Star Trek: Missions
****
I had enough disappointment with lazy franchise cash-ins growing up that I learned to avoid pasted-on branding, but when this... thing popped up on eBay for not much more than the cost of postage, around the time I was wrapping up my epic TNG adult rewatch, I hesitantly checked out what it was.
Sure enough, it turned out to be mainly a retheming of a generic fantasy game to sell pretty much the same product to differently-oriented nerds, but the way the cards interacted to create emerging narratives looked alluring. Finding out there were popular unofficial solo rules that were considered better than the normal game, I was sold.
This is the perfect Star Trek game for failed and lazy writers that lets us imagine we're in the writing room, scraping together familiar plots and struggling to find things for the characters to do against a tight deadline and running time. It's five-minute fanfic and roleplaying without the effort, the Customizable Card Game without having to sell a kidney, and it became one of my favourite activities for a while, until the repeat run started getting repetitive. I don't imagine there's much realistic hope of a Deep Space Nine sequel, but I still have that spare kidney.
