A new Star Trek expansion is always interesting, but this is the most innovative expansion since Blaze of Glory. Unlike previous expansions which gave us clear cut good and bad cards such as DQSS vs Harness Particle 010, Holodeck Adventures has given us somewhat of a puzzle of cards for us to see what fits and what doesn't. Like most sets it has some incredible personnel but it's the other cards that interest me such as the incidents and events. Let's take an in-depth look at Decipher's newest Trek expansion, Holodeck Adventures.

Artifact: Honestly it's nothing special, the fact that it must seed at Bajor and only helps Bajoran missions really hinders it. I would only use it with Starry Night personally.

Dilemma: Some good, some not so good but no stinkers like Replicator Accident. The Chula dilemmas are pretty weak, unlike the Clown dilemmas. Playing Doctor just begs to be used with Rascals and Guillotine has great potential and will neatly replace Shaka: When the Walls Fell in most of my decks. Cytoplasmic Life-Form is great, just fly your opponent's ship up to your doorstep and have it blow it away. Talosian Cage is pretty good as well as Your Galaxy is Impure but with Nanoprobes I doubt that it will get much play. Try to snag some Kelvan Show of Force because I think they will become quite popular vs hologram decks.

Doorway: One word, wow. This will find it's way into most decks. As a seed card it's pretty necessary, as it allows you to report holograms to your ship or facility, plus it removes quadrant restrictions (because the doorway is allowing the reporting). But the main reason to use it is to download any [Holo] or [Barash] card, period. While you can only do this once per turn there is a slew of powerful personnel you can get, such as Vic Fontaine. The last function is pretty redundant because you can just reactivate your hologram next turn and doesn't prevent your holograms from discarding or erasing. This will be useful against Holo decks as well, just toss a doorway to get Nicky the Nose and erase up to a 100 holograms. Groovy.

Equipment: All quite useful. The '45 Dom Perignon can be used to turn a universal USS Galaxy into a Future Enterprise and it's a just a Holodeck Door away. Ablative Armor is great against armada decks and it works with facilities as well. Satan's Robot is the least useful of the three but with Holodeck Door or Fortress of Doom you can get it out quickly to fight intruders without risking valuable personnel.

Event: First let's address the Dominion War Effort. This card will find it's way into all Dominion and most Cardassian decks. There are 11 Dominion and 8 Cardassian support personnel. It's powerful, take a look as this. Defend Homeworld for Deyos, play a Jem'Hadar, download one with ASP, exchange a Young Jem'Hadar for one, that's three personnel a turn and 4 card draws, that's pretty intensive. Plus instead of playing the Jemmies in your hand, you could put them on Jem'Hadar Shrouding and draw cards that way and use them to harass your opponent later. Bynars Data Transfer isn't as good as Handshake and Holo-Projectors are OK. For the Ferengi Oo-Mox is much more useful than the Data Net. There is only 14 unique Ferengi with Greed so the chance of you abusing this is slim, plus discarding your hand is kind of harsh. Oo-Mox is much more useful at the small cost of stopping your Ferengi for a turn you get to double their skills and pump up their attribute by 2, this would have gone into my End Transmission deck for sure.

Facility: This is pretty sweet. No more stocking Transwarp Network Gateway in your deck and it's an outpost so you can slap a Spacedoor on it or seed a Complink Drone at it. (Honestly who will use a Borg Outpost anymore?)

Incident: Ah the bread and butter of an expansion, incidents always have the most impact on the game and in this expansion it is no different. This is a lot to go through so I'll take it one at a time.

Children of the Light: The core of Holo decks (snicker..) it's a treaty for all holograms. The second is less useful unless Iden downloads it because it's unlikely your opponent will move his damaged ship to your location. (If you move to his location you can't play it until next turn unless you DQSS it.)

Clone Machine: The non-DQ version of DQSS lets you report copies of unique personnel in play for free. Also any Vorta that dies allows you to download another copy of that persona. It can be quite useful especially with personnel that have point boxes. In my opinion Dominion mission solvers will get the most use out of it.

Cybernetics Expertise and White Deprivation: Old rules now put on cards, same old stuff except androids get some pumped up abilities like android recycling.

Holoprograms: I think that these will be quite useful in the future though some more than others. I've noticed that all the holoprograms have primarily two functions, the first is a reporting mechanism and the second is a cool ability.

221B Baker Street: The best one in my opinion, in the place of a card play you can download any of Baker Street's people, but more importantly is you can get Sherlock Holmes in play first turn and that is power onto itself. Its second function is pretty good as well, it allows you to turn your personnel into holograms which can be useful if you have important people you don't want killed, like say Dr. McCoy or Dixon Hill.

Deadwood: The second worst reporting mechanism out of the five holoprograms and only Sheriff Worf and his Deputy can report there, no downloading. So what about the other three Deadwood personnel? If the ship or facility is without a holodeck door (say seeded on Voyager) or not in the Alpha Quadrant it can't get into play; pretty weak if you ask me. Unfortunately its second function is the most powerful of the five. If you have the Sheriff and his Deputy aboard you can increase a mission's span by the number of Security on board (max four), prevent battle unless the opponent has more Security, and can nullify a Security dilemma once per turn. Wow, I guess you don't need the other deadwood personnel (though Durango would have been nice). Armada decks are going to use this quite regularly I think.

Noah's Mountain Retreat: This holoprogram is all about reporting. First you can report or download in the place of a card play any of the Mountain Retreat personnel. That's good but wait there's more, if transporter skill aboard you can discard any of the Dr. Noah personnel (everyone except Bashir and Garak) to download their persona at the start of your turn. That's pretty handy but not game breaking.

