By Kelly & Kevin Phillips
Earlier this month, thousands of board game, table top role-playing, and trading card game fans descended upon Philadelphia for PAX Unplugged 2024!
While not a dedicated Star Trek convention by any means, we usually come across Star Trek games when we’re there, and so we hope this con report will be informative — especially if you want to check it out next year!
One of the first things we noticed when entering the expo hall for this year’s convention, was the UniVersus booth. Hard to miss the giant U.S.S. Cerritos and Star Trek: Lower Decks character banners! Needless to say, we were intrigued.
The UniVersus Star Trek: Lower Decks Challenger Series card game from UVS Games is a character-driven, multi-IP fighting card game. What makes the game particularly interesting, is that you can combine the various IPs to create your decks. This means you could splash in some Cowboy Bebop or Critical Role with your Star Trek.
When we popped by the booth, we first did a scripted demo using a standard basic deck, which helped us wrap our brains around the fundamental rules. If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering or Disney’s Lorcana, you’ll find a number of familiar game play elements. It wasn’t difficult to grasp, but we suspect it is difficult to master.
After going through the standard demo, we got a chance to play with the Lower Decks Boimler challenge deck. Our opponent was playing (and was dressed like) Mariner. It was readily apparent that the designers at UniVersus love and understand Lower Decks.
First of all, the art on the cards is fantastic (and the foil cards are stunning)! And from what we could see from the cards we got to use, there are so many great references to the show built in. Lower Decks works surprisingly well as the basis for a card game inspired by fighting games. There are also Tendi and Rutherford challenge decks available, although we didn’t get a chance to scope those out in detail.
Another recent release available for purchase at PAX Unplugged was Star Trek: Star Realms. UVS Games partnered with Wise Wizards Games to put this out in time for the 10th anniversary of the original Star Realms deckbuilder, and features familiar mechanics to fans of the award-winning game. The four factions have been reskinned to represent starships from the Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Dominion fleets.
We hope to bring you more detailed gameplay reviews in the future! UniVersus’ Star Trek: Lower Decks set launched on December 6. Challenger decks and playmats are available online and at brick and mortar game stores now. There are also learn-to-play resources on their website. The Star Trek: Star Realms core set is also available online from UVS Games.
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After exploring the UVS Games offerings, we headed over to the Beadle & Grimm’s booth. If you’re a fan of both Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons, you may already be familiar with this company, known for their exquisite D&D products.
If you aren’t part of that Venn diagram, then you may not know that Beadle and Grimm’s has ventured into the Star Trek franchise, and have recently Kickstarted a murder mystery game and an escape room game.
(And if you are part of that fandom overlap, then it probably comes as no surprise that Todd Stashwick, Captain Liam Shaw and D&D aficionado, is involved.)
We had a chance to chat about the Kickstarter with Beadle & Grimm’s Jon Ciccolini at PAX Unplugged. (The below interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
TREKCORE: Tell us a little bit about Todd Stashwick’s involvement in the murder mystery game. How did he get involved and why it had to be Todd – because it had to be Todd, right?
JON CICCOLINI: We’re long time friends of Todd’s! We’ve done Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! D&D live play games with him. He was on our TV show. Great guy and avid gamer. If you’ve ever seen his game room, it’s crazy. When we got the license to do a Star Trek murder mystery game, we knew we wanted to work with Todd and Star Trek: Picard is relatively new. So we were like, let’s let’s start with Star Trek: Picard.
In the game, the players are being sent on this mission by Captain Shaw (because story of the game is set before the show takes place). And what’s cool is there are augmented reality elements in this game. It comes with a badge that you can scan and do certain things with, but also there are paper elements in the game — like the letter from him.
You can scan an image and hear Todd Stashwick actually read the message to you. Working with him has been great.
TREKCORE: What’s the core difference between the murder mystery game and the escape room game? What really differentiates those two products?
CICCOLINI: They are Similar products in that you’re trying to figure out something as you go, right? With the murder mystery, it’s much more like a hunt-a-killer type game, a standard murder mystery. Someone says “here’s all the evidence, I need your help to figure out who the real murderer is.” There are stages in the game.
With both games, there are a couple of puzzles in there. But in the escape room, it’s much more puzzle heavy. Out that there is a derelict ship and you board it. Why is it derelict? What’s going on here? You know, how do we save these people?
TREKCORE: Why Strange New Worlds for the escape room setting?
CICCOLINI: Strange New Worlds is fresh, it’s new — And the whole Strange New Worlds vibe felt right for discovering something. You’re boarding a ship and trying to figure out what’s happening on the edge of the universe. So that one felt right for us for this game.
It also has augmented reality like in the murder mystery game. You can use your augmented reality to get hints. You can use it to play an audio file, you can use it to launch a web report. The escape room game is a little more interactive. You’re actually using augmented reality to explore the ship, to pull up more games and puzzles, like a point-and-click adventure.
TREKCORE: What are the retail plans beyond Kickstarter?
CICCOLINI: For the Kickstarter, you’re gonna get it at a discount and you’re gonna get it first. After that, we are going to attempt to put this into game and hobby retail – your local mom and pop shop.
TREKCORE: What’s the timeline?
CICCOLINI: We’re hoping that the Kickstarter folks get theirs in July. Retail being a few months later. One thing I do want to call out as part of the Kickstarter, is we have some add-ons you won’t get in retail. There’s an add-on where you can have Todd StashwiCk sign your game. You can order an extra combadge, and you can get a sci-fi soundtrack that you can play while you’re playing the games.
Although the Kickstarter for both games has closed, late pledges to support these projects are still being accepted.
A huge thanks to UVS Games and Beadle and Grimm’s for giving us some great insights into their respective Star Trek games!
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One last event that we want to highlight is one we weren’t wasn’t able to attend personally, but after seeing the photos on Facebook afterward, we felt it absolutely warranted mention: a mega-life sized version of 1993’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game – A Klingon Challenge!
Planned, organized, and executed brilliantly by Flip Florey, this event had a massive board game the players could actually walk on, and a large screen to show the videos from Kavok — the Klingon that is definitely not Gowron — played by Robert O’Reilly.
Flip was kind enough to share this photo from the event, which looks like it was truly epic. You can learn more about how it all came together over on this thread at BoardGameGeek.com.
PAX Unplugged is part of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) family of conventions. The dates for PAX Unplugged 2025 have already been announced: November 21-23, 2025. All ticket levels were sold out for 2024, so if you’re thinking of attending next year, keep an eye on the website for when ticket sales become live.
We hope to see more Star Trek game developers next year!