Game play is relatively simple. You get your ship (worth a certain number of points), then buy disks to fill out your ship (up to its capacity). You can buy ship upgrades, special personnel and personal weapons, each taking one capacity. Once everyone has their forces you can lay out the ship disks and your displays and go at it.

On each you turn you first reveal or hide counters (for intelligence and to protect them from attack), then you lay out your three commands upside down so other players don't know what you plan that turn, then you do three phases of action, then boarding party combat and maybe something else then it's the next turn.

During the action phases each player can do one action. The first ship is the one with the most command points (usually from personnel). It can go now or skip its turn (each other ship can then go now or skip its turn, once the last person goes it's back to the top with the ships that didn't go having the option of going now or skipping, until everyone has done an action for that phase). The actions are change speed, change direction, weapons, shields, and crew action. Your ship is constantly moving every phase and you can either do your action and move forward or move forward and do your action (moving is down by flipping the ship disk end over end).

Weapons fire is done with phasers or torpedoes. Phasers have a range of 1 without improvements (measured with a range counter -- about 3 or 4 inches). Torpedoes are small, low speed disks that shoot out from the front of your ship, moving every phase for four movements and able to change direction at will. Weapons do damage from 4-7 or more. Take that number of damage chits and shake them, they'll either come up hit or miss, the number of hits is the amount of damage. You also roll five damage chits (one of each type) and if only one comes up with a system (one or two if their shields are down), you do a critical hit to that system. A weapon action is also used for transporter actions. Shields can be re-raised on every shield action, so defensive actions are relatively easy, though you then have nothing else to do.

With just the four non-crew actions, it's tough to plan your turn and line up shots and so forth. That's where the crew action comes in. Crew disks have either special powers that you flip the disk to use, or they can do other actions. Each crew disk has three lines for actions, each line having zero to two of the other commands. When you use an action to activate a crew disk, you can use any of the three lines and do the one or two actions given. This gives you flexibility to choose a command at the time you need it rather than having to plan ahead, and it also allows you to do two actions in one action phase.

Anyway, the mission was to capture a Klingon prototype starship and fly it back to your side of the board. Dave had the Ferengi, Chris had the Feds, and I had the Cardassian ship. Since I had the biggest ship I came in blazing, choosing three attack actions and planning to at least fire my torpedoes if nothing else (each ship only has a few torpedoes). Dave went for the prototype with shields down and beamed in his lone Ferengi captain, but I blew up his unshielded ship. Chris then came in and I mauled him too as I did a life support crit (can't use crew disk powers) and then he didn't have a shield action handy. But Dave won. Once he had the prototype moving he could shield shield shield and I didn't have the firepower or flexibility to catch him and punch through his shields and beam someone aboard. It was a fun game.

Dave and Chris had a Gamma World game to go to (run with the Alternity rules). They dragged me along but thankfully there wasn't room. Another loud person in the game and I wasn't really interested in gaming until 02:00. Eric, Ken, some other guy and I went out for dinner. They wanted steak so we stopped at Major's Steakhouse on the road between Bollinger Canyon and Crow Canyon roads. Didn't look like much on the outside but it was quite nice and elegant on the inside. I had the 20 oz porterhouse which was quite good. Ken had a rare steak which wasn't all that rare. Eric had the rack of lamb. The other guy had a medium steak which was a bit rare. Ken wasn't impressed with the food, saying how in Chicago they have real steak, and real pizza, and real cold, though not much else.

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