Ah, Captain’s Chair. I’ve already logged my appreciation of Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi’s remapping of Imperium into the Star Trek universe. Like that series, now sadly defunct thanks to the shuttering of the board-gaming side of Osprey Games, this is an information-dense deck-builder that absolutely revels in its moreishness. Quite literally. It features more icons, more decks, and more chrome-laden rules per cubic micron than any other deck-builder I can recall.

Now there’s a second-wave box, To Boldly Go. If you’ve played the original, you know what to expect. Seriously, newcomers can just read my previous review.

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More than most fictional settings, Star Trek lends itself to what-ifs. Mirror universes, alternate dimensions, and time travel play a big role in making the final frontier ever more expansive, but we don’t even need to breach the time-space continuum to find uncomfortable alliances and enemies-turned-friends. In its messiness, Star Trek has always been playful. Ever wondered what would happen if a dilithium leak briefly tricked an intoxicated Commander Sisko into courting Lursa Duras? Me neither! But there’s a non-zero chance that someone in the writer’s room drafted an entire Deep Space Nine episode about that very scenario.

Star Trek: Captain’s Chair swims in those possibilities. Designed by Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi, and built around the deck-building system they unveiled in Imperium: Classics, Legends, and Horizons, this isn’t the first board game to bottle the spirit of Star Trek, but it is perhaps the one that most exemplifies its endless possibilities.

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