Niall's deck had all the right answers to my strategy, unfortunately, since I just love nuking Borg Cubes for the points. My strategy in the past, has been to solve one or two missions for minimal points and then collect my cube points for a win. Niall started in the DQ with two big (untouchable) facilities and got the biggest cube + Ablative Armor + the multiplexor drone before even leaving home.

I did the math and every ship in my deck + boosts could not one shot his cube. But I was able to Outgun one of his Borg Scout Ships (that he used for the report drop) and if I had gotten one more of those it may have been doable. The other option would be to attack him once, damage the cube and then come back, but the multiplexor would make it unlikely for too many of my ships to survive such a confrontation.

Still, this was a relatively close game. I made the mistake of spending a few too many turns working through the dilemmas at Liberation only to find the Dead End. Then my other DQ mission proved much easier and was solved, but for minimal points due to Niall's point loss dilemma strategy. I then bounced to the AQ and solved a space. But due to the aforementioned point loss strategy, I needed 4 missions to win with Liberation as the ready and waiting 4th.

Niall went to Earth and got through my two dilemmas quite readily, but then I battled him to prevent probing. Here he shut out my hopes of a big in space battle by using the engagement rules to start a return battle on his next turn and eliminate my Borg Scout Vessel. I should have continued to ping him with battle anyway, as once he was open for a probe he downloaded the Stop First Contact cards and then probed for a completion. This eliminated my Hogan and Seven of Nine which made one of my missions impossible to solve.

As it stood, I needed to get way down the spaceline and do a space mission before hopping back to the DQ for the Liberation solve. But before I pulled that off, Niall went to space and was able to get through relatively easy (he used a scout to clear the Cytherians and then immediately moved in with the cube). His Counterpart, Data, allowed him to probe the same turn as scouting was complete, and that was successful for the game win. His two missions to my four. So no opportunity to battle him and stop a probe and no chance to Outgun this Scout Vessel and get some Cytherians points.

Well played, good sir.