Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 111

and even the later model Enterprise (NCC-1701-E), from the Next Generation
ilms First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis . Second, because each ship is a
HeroClix, players can decide how to distribute the ships' power by turning the
dial on the bottom of a piece to determine whether, for example, shields, engines,
or weapons should have more power. Each click of the HeroClix changes the
game because of the unstructured element. hird, the ships in a player's leet are
determined by the draw of cards from a shuled deck. Fourth, expansion packs
like Romulan Empire or Dominion can add additional ships, cards, and missions
to change the game.
he typical Fleet Captains game board itself is constructed from 27
randomized tiles, creating a representation of space. 35 Each tile is laid face-
down, hiding its contents until a ship either scans the area or lands on it.
Locations run the gamut of many diferent Star Trek —themed spatial anomalies
or encounters. hey can be anything from empty space, meaning there is
nothing there, to a Protostellar Nebula, which automatically cloaks ships, to the
classic Class M Planet (Class M planets in the Star Trek universe are habitable,
Earth-like planets).
In addition, each location tile includes an “encounter” chance—if this
occurs, the player must draw one of 50 random Encounter cards. Like the
Battlestar Galactica cards, or the cards in he Walking Dead: he Board Game,
these cards are suiciently related to aspects of the Star Trek —universe to
resonate with fans of the series. here are numerous Encounter cards that can
have positive or negative efects on the game play, and oten the use of these
cards depends on the particular settings on the HeroClix base of the ship that
engages the encounter. For example, the Pakled Encounter card requires a level
10 Weapons check, which means that the player must roll a die and add that
score to his or her ship's HeroClix weapons score.
he various command cards that players possess complicate the mutability
of the game spaces, pieces, and encounters. Each player has the option of ten
10-card decks, each with particular strengths and weaknesses. For example, the
Captain Kirk deck provides additional support on combat missions, but does
not provide many crew members; in contrast, the Evasive Maneuvers deck
provides fewer combat options, but more operational help in terms of shields
and scanners. Players choose 4 of these 10-card decks to use for any particular
game; the additional 60 cards are not used in that session (but could be used
in future sessions). In many ways, playing through one game session of Fleet
Captains is diferent from any other play session: there is enough variation