While WizKids is introducing a brand-new Star Trek tabletop game later this year (see more on Into the Unknown soon), I was really excited to see that Attack Wing continues to be supported with not one, not two, but three brand new releases that have just hit store shelves. Two of them follow along the classic Faction Pack format, while the third is something entirely new. All three are great additions to the game, bringing new players and veterans fun and interesting new features and options for their matches. The two standard packs take us across the galaxy from Voyager with the Federation Faction Pack – Lost in the Delta Quadrant and the Independent Faction Pack – Adversaries of the Delta Quadrant, while the deluxe Federation Faction Pack – These Are The Voyages celebrates the history of the name “Enterprise” in a cool new way. Read on to find out more!

If you’re new to the game, Star Trek Attack Wing lets you take control of any number of awesome ships, load them up with equipment, crew, weapons, and more, and take them into dynamic, exciting combat on the tabletop. Everything has a point value, so you and your opponent can build to an agreed upon limit; it’s up to you if you want to run one powerful ship absolutely loaded for bear, multiple smaller craft with fewer upgrades, or anything in between. The game has been in production since 2013, so you can collect tons of iconic vessels and characters. After the first few years of single ship Attack Wing expansions, WizKids switched to Faction Packs, the majority containing four ships and nearly all the materials you need to play them including captains and fun upgrades that are fully compatible with your existing Attack Wing expansions. The two Delta Quadrant packs here follow that trend, while These Are The Voyages is even more expansive!

If you’ve seen one Star Trek Attack Wing product, you’ll instantly recognize these. All of the starter sets and expansions share the same core packaging principles: blue star field backgrounds, familiar Trek fonts and logos, iconic Enterprise-D logo, and more. The standard Faction Packs come in folding flat square boxes featuring a window so you can see the four included ships. Each set’s faction is clearly delineated by text as well as symbol/symbols, and a subtitle gives you a clue as to its specific theme. Finally, the back of each box has a description of the relevant faction/history along with a list of the pack’s contents and an upsell for the most recent Federation vs. Klingons Starter Set. The These Are The Voyages pack is very similar to the others; it differs in having five ships instead of four and comes in a two-piece box like the starters rather the fold-open Faction Pack boxes. Note: you will need a Starter set or Alliance Campaign box to play as those include the necessary tokens, movement templates, damage cards, etc.

Okay, we’ve looked at the packaging. Now, what’s inside a Star Trek Attack Wing Faction Pack? Quite a lot! First off, there’s a plastic tray holding all of the components in place, particularly the ships in the window. Then there are stacks of cards, small bags with base parts and dial centers, and multiple large cardboard sheets containing all of the tokens you’ll need to play with these ships, captains, and upgrades. These include named and generic ship tiles, captain icons, maneuver dials, and unique tokens to help you keep track of specific abilities and mechanics while playing. As always, the cardboard components are solid and heavy, and the cards sturdy with great-looking graphics and screenshots.

We’ll go over all the specifics in these sets, but first I want to mention some of the new elements and mechanics they introduce into the game. These include rules governing new keywords like Night Shift (abilities that come into play when your opponent has the initiative), First Officer (can take over as Captain with a reverse side), Lower Decks (can be equipped to a ship two for every one Upgrade slot), new and much easier to play rules for Auxiliary Ships (now anything with Hull Value two or less), new maneuver options and rules, and some really interesting new options with Starship Construction cards. Obstacles and ships can now “Obstruct” in a new way, and vessels can gain access to new actions like Transport and Tractor Beam.

With the previous Ships of the Line faction pack we saw a move from mission cards to a new Mission and Campaign Guide booklet, giving more detailed scenarios with more space for text and images. That trend continues here with the Adversaries of the Delta Quadrant and Lost in the Delta Quadrant booklets giving you entire campaigns to play with multiple games, advancements, special rules, and more. Meanwhile, These Are The Voyages includes an expansive Q Conflict mission pack for a truly cosmic experience utilizing the pack’s unknowable beings (Q, Trelane, Ayelborne, Metron) and vast terrors (Planet Killer, Crystalline Entity, Queen’s Octahedron).

Alright, without further ado let’s dive into each set individually, starting with Lost in the Delta Quadrant and the ongoing travels of the U.S.S. Voyager and the show which bore her name. There are four United Federation of Planets ships in this pack, an Intrepid-class, Nova-class, Delta Flyer, and Aerie-class. All of those can be played as generic versions, or unique craft including THREE different versions of U.S.S. Voyager and the class prototype U.S.S. Intrepid, the infamous U.S.S. Equinox and U.S.S. Nova, Delta Flyer and Delta Flyer II, and U.S.S. Raven that studied the Borg with disastrous results. The miniatures for all four of these take existing Attack Wing (and HeroClix Tactics) sculpts and furnish them with new decos, resplendent in shiny silver and lots of great little details like the intricate cockpit canopy decorations on the Delta Flyer. WizKids also takes advantage of these faction packs to adjust points costs, and these new versions are lower points compared to previous versions while still packing the same, or more, punch.

