SNAP Review – Star Trek: Chrono-Trek

Two to beam up, Miles.

– No, Scotty!

What happened to O’Brien?

Oh, no.

This is a SNAP Review for Star Trek: Chrono-Trek, a Star Trek themed card game about time travel from Looney Labs.

Star Trek: Chrono-Trek was designed by Andrew Looney himself and is a thematic reimplementation of the original ChronoNauts. 2-6 players of almost any age can play. A game lasts anywhere from 15-45 minutes.

Art

Well, Anitra, unsurprisingly we are a couple of nerds; and let’s face it, we’re a little particular about our sci-fi. So how’s the art in Chrono-Trek?

The graphic design looks a lot like those late eighties concepts for what 24th century computers would look like.

What art there is, in the characters, was done by Kevin Hill. And they look pretty much like their characters, if stylized, so I’m going to say he did a pretty good job.

The icons are easy to understand, and there aren’t a lot of different ones to try to keep straight

But one thing that’s not easy to keep straight in Chrono-Trek is the timeline. So, Anitra, what on earth is going on here?

Mechanics

Let’s talk mechanics. Chrono-Trek works almost exactly like the original ChronoNauts, so if you understand how one of these games works, you understand them all.

Anyway, Chrono-Trek starts with the timeline. This is pretty much the way everything is supposed to be. But every single one of these cards has an alternate event on the back, and you’re going to need to trigger some of these events to win the game. So how does that work?

Each player starts with an identity card, that they keep secret. These cards have some number of requirements on them – usually it’s three things. They also have pips up here in the corner that represent their difficulty. Some of these identities have really specific goals, like playing fracture cards or manipulating a temporal anomaly.

On your turn, you draw a card and then either draw another card or you play a card from your hand.

These cards could be all sorts of things.

Green Artifact cards are played just like a keeper in Fluxx – you put it down in front of you when you play it. That object is now “yours”.

Yellow Inverter cards flip a Linchpin card in the timeline. When you flip over a Linchpin, look below for Ripplepoints. Flip these, too.

Blue Action cards have all sorts of different effects.

Purple Power actions are just that: they’re stronger actions. They’re obviously less common.

Black Event cards are mandatory play cards. If you draw one of these, play it, and then draw another card again.

These light green Assignment cards can be simply discarded to draw two cards. But if you can discard the Artifacts they require, you can get many more cards from the deck.

Finally, maroon Fracture cards completely break the timeline – they fracture it. Playing a Fracture actually overrides a specific Ripplepoint and completely changes the timeline in that specific spot. There’s other fallout effects from Fractures, too. If you need an event for your identity and it happens after the fracture event, you actually cannot win the game. You’ve got to get rid of the Fracture.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a temporal anomaly working its way backwards through time – from the end of the timeline to the beginning. Mostly it’s the Event cards that move this along.

Play circles the table until one player has all of the requirements fulfilled on their Identity card. If any player has fulfilled their requirements on their turn, they win the game immediately.

Expectations

So Andrew, what did we expect from Chrono-Trek?

We’ve talked a lot about games I got the chance to see at GAMA Expo this year (2024) and this was another one. Technically I got a demo of ChronoNauts, but then I saw over the shoulder (I was like “oh, is that a Star Trek version?”) And that was the one I asked about. So I kind of knew what I was getting into.

For me, it looked really complicated when I first looked at the box and how things needed to be laid out. I saw that you’d have to lay out a whole bunch of cards – it’s like 36 of them in the timeline.

And any game that involves time travel, I expect there to be some complexity and it be a little difficult to learn.

Surprises

So what surprised you about it?

Once I figured out what this layout meant, I actually thought ChronoTrek was really easy to understand. It’s not necessarily easy to PLAY – you have to get everything just right to meet your goal, and hopefully without telegraphing too much to your opponents so they don’t block you.

For me, I was surprised just how much I could feel Fluxx while I was playing this game. There’s something about Andrew Looney’s designs that is a really fun tongue-in-cheek wry humor, almost irreverent kind of thing. This came out here in little ways, like one of Janeway’s items being her favorite coffee cup, for example.

Or like the Action “Vent the Warp Core” – which lets you discard a bunch of cards from your hand and redraw.

So even though the gameplay shares very little with Fluxx – although there are some things – this is still very clearly a Looney Labs game. And with a mythos like Star Trek, it’s super fun and super cool to see just how much care they took to include tons of events and situations that cropped up in the various series.

It also surprised me just how quickly most of our games went. Since it takes a long time to set up, but not very long to reset the game, we always played two or three times in a session.

Recommended?

So Andrew, would we recommend Chrono-Trek?

Every time traveling movie or show inevitably has some kind of multi-step process to unravel the time paradox and set things straight. Your goal here might not be to set things straight, but you’ll definitely have to work through those complicated steps.

That doesn’t mean you can’t play this as a family, though. The iconography is pretty clear on this game, and you don’t reallly need to know Star Trek.

There is a lot of reading in this game. It can feel complicated, even though each individual step is small.

But if you like the idea of spending a few minutes with all of your beloved Star Trek friends across all the series – and maybe sharing them with your children – and the idea of a time-based puzzle doesn’t set your head spinning, you should take a look at Star Trek: Chrono-Trek.

We’re going to give it 3 ½ starships out of 5.

And that’s Chrono-Trek, in a SNAP!

Find it on Amazon or at Looney Labs.

---

The Family Gamers received a copy of Star Trek: Chrono-Trek from Looney Labs for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

Background music is Machinery, used by permission from You Bred Raptors?