Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might have left the syndication airwaves nearly two decades ago, but us fans are lucky enough to still get some new merchandise themed on the station-bound series from time to time — and this summer, DS9 is represented in the new Star Trek: Galactic Enterprises game from WizKids.

While technically a re-skin of one of WizKids’ older games, Fantasy Business, it’s nice to see Quark’s smiling face once again — but don’t forget Rule of Acquisition #48 (The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife!) when playing!

The basic concept behind the game is that you are a Ferengi on station Deep Space 9, and you and your fellow players will be bidding on items for sale at auction. After you’ve stocked your Promenade shop with the items you’ve won at auction, you have to determine a sell price. If you have a monopoly on an item, you can sell for double the base price.

But if you have a competitor selling the same items, you’re going to find out pretty quickly whether or not you have the lobes for business — by either trying to create an alliance with your fellow Ferengi and agree to work together to fix the price, or stab them in the back by undercutting their price and keeping all the profit for yourself.

When I played this game with friends, more often than not it seemed like they were abiding by Rule of Acquisition #21 (Never place friendship above profit!). Action Cards can also be purchased at auction in lieu of purchasing an item to sell, and these allow you to manipulate the marketplace in fun ways.

I realized a bit too late in our first game how powerful these cards could be. While it may seem risky to skip buying an item at auction and going for an Action card instead, players should remember to live by Rule of Acquisition #62 (The riskier the road, the greater the profit!) to maximize success.

While monopolies may be easy to come by in the first few rounds, as more items enter the marketplace the wheeling and dealing starts to add complexity to the game. When I was playing the game initially, it was with three players. By the end of our first playtest, we found ourselves longing for a full eight-player game, as it seemed like that would make the game significantly more entertaining.

Star Trek: Galactic Enterprises notes a minimum of three players needed, but I think four or five would make for a better time. The earlier you have to start negotiating, the more fun it’s going to be. The game offers solid replayability due to the randomness of the Market Cards available each round — representing items for sale — and the variety of Action Cards. The rulebook even offers a few variant rule sets to shake things up if you want.

Following Rule of Acquisition #74 (Knowledge equals profit!), I’d like to offer the designers of this game some ideas for a future edition. First, if there’s a tie, the youngest player at the table wins. Why? This doesn’t seem to be fair, nor does it fit with the theme of the game at all — there should be a better way to break a tie.

Secondly, the rules indicate you can conceal your latinum haul. That’s great and all, but there’s no way to do so. In fact, it felt like the game was really missing some way of shielding my Price Fixing Sheet and my latinum. Given that Galactic Enterprises is based on an older game anyway, I would have thought this oversight would have been addressed already.

My friends and I ended up folding our Price Fixing Sheet and using our arms to try and hide our stash of latinum, but it didn’t work well. I think having a shield with the four phases of the game printed on it for reference would have been useful.

Speaking of latinum, having many of the denominations be so similar in size and design made it tricky to grab the right ones quickly. I also felt like the game could have used 100 count latinum pieces (it currently maxes out at 50 count pieces).

Even with just three players, toward the end of our game we had nearly depleted all of the latinum available. In the end, I ended up creating a few 100 latinum pieces of my own, and I’m going to create some kind of shield to hide players’ sheets and latinum.

All that being said, Star Trek: Galactic Enterprises fills a nice gap in the Star Trek game market. It’s nice to have one that isn’t just some overly complex battle map with ship miniatures, or another mobile game that is hard for a group to enjoy. Star Trek is more than ship battles, after all.

Despite being a reskin of another title, this felt like it was always meant to be a Ferengi-based game. I loved all the Deep Space Nine screencaps on the Action Cards, and the clever insertions of the Rules of Acquisition everywhere — here’s hoping we get more Star Trek games like this in the future!

WizKids’ new Star Trek: Galactic Enterprises game hits stores in mid-September, but you can preorder your copy now for $24.99 through the links above.