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All this talk about flying around on starships and attempting missions underscores another distinctive aspect of the Star Trek CCG: its three-dimensional "feel." Sure, the game is played with flat cards instead of miniatures, but ironically, many miniatures games don't exploit the third dimension and emphasize three-dimensional pieces moving around a flat arena. In the Star Trek CCG, where your resources are located matters a great deal. Each player brings five missions to the table; these missions represent different locations in the Star Trek universe. Once your personnel board their starships, they can move to any of these missions. If the mission is a planet mission, you must decide which personnel to leave on your ship and which personnel to "beam down" to the planet itself. Your starships can visit the Alpha, Delta, or Gamma Quadrants, or even (depending on your opponent's actions) be flung into far distant space thousands of light-years from home.

Decipher's Star Trek CCG has been around a long time, with the Second Edition launching at the end of 2002 and now boasting fourteen "physical" expansions, three "virtual" expansions, and a handful of boutique products. Despite the richness of its universe, the Star Trek CCG (Second Edition) has no banned cards or set rotations, and very few errata. Moreover, the resources available to each of the affiliations or factions in the game are carefully balanced to achieve parity between them. Even those affiliations that have been more recently introduced--such as The Original Series crew in the These Are the Voyages expansion-—can go toe to toe with those that have been around since the beginning of Second Edition. The game design principles at the heart of the Star Trek CCG allow the Second Edition to grow and expand continually without compromising this remarkable game balance, the best of any collectible card game.  Star Trek CCG features the widest and most balanced selection of deck types of any CCG on the market; even at the highest levels of play, you will see an almost bewildering variety of decks being utilized.

The Star Trek mythology, broad customization possibilities, a "racing" alternative to the predominant "dueling" model, a wide variety of player interactions, emphasis on the spatial dimension, and the best game balance in the business are just some of the ways that the Star Trek CCG can give you a new and unique gaming experience. Pick up a couple of different starter decks at your local gaming store--or perhaps an Adversaries Anthology, which includes a Borg or Dominion starter deck, six booster packs, eighteen popular cards in new foil versions, and two exclusive "Archive Portrait" (extended art) cards. If you're still not quite sure and you want to try the game for free, download a sample deck. In any event, check back here in a few days for the next installment in this series that will take you into gaming's final frontier: the Star Trek CCG.

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-djl-