Commanding these ships (or other in your fleets) are eight Captain cards: 9 skill Kathryn Janeway punishes enemy ships for messing with her crew, 8 skill The Doctor takes the bonuses (and negatives) from two other captains into battle, 7 skill Chakotay adds a Crew slot to his ship and helps damage go through, 6 skill Tuvok is a hardy defender, 5 skill Rudolph Ransom adds a Crew slot and takes advantage of nearby obstacles, 4 skill Tom Paris excels at piloting Auxiliary Ships, 3 skill Harry Kim is a Night Shift captain who buffs his ship when coming back online from Auxiliary Power, and 1 skill Magnus Hansen hinders the captain on an enemy ship (with more effects if it’s Borg).

36 upgrade cards round out the Lost in the Delta Quadrant pack, with most of those being Crew. These include five of the Captains whose reverse side gives them a whole different battlefield roll: First Officer Chakotay, the Doctor, Tuvok, Tom Paris, and Harry Kim. The others range from Seven of Nine who lets her ship use Borg technology to Maxwell Burke who steals Upgrades from opponents, Erin Hansen who gets bonus movement when up against an enemy with a high Captain skill to Kes who can look at an enemy’s Maneuver Dial and gain a benefit dependent on the enemy’s faction. The Tactical Superiority Commander Elite Talent gives high-level captains a bonus attack die, the awesomely named “Coffee, Black” slot-less Upgrade gives a Scan token during the Night Shift or switches initiative, the Transwarp Coil increases the speed of Borg vessels, the Starship Construction Upgrade Ablative Generator provides additional hull protection, and Neelix is an Ambassador who gives an Evade or Battle Stations token to whichever ship approaches the other first. Transphasic Torpedoes, Gravimetric Torpedoes, and Photonic Missiles let you blow up your enemies real good, while Tech can let you change your speed with Variable Geometry Pylons, perform additional actions with Bio-Neural Circuitry, get the most out of Scanning with an Astrometrics Lab, or defend you with things like Temporal Shielding, Multi-Adaptive Shielding, and Re-Chargeable Shield Emitters.

Things weren’t always easy on the other side of the galaxy, and Voyager encountered lots of challenges and just plain meanies, many of which you can now play in your Attack Wing games with the Adversaries of the Delta Quadrant faction pack. It’s a really motley one, as Independent sets often are, with ships, captains, and upgrades from a wide range of species and factions within the area of space. The ships are Numiri (Antares Shadow), Vidiian (Honatta Prime, Fina Prime), Hirogen (Alpha Hunter, Relic Stalker), and Nasari (Nerada). Interestingly, most of the named vessels here have highly offensive special abilities, further emphasizing the dangers of these factions! All four are fielded with re-colored plastic ships using sculpts we’ve seen before, in cool new metallic decos that look really nice.

Nine menacing Captains are included to command these ships, and they expand on the variety of the ships themselves. You can go traditional and equip 8 skill, double Elite Talent Karr or 7 skill Turanj (both get bonuses to their attacks) to the Hirogen ship, 5 skill Nadirum or 3 skill Dereth (both of whom affect Crew on an enemy ship) to the Vidiian ship, etc., or branch out with a renegade hologram in the massive 10 skill Iden (who is more effective with more flexible upgrades and more effective against Independent ships), a con artist in 4 skill Dala (who gives her ship a bonus Crew slot and isolates an enemy ship from its own fleet), the 8 skill Vaadwaur warlord Gaul who deals bonus damage against particularly slippery foes, and more.

The Crew upgrades in this set continue the villainous rogue’s gallery with a really deep lineup of 10 options including First Officer Turanj who gives his ship another Crew slot and can perform a hostile takeover during a particularly brutal attack, con artist Mobar who further punishes isolated enemy ships along with Dala, Think Tank spokesman Kurros (Jason Alexander) who forces an opponent to choose how a ship is debuffed, thief Tau who literally steals tokens from opposing ships, arms dealer Kovin who gives his ship an additional Weapon slot and makes it easier for used weapons to come back online, two Vidiian Guards who buff their Vidiian Captain, and more. A Life of Piracy has never been so attractive with two copies of an Elite Talent with that name that lets you start the game closer to obstacles and gives bonuses to Ferengi or Klingons; the other Elite Talents are Relics that let a Hirogen gain extra Actions for hits against enemies and Vidiian Sodality that does the same when disabling or discarding enemy Crew. Take down your enemies with weapons like Targeted Phaser Strikes, Grapplers, a Tetryon Particle Weapon, or even the dreaded Isokinetic Cannon, or equip your fleets with advanced tech like a Translocator, Monotanium Armor Plating, Regenerative Shielding, and Refractive Shielding. Finally, the Adversaries bring the Independent faction four versatile upgrades that can fill different slots depending on your build: Photonic Field Generator, Weiss, Kejal, and Optronic Data Core.

