Space. The final frontier. Star Trek: Lower Decks doesn’t follow the starship Enterprise. Instead, it follows the Starfleet ship USS Cerritos, focusing on lower-ranked officers and their shenanigans. Created by Modiphius Entertainment, Star Trek: Lower Decks: Buffer Time is a 2-6 player card game featuring characters and situations found in the show. It plays with what the show defined early on as “buffer time” – the time between jobs when lower deck crew relax. Although the characters aim to relax, the players have a much more difficult time trying to do the same.
How’s It Play?
The game is entirely made up of cards. 18 assignment, 20 side project, 28 shift, 20 alpha shift ability, and 6 reference cards come the box with a rulebook.
Assignment Cards, Side Project Cards, Shift Cards, and Alpha Shift Ability Cards are organized into stacks on the playing area. For each turn, the Assignment Card is shown and players attempt to reach the target value using effort points. This is done by playing Shift Cards and Alpha Shift Ability Cards. The goal of Star Trek: Lower Decks: Buffer Time is to rack up Leisure Points as an Assignment is finished. This is done by completing Side Project Cards. There’s always a chance to draw Officer cards that act as punishments, and if four are pulled into the stack the game ends in a loss.
The Verdict
It took a bit to understand the instructions and how the game worked, but when it clicked it was a very fast game for two players. It runs for five rounds and players take one action per round. That means it can run in five minutes or less when it’s two players, which isn’t a really satisfactory experience. The player count determines what the Leisure Point goal is, which is good in theory, but it’s massively weighted against smaller numbers of players. The goal starts at 18 and increases by 2 for each player – but that means five more cards are played per additional player, which makes it significantly easier to get enough points. The most difficult assignment is worth 18 effort points, which is the lowest Leisure Point goal possible, but if more people are playing, it’s faster to complete some of the lower value assignments.
The Alpha Shift Ability cards are often confusing. One card, which costs 5 effort points to play, reads “Play this card into the middle of the playing area, next to the Duty Assignment and any Side Projects. If this card is moved to the Scoring Row, take a random Assignment Card from the ones that were set aside during set up, and place it on top of the Assignment Deck.” This card came into play at the very beginning of the game and at that point things were still confusing as is as to how the cards should be arranged in the playing area – all card stacks were told to be placed in the “middle of the playing area” without any sort of order of how the stacks should be placed next to each other. There’s no option to discard any cards, so it stayed in the player’s hand instead of being used.
Considering it’s a card game, Star Trek: Lower Decks: Buffer Time is well crafted, with high quality cards that are easy to shuffle but solid enough that they aren’t folding when handled. The art, however, is not so high quality. The images on the cards are very clearly moments from the show, as if someone collected screen caps and pasted them on the cards. This results in some of the cards looking a little simple and almost blurry. Some of the captions on the cards sound like quotes from the show – there’s a Side Project card called “Pottery with Shaxs” that reads “Take your never-ending bonfire of rage and bury it in the clay.” These captions are hard to read and I’m not sure if it’s a font issue or a size issue.
Star Trek: Lower Decks: Buffer Time could be a very fun game for a group of players. As a two player game it’s surprisingly difficult. Part of the joy of this game is seeing characters and situations from the show play out, so it wasn’t as enjoyable for me as a very casual viewer. For someone who enjoys playing group games and loves this series, this is a worthwhile choice.
Star Trek: Lower Decks: Buffer Time is available from Modiphius Entertainment for $20.60.
Images and review copy courtesy of Modiphius Entertainment
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