'Star Trek: Adversaries' Online Collectible Card Game Launches

Star Trek is stepping into the online collectible game arena with Star Trek: Adversaries. The game is the result of a team-up between Puppet Master Games and CBS Interactive and launched in Early Access on Tuesday.

The game draws on Star Trek lore, featuring characters, ships, and concepts from Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Enterprise, and Star Trek: Discovery.

The game currently features more than 50 fully-rendered and customizable 3-D starships and 140-plus crewmembers, 300 ships and crew from the Prime timeline, and 24 collectible flagships.

Players build decks around their flagship, which function like heroes in other online card games. Each flagship belongs to one of two factions, Federation or Klingon, and comes with a set of core cards. The flagsips are and is equipped with a unique special ability and an ultimate ability.

There are twelve available flagships for each faction, including Galaxy Class and Constitution Class for the Federation and K'vort Bird fo Prey and the Klingon Ship of the Dead for the Klingon faction.

The game pits one player's flagship against another, with each player summoning additional ships, either independent or from their own faction. Those ships can assigned crew members that buff stats and provide special abilities.

Adversaries' game modes include multiplayer and AI campaigns, ranked matches, and draft play.

Having played a few games in single player mode, Star Trek: Adversaries is a pretty interesting game. The sheer number of flagships outstrips the number of heroes available in most similar games, meaning there's more potential for different playstyles. There's also some interesting mechanics, like the ability to "retreat" a ship, essentially sacrificing it to recoup its initial cost, adding that energy to your pool for the current turn. The mechanic changes the way you think about your forces on the board and allows for some unexpected and deadly plays early in the game.

That said, the game is still in Early access, so there's not much in the way of bells in whistles just yet. There's no tutorial in place, so newcomers will just have to learn the ropes on their own. Most things can be figured out, though some systems are harder to piece together than others.

Star Trek: Adversaries can be downloaded for free on Windows and Mac from the game's website.