Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 98

Both of the games described above allow players to explore new worlds,
help them to seek out new life and new civilizations, and ask them to boldly
go where few games have gone before: into the realm of clickable miniatures.
With a half-century lifespan, the Star Trek franchise is particularly well-suited
for paratextual board games that invoke diferent eras, diferent characters, and
diferent narrative structures. Indeed, in the ity years since the original series
premiered, over thirty diferent Star Trek paratextual board games have been
published, from complex war games (e.g., Greg Costikyan and Doug Kaufman's
1985 Star Trek: he Adventure Game ) to relatively simple spin-and-move games
(e.g., 1992's Star Trek: he Final Frontier ). hese original paratextual games
attempt to place the player within the universe of Star Trek . Part of the reason so
many games have been developed is the large narrative world of Star Trek , which
has continually expanded since 1963. he premiere of a new series, for example,
he Next Generation (1987), or a new ilm, for example, Star Trek II: he Wrath
of Khan (1982) helps to spur developers to release games. he expansive Star
Trek franchise allows players to become part of “a brand, a world, and a set of
characters that exist across clothing, toys, videogames, a ilm, ads, books, comics,
DVDs, CDs, and many other media platforms.” 2 hese paratextual games deepen
the experience of the Star Trek world and facilitate player immersion in the Star
Trek franchise.
In this chapter, I look at how both Reiner Knizia's Star Trek: Expeditions and
Mike Elliott, Bryan Kinsella, and Ethan Pasternack's Star Trek: Fleet Captains
integrate and manipulate characters and characteristics within two parallel Star
Trek universes. Each game is based on an iteration of Star Trek . Fleet Captains
is based on the “Prime Universe” franchise made famous by Gene Roddenberry
in the 1960s, and Expeditions is based on “Alternate Timeline” franchise
constructed as a reboot by J. J. Abrams in the 2000s. he game based on the
Prime universe, Fleet Captains, integrates all the original Star Trek iterations
( Star Trek , he Next Generation , Deep Space Nine, Voyager , and Enterprise )
in one game world, eliding both the temporal diferences between series (the
original series took place about 70 years before he Next Generation ) and the
larger cult plots of the shows (in the game, as I will discuss, the Federation is
ighting the Klingon Empire, a plot speciic to the original series and tangential
to he Next Generation , rather than Deep Space Nine or Voyager ). As I will
discuss later in this chapter, while integrating aspects of all the series, Fleet
Captains does not concentrate as heavily on Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-05).
Potentially, as I describe, this could be because Enterprise, as a prequel, sits in an