The old Red Alert tabletop card game

[hedgehobbit]

I was wondering if anybody had ever played the old Red Alert tabletop starship combat game. I say old but it's from the 2000s.

www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/769/star-trek-red-alert

It had some neat ideas. Each ships phasers were just abstracted into a phaser power and torpedoes (photons, plasma, etc) were treated as homing weapon with a counter that moved along the board.

The different crew member were given powers which made their ships perform better in logical ways and you could buy secret upgrades that were hidden from the other players (such as better phasers, torps or special boarding parties).

I played it a few times and it was pretty fun. Their was no energy allocation but each ship only had a limited number of actions. So, if you took damage your shields would drop and to raise them you would need to use the Raise Shields action which means you are not firing or moving faster. So it's kind of abstracted.

Unfortunately the game was TNG era and I never saw a TOS expansion. There were some fan made expansion (and they were pretty good) but they dealt with the Borg or Dominion so were of no interest to me.

[finarvyn]

1. I didn't buy too many TNG games.

2. I tended to avoid collectable card games, disk games, pog games, and others that seemed too different in style. I was more of a wargame or RPG type of guy.

Having said that, it would be interesting to read through the rules to see what they did. :-)

[hedgehobbit]

I know what you mean about collectible games. It is unfortunate because some of them had some good features but tended to get ignored by regular gamers. Red Alert came out right at the end of the whole collectible game era and I was able to find a complete factory set (with every card) for cheap on eBay. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have played it. The Tomb Raider card game is another game that would have better served as a non-collectible game. It is similar but superior to Dungoneer.

Anyway, you can't really get a feel for the game from reading the rules since most of the features of the game are the special rules printed on the cards themselves. [Like Totaler Krieg!]

[finarvyn]

Would you be willing to post a couple of sample "special rules" from the cards? I'm curious as to what kinds of rules these might be. (And the "Totaler Krieg!" reference flew right past me. :-( )