History and Hysterics
Star Trek. A franchise with a rich history spanning six decades of intriguing space adventures that needs no introduction. After five of these decades had come and gone along with nine shows under its belt (yes, The Animated Series and Short Treks count, you can ask Wikipedia), it is probably of little surprise that Star Trek was ripe for parody, but I think very few suspected that the best would come from within their own planetary shields.
Lower Decks took a blood-soaked bat’leth to Star Trek canon, dissecting it and putting it back together with the aid of a hypospray filled with laughing gas. The result was a hilarious romp that was not afraid to relentlessly poke fun at itself yet still understood what made Star Trek so genuine and endearing to all ages. It is a show that every level of Star Trek fan from complete beginners to Vulcan calligraphers will get something out of.
The big question is whether Buffer Time, the Lower Decks card game from Modiphius, understands what made the show itself so special and is able to translate that into an entertaining card game. Engage!
The Package
Star Trek Lower Decks: Buffer Time is a compact card game that comes in a small cardboard box with one of those magnetic clasp lids that shuts with a satisfying snap. The box presents itself well, covered in colourful renditions of the core characters and the USS Cerritos that stay faithful to the series’ charming art style and the blurb on the back does a decent job of setting the scene and explaining the game briefly. The player count and recommended age graphics all feature small but distinguishable Vulcan ears and Spock’s haircut, which is a delightful detail.
A striking box befitting such a colourful show. Clock the Spocks on the back!
Every aspect of this game shows a great deal of attention paid to the tone of Lower Decks. In addition to the Warp Core Four, other fan-favourite characters such as Badgey and Peanut Hamper make appearances on the cards, all of which are references to classic moments from the show and feature matching quotes for flavour text and screenshots for card art. They’re fun reminders of the show’s best bits and will give fans some good laughs. Even the card theming matches Star Trek’s classic computers and tricorders, which is a strong and easily readable choice.
Some of the nostalgic cards you’ll find during your games.
If you’re a fan of Star Trek and especially Lower Decks, the package itself will draw you in with its many nods to the show and if, like I am, you’re a fan of the art style of Lower Decks in particular, then you’ll love the presentation. If you aren’t then I can’t help but wonder whether the show screenshots and bizarre quotes will do enough for you.
The Game
Star Trek Lower Decks: Buffer Time is, as the box says, a “push-your-luck card game” for “cool scrappy underdogs” and takes its name from the practice of artificially inflating the estimated time to complete a task that the crew of the USS Cerritos use to build some relaxation into their day. It’s the perfect name for the card game’s premise of trying to complete your assignments whilst fitting in as many fun side projects as possible to increase your leisure score. Much like in the show, if the higher ranking officers find out you’re taking liberties with your schedule, you incur their wrath and some pretty severe penalties. You have five rounds to reach your leisure goal and win the game.
The Cerritos’ finest will ship you off to Starbase 80 if they spot your antics.
The game is designed for two to six players, but it’s easy enough to adapt for solo play. For the purposes of this review, there were two players. The estimated playtime of this game is 20-40 minutes, which I would say from a few playthroughs is about right. This length means you’ll often get in a few rounds in a session which, unless you’re playing with the maximum six players, you’ll need to see and try out the multitude of cards the game has to offer. The game is well designed for quick rounds with your mates and could be a good backpack-filler for travelling, but its portability is hampered slightly by just how much room the cards can take up once the game really gets going so it’s best played at a table.
This could be condensed, but the amount of cards in play is still quite high!
The “push-your-luck” description is accurate to a fault as this is where the game falls down on multiple levels, with my biggest issue coming down to one card or one mechanic, depending on how you look at it.
I mentioned that you need to avoid the ire of your superior officers whilst gaining as many leisure points as possible. Assignments and side projects both have effort targets you need to reach for you to get the leisure points associated with them, meaning you need to draw from the shift deck to see if you can meet those targets. There are effort cards worth one to five points and officer cards with one to three badges. If you manage to draw four badges in a shift, you automatically lose that round.
The problem with this is Captain Carol Freeman. Much as she can sometimes be a thorn in the side of the protagonists, here she is a bigger nightmare than Moopsy. She is the only card in the game that comes with three officer badges on her card, meaning that if you draw any of the other five officers, most nuanced tactics go out of the window in favour of rushed damage control in case you run into her and immediately lose the round, which also results in the loss of the highest scoring card from your leisure points total. It’s a brutal punishment for such a short game and can derail a solid run in an instant.
Even putting this run-killer’s picture here sends a chill down my spine.
There are some counterplays to Freeman, but none of them really involve skill and instead rely on you drawing the right Alpha Shift Ability cards. Given each player starts with just two of these cards and only one player can draw a single one per round, the odds of you drawing the right ones are slim and decrease the fewer the players you have.
The points distribution of the cards makes this worse. Over half of the shift cards are worth one to two points, with only a single maximum five in the deck. Factoring in that the assignments are weighted towards the twelve to eighteen effort target brackets and you are going to be drawing a lot of shift cards and that starting 3.6% chance of drawing Freeman only goes up with every draw. Whilst this adds tension, it’s more a frustration knowing that drawing a single card can ruin your entire run. The runs are mercifully short, but when you’ve had a few in a row end this way (and if they’re ending, this is almost always how it happens) it gets demoralising quickly and you’re almost certainly going to want to play something else.
This could be made less infuriating by simply increasing the number of officer badges needed to end a run to five. However, this is a review of the game as it comes out of the box and that change still wouldn’t really fix the weighting of other cards and rounds that become endless strings of one and two point cards to reach an eighteen effort target for a measly three leisure points. The game might be called Buffer Time, but this buffer is not as fun as the one in the show.
Push-your-luck games are at their most fun when it still feels like there’s some skill in choosing when to push, but this game frequently forces you into decisions due to a lack of options or harsh draws, which feels like a crime for this style and sucks the fun out of playing. When you do win it feels more like you made it through the game rather than won a hard-fought battle through ingenuity.
In Conclusion
With fun, nostalgia, and a sense of endearment being at the core of Star Trek Lower Decks, this game was always going to live or die on whether it managed to capture that same atmosphere and I think depending on what you judge it on, you get a different answer.
If you look at the package itself, it more than lives up to Lower Decks and Star Trek as a whole. If you like the franchise, you will almost certainly like how this game looks and enjoy the wide variety of nods to fun moments and characters.
If you look at the game, it captures the show’s sense of chaos but without the endearment to ground it. It can be fun if the luck is in your favour, but that’s a rarity here and you’re likely to spend the majority of your time frustrated. Personally, there are very few games I play where I enjoy that feeling and all of them come with a sense of reward for having beaten them or at least having tried. I don’t get that from this game. I think with some homebrew tweaks to the rules you can have more fun (which is what I intend to do if I play again), but as it stands, it’s a rough experience.
As a whole, art can only carry a game so far and the gameplay has to be what draws you in. Unfortunately for Star Trek Lower Decks: Buffer Time, it hasn’t captured this lifelong Star Trek fan’s heart. I’d struggle to recommend it even to die-hard Trekkies and if you’re not a fan of the series, I really have no reason to recommend this game to you at all. I’m going to boldly go and find something else to play.