Last but not least, These Are The Voyages. As a big fan of Starfleet and its ships, I was more than a little excited for this pack. It’s huge, it has more contents than any previous Faction Pack, and it brings back to the game some classic ships and cards we haven’t seen in a while. There are five ships here: the NX class, Constitution refit, Excelsior class, Galaxy class, and Sovereign class. All of these models re-use existing sculpts, but they’re presented here in solid “gold” like they’re displayed on the wall of a captain’s ready room! I wasn’t sure how these were going to look in person, but they’re actually really cool and definitely stand out on the tabletop.

Each ship comes with two named vessel cards as well as a generic version, giving you a huge range of options for how to play them. The NX can be played as the Columbia NX-02 that benefits even more from Enhanced Hull Plating and Photonic Torpedoes or Enterprise NX-01 which gets a free Federation Prototype construction card and can perform actions while under Auxiliary Power. Are you one of those people who refer to the Constitution class as the “Connie?” Regardless, you can play the refit here as the Enterprise that gets a different bonus every time it maneuvers or the Enterprise-A that attacks better when scanning and can swap out Elite Talents. The Excelsior takes its inspiration from Star Trek IV and takes Target Locks for its allies, while the Enterprise-B (I know, the model isn’t the refit) mitigates the strain put on its Crew actions. Take on the ship class vessel with the U.S.S. Galaxy that increases the skill of its captain and gains additional benefits on a Ship Construction card or go for the Enterprise-D that can shoot at opponents outside of its standard firing arc, and go beyond the next generation with either the Sovereign-class U.S.S. Atlas that shares its Action-given tokens to nearby allies or the mighty Enterprise-E with a two-sided card letting you swap between firing torpedoes without a target lock and getting a free (and buffed) Evade token after a green maneuver.

15 Captain cards cover the ages from Jonathan Archer and T’Pol all the way through to Picard on the Enterprise-E. Going from highest captain skill to the lowest the list looks like: Jean-Luc Picard (9), James T. Kirk (8), Mr. Spock (7), Hikaru Sulu (6), William T. Riker (6), Styles (6), Edward Jellico (6), Pavel Checkov (6), John Harriman (5), Jonathan Archer (5), T’Pol (5), Erika Hernandez (5), Maxwell Forrest (4), Data (4), and Geordi La Forge (4). Each one has at least one special ability, often working best in conjunction with specific ship or upgrade builds. In addition, both James T. Kirk and Maxwell Forrest can be fielded as an Admiral.

Speaking of upgrade cards, These Are The Voyages gives you several fleets’ worth starting with no fewer than 48 Crew cards! It’s a dizzying array of main cast members, guest stars, one-off favorites, and more. See the photos for the full spread, divided by generation. I love seeing all my favorite characters and new additions, as well as old Attack Wing favorites like my main man Lojur whose ability to keep weapons firing has won me multiple games over the years. I think the six Elite Talent cards may be the most fun out of this set, with incredibly iconic names, images, and thematic mechanics like “It Won’t Be Installed Until Tuesday” letting you start the game with disabled upgrades that come online later and “Fly Her Apart Then!” giving you an emergency burst of speed or the ability to take damage instead of going to Auxiliary Power. The seven Weapons, too, cover the generations from Phase Cannons and Photonic Torpedoes to a variety of Photo Torpedoes and the Type 8 Phaser Array. Seven Tech upgrades add Transporter and Tractor abilities among others, while versatile upgrades like Systems Upgrades add slots and Shields and the Tactical Data Link helps out allies. The new Starship Construction feature is seen in three cards, Enhanced Hull Plating replacing shield on the NX and two copies each of Dominion War Retrofit and Federation Prototype. Ambassador St. John Talbot helps vessels in strange locations, and “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” gives you some fun token swapping abilities.

If you couldn’t tell so far, I’m really enjoying these new faction packs, especially These Are The Voyages. If you’re new to Star Trek Attack Wing and looking to dive in, Lost in the Delta Quadrant and Adversaries of the Delta Quadrant are great places to start, and any fan of the Federation is going to love These Are The Voyages. All three of these sets can kick off a new collection or add to an existing one, as all Attack Wing captains and upgrades are compatible and can work together in ever-increasingly interesting combinations and permutations. (You will need a Starter Set or Alliance Campaign Box to play, however.) All three of these packs are available now, the two Delta Quadrant sets for $39.99 MSRP and Voyages for $49.99. With four/five ships, a ton of card elements, and campaign guides and unique ways to play, these faction packs are a solid deal and a ton of fun.

Review and photos by Scott Rubin.

Review samples courtesy of WizKids Games. For more information check out Attack Wing on WizKids.com.