Fortress of Doom: The best reporting mechanism of the five, since each turn you can download a minion of Chaotica for free. While the selection isn't great you do get (4 cards) for nothing. The second function can be neat if you use it with Iden. Use Iden to steal all of your opponent's holograms then prevent them from attempting. This card will be seeing a lot of use in Voyager constructed.

The Office of Dixon Hill: There are 6 Dixon Hill personnel and only 2 can report there and only the worse of the 2 can be downloaded. Wow, doesn't that suck and most of the Dixon people have the coolest abilities too. Should you get Cyrus Redblock out you can request the item, which is kind of cool, but I don't think it's worth the trouble.

In the Zone: Ah, this expansion's magic bullet. This one effectively takes care of first turn wins since non-Borg players can't score more than fifty points a turn. The second ability is kind of cute but fifty points on the nose is kind of hard to get. The last ability is one that I have trouble with. It nullifies End Transmission, Preparation (?) and limits Devidian Doors to one per turn. In my opinion all these cards are not broken at all but only when abused with others. End Transmission isn't powerful, you just have to play smart to beat it. Here's an example: most ET dilemma combo's go Chula: The Chandra-Q-Flash-Friendly Fire. Now what you do to pass this easily is attempt it with only one of the mission's affiliation and a bunch of Non Aligned so that the odds of the one Aligned person will be stopped is high. So you hit Chula and the Aligned person is stopped and the mission attempt is ended and Chula is discarded. Do it the same for the Q-Flash. Now all that's let is FF and that's not hard to pass or if your playing armada just blow up his Nor. As for Devidian Door, it is only broken if used with huge drawing engines like Ooby Dooby (now that deserves a ref card) or Empok Nor/STP.

Jem'Hadar Shrouding: A great card, use Mission Debriefing to stop an away team on a planet, kill them, on your turn then place them back under the Shroud. Really easy, use it with Dominion War effort for more card drawing power. Dominion will be a force to be reckoned with in the new year.

// Editor's note: of course, these days, winning a battle without the use of

// hand weapons could be rather difficult…

Tongo: An OK side game but not as good Dabo. Ferengi personnel will be rarely have greater stats than Feds, Dom, or Hir personnel.

Interrupt: The interrupts in this expansion are surprisingly good. All Threes and Data, Keep Dealing are really good at draw deck manipulation. I'm a Doctor, not a Bartender isn't as good as its predecessor (there are only 4 bartenders in the game so far: Quark, Mr. Quark, Mr. Nog, and Guinan). I've Been Waiting for You is going to be a staple for hologram decks. Remember the Alamo and Small Oversight are great in sealed environments.

Mission: All the missions are DQ and can be attempted by anyone, nothing special but Seal Rift is an easy 35 points and Study Proto-Nebula lets you download One for free.

Objective: This expansion's objectives aren't anything special. The Bajoran Resistance Cell is OK; it lets Tabor report to the AQ but there is only one Bajoran espionage card so you can go after the OK Cardassian missions. But the card drawing is nice. Hunting Group is pretty useless; Hirogen missions are easy enough to solve on their own and as if a ship is going to wait around for you to finish one of your missions. The long awaited Orbital Bombardment is kind of a disappointment. In my opinion it should have been more like the Breenzooka and add damage counters. One high point is that you can use the probe function to get around tripping Defend Homeworld.

Personnel: The meat of an expansion, personally I like that Decipher concentrated less on super skills and more on cool abilities (who would play with Bashir or Crusher if they could have McCoy instead?). I'll look at them by affiliation.

Bajorans: 3 solid personnel that fill in some nice skill gaps, Anaydis reports for free to the Chamber.

Cardassians: 9 great Cardassians, Crell Moset is a must have for Cardassia, Mila and Ekoor are good too.

Dominion: 2 holographic support personnel, nuff said.

Federation: Strangely the Feds didn't get any heavy hitters (not that I'm complaining, it's just odd). Zimmerman is good along with the ECH and Naomi is neat. (I want to see 12 Navigation from Paris, Naomi and the Twins). Boothby is a big disappointment, for someone who influenced so many captains he could have had a cooler ability like to be able to download a non-AU Officer or something.

Kazon: An OK Security Kazon

Klingon: Gowron is kind of a let down, but B'Elanna is cool.

Non-Aligned: A whopping 40 really neat people. Mostly everyone has cool abilities and they are just fun to play. The Captain Proton people are kind of weak where the Baker Street people are quite strong. I don't know what Decipher was smoking but Vic Fontaine is a beast! In case you don't know Vic allows you to download a card, any card when you get stopped by a dilemma at his location. Let me allow that to sink in for a moment..... Whoa! Dixon Hill is a monster as well since he once per game allows you to ignore mission requirements.

Romulans: The new leader of the Romulan empire is pretty good. Praetor Neral reports for free and gives all Tal Shiar Security, nice.

Vidiian: One lonely decent Security. A nice addition to a harvesting gang.

Earl's Top Five Personnel

5.Praetor Neral
4.Crell Moset
3.Sherlock Holmes
2.Dixon Hill
1.Vic Fontaine

Q-Icons: All pretty useless except Quandary.

Ships: Nothing special unlike last expansion.

Site: It allows you to download compatible hologram cards.

I have to say Decipher really did a great job with this expansion, one or two things to note is that the Mirror and Gamma Quadrants are really hurting. Not only in missions but in new ideas. They should do something with infiltrators and give them some more facilities like they did with the Borg. I think that I future expansions should look into it.

Well that's it I hope you liked my report, it was a bit long but I covered everything. Should you have any questions, comments or ideas for future article I look forward to hearing from you.

Peace.

Earl Prusak

esprusak@telusplanet.net