Some people, I'm sure, are so organized they can close their eyes and design a new deck in their head, right down to the personnel granting that third geology and exobiology. The rest of us use the WNOHGB Database ;-).

But what if you internet connection isn't available, or you want to see only cards that you have in your collection, or you find a great new use for a card and want to make a note of it for when you build your next deck? The ST:CCG Players and Collector's Companion will allow you to do all of the above.

So what exactly is this program? To start with, it has a complete database of all the cards in ST:CCG. All of them. Like the WNOHGB Database, it allows you to search by affiliation, expansion, skills, etc. It doesn't have all of the options the WNOHGB Database does, such as searching for missions that can be protected by HQ: Defensive Measures and the ability to search for multiple-affiliation personnel, but it has most of them and offers a few new ones, such as search by rarity. Getting exactly what you want can require a little creativity; in order to get ships, I set it to find only cards with range greater than zero. One option I especially like is the lists, which gives you a list of cards which meet a requirement (reports free to the Office of the President, is a Shapeshifter, etc). Unfortunately, the lists function seems to simply search for the words, which leads to a few odd inclusions, such as Assassin's Blade as a shapeshifter and Brunt's Shuttle as an Empok Nor dilemma; the programmer is still making improvements, so I expect this will be corrected soon. I would like a box on the main page to type into so that you don't have to go to the "find" page when you know the card title. Another problem is that in order to find a card using the name search, you'll often need to type in the entire card name. ("Spock" will find Spock, but not Mr. Spock or First Officer Spock; "Live" will find Live Long and Prosper but not A Good Day To Live) I would like to see a lore search as well as a title search; without knowing the name of the mission where planet Gateway is, I had to look at all of the missions in Mirror Mirror to find it.

Now that I've covered what I don't like, I'll talk about what I do. The software lets you put in your own collection, but since that would take me roughly two weeks, I've opted to skip that step and make sure I have everything after deckbuilding, making my deck from an infinite supply of cards (don't I just wish!). The software allows you to put cards in your deck separated into seed cards, draw deck, tent, flash, battle bridge, and tribble deck. The software tracks mission requirements and skills available, and tells you what you don't have. There's a notebook to fill with deck notes, and once your deck is finished you can print out a cardlist. There are also boxes you can check to display only certain card types, making it easy to see, for example, how many ships are in the draw deck. Just about the only missing feature is a shuffler to do test draws. To make the database more useful, you can cross-reference cards and add strategy notes; the card extras published on Decipher's website are already included.

You can also download scans of all of the cards; let me tell you, I wouldn't recommend this with a dial-up modem! I received the entire program on a CD to review, otherwise I would not be using them. As it is, they do take up a bit of space, so I wouldn't get them if you have a small hard drive. Seeing the cards is kind of nice, but the scan quality isn't great (or the size would be even worse) so I guess it comes down to whether or not you like pictures. ;-)

I've downloaded the companion, and, what can I say, I'm REALLY impressed by the program. It's exactly the tool I searched for in the last 2 years. Keep up the good work!!!"

- Christian Wenger

Overall, if this were just the database, I might pass on it in favor of the WNOHGB Database, but if you want to shell out the $20 for the fully enabled CD, it isn't a bad buy. Players with small collections will appreciate being able to limit the search to what they have and printing off lists of what they need, and the deckbuilding option is nice. I'd recommend checking out the program at http://www.angelfire.com/trek/pcc