Mutability and Materiality in Star Trek - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 114

Figure 5.3 Branching narratives. Star Trek: Expeditions. ©WizKids Games 2011.
Photo by Katie Booth.
there are cards. his means that diferent cards might be placed each time the
game is played, increasing the mutability of the game and providing more
replay value.
here are fewer Supplemental cards in Expeditions than there are location tiles
in Fleet Captains , creating less mutability overall in Expeditions . his lessened
mutability applies to the relative dearth of “text” manifest in the Alternate
timeline depicted in Star Trek (2009). Although technically part of the Star Trek
canon—the ilm is positioned to be at least tangential to it, using the igure of
Spock (Leonard Nimoy; Zachary Pine) as a crossover icon between universes—
there have been far fewer content hours produced of the alternate universe to
play with in the paratextual game. When Expeditions was released in 2011, there
had been only one ilm produced (by Paramount Pictures) and two four-part
graphic novel series published by IDW. he same year that WizKids published
Expeditions , a new graphic novel series was announced by IDW, and two years
later the sequel ilm (and graphic novel) was released by Paramount. Indeed,
while the Prime universe of Star Trek not only had hundreds of hours of footage,
but also had created gaps between series. hese gaps are both temporal—the 70
years between the original series and he Next Generation —and spatial— Voyager
depicts a ship lost across the galaxy. hese gaps help create what Matt Hills refers
to as a “hyperdiegesis,” or “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space,
only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but
which nevertheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic
and extension.” 42 Fleet Captains ofers a chance to ill in those games using the