manage to wound Taibak, one of my better mission solvers, pretty early on. Damage in this game is tracked by reducing the character’s stats, so for example when Taibak takes 2 damage I have to reduce his movement and his skill (used for mission solving) by 1. No stat can go below 1, and once all four stats are down to 1 the character is neutralized.

Our Immortal Q card for round 2 is Q’s Peace, the reverse of the card from the previous round. This time, attacks in Q’s line of sight are at a disadvantage, and skill rolls are at an advantage. I get to place the Q miniature again, and this time I put him right in the cental corridor where he can see most of the action. It has become clear that my opponent’s missions are all about attacking, so Q should do nothing but help me and hinder her. Any player can use one of a character’s actions to attempt to move Q to a different space on the board, but it’s a slight risk: that player rolls a die, on a 4 or better they can move Q, but on a 1 their oppoent gets to move him.

I manage to get some more missions done, and collect some intel tokens from the board. These are unique to the Romulan faction and will give me bonus points at the end of the game. Meanwhile, the Klingons are whittling down my forces — I haven’t lost anyone yet, but the damage is making all my characters less effective. However, my opponent doesn’t appear to be scoring many missions, and I am way ahead on points.

For the final round we draw Q-Pid for our Immortal Q card, which interferes with one of the game’s more interesting concepts: backup. Under normal circumstances, if you have two friendly characters in the same space on the board, they give each other backup, adding one extra die to each other’s attack, defense and skill rolls. My opponent used it to great effect in our previous game, with Sulu and Leslie tag-teaming my Borg drones. Now, however, it’s as if Q saw what she was doing and wants to put a stop to it. The Q-Pid card makes it so that any character with backup rolls two fewer dice instead of one extra, so we have to be careful about placing our characters and make sure to spread out as much as possible.

I’m at a bit of a loss for what to do on the final round. I’ve drawn two Assassination missions, which score if I take out one of my opponent’s characters, no easy feat as the Klingons tend to have high defense values. The other doable mission I have requires me to get two of my characters to terminals in Sickbay, clear on the other side of the board. To make matters worse, in order to get my characters there they will have to cross the main corridor, which is swarming with trigger happy Klingons.

Gowron has taken a little damage so I single him out as my assassination target, softening him up with the Q-liens before sending Sela herself in for the kill. Unfortunately I wasn’t quite able to make it happen, but I did get the two Romulan technicians over to sickbay to score a 30 point mission. The game ends with 140 points for the Romulans and 70 for the Klingons. This time around, the Q elements had a much more interesting impact on the game — moving and attacking with the Q-liens was an important part of both of our strategies, and making use of the Q miniature’s position was pretty critical.