I’m here today to talk about the Galaxy Builder Decks by Journey Mountain, available on DriveThru Cards for download print-and-play or professionally printed. While this resource is open-ended and intended to use with any sci-fi franchise, or your own setting, it fits extremely well into games of Star Trek Adventures and Captain’s Log.
Disclaimer: Journey Mountain reached out to Continuing Mission offering a complementary copy of the Galaxy Builder decks for review. The views here were formed by direct use of the cards and as objective as I can manage, but you can form your own opinion as you read.
Jeff McDowall, owner of the company, is a graphic artist, designer of board game meeples, and publisher of RPG titles. “I have been a Star Trek fan since TNG,” he writes. “My favorite Trek series is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. My favorite captains are Picard and Sisko. One of my first RPGs books was FASA Star Trek TNG Year One.” He’s long been a fan of Star Trek RPGs and made his own materials. “Fast forward to the 21st century and I first read about Star Trek Adventures on June 24, 2017 while on vacation in NY. I remember that date because during my flight home, Galaxy Builder Decks was born. It started as a few messy pen sketches in my notebook of a tool for making STA maps right on the table. A few months later I posted a LCARS-style version of the idea online for feedback.” During the Covid pandemic, McDowall says he went all in on the Star Trek Adventures books and as his cards developed he made sure they fit well with this game. “My hope for this series is that players can use the decks to create entire settings, expand on their adventures, and allow for more exploration.”
Card Design
Each of the Galaxy Builder Planets cards has a wealth of information in a small space. On the front side is an image of the world with some notes about gravity, atmosphere, water, temp, minerals, and vegetation. These are tailored to the type of world so you won’t end up with physically impossible (or at least implausible) worlds that seem duct-taped together. Your medium-sized glacier planet won’t mysteriously have high temperatures, no atmosphere, and little water. Instead, it will have traits consistent with the type of planet you’re imagining. In addition, by the way, the deck has a few asteroid belt options, three types of Main Sequence stars (K-, G-, and M-type), a black hole, and a gravitational Lagrange point which is otherwise empty.
Flipping it will show the back side which has a description of the planet (handy for when the crew scans it) and some qualities for any inhabitants living on the planet. On a glacier planet, for example, any native lifeforms will be skilled in cold weather habitat construction and cold weather survival, while colonists will need environmental suits to survive many areas. If the planet is larger (with higher gravity) they will also be very strong while a smaller planet will have agile inhabitants. More impressively, each planet card also has a Major Terrain table for some feature particular to its character. Roll a few times on this and you get some descriptors for regions of the planet so that it isn’t a featureless globe. Your glacier planet has Frozen Plains flanked by a region of Icy Crags, or perhaps Ice Spires in one area and Hot Springs in another.
While you can make use of the planet deck on its own, things really get interesting when you add the Planet Traits deck. As mentioned above, there is a lot of information on the planet cards and they are full of traits already. The Planet Traits deck has a bunch of different detailed traits that you can layer onto the characteristics on the planet cards themselves. Maybe your medium glacier planet has a notable orbital period of many years or it has some sort of luminescent material in the crust. Each trait card has a random table on the front (depending on the trait, the orbital period has you roll for how long and the luminescence asks what and why) and on the back it has a description and inhabitant qualities like the planet cards.
Each of these decks (Planets and Planet Traits) has 52 cards meaning that in theory you have 2,704 different planets that you can create. That’s a lot of combinations, even before you consider that you can have multiple traits per planet as well as small moons orbiting larger worlds which lends a twist on a situation even if you’re otherwise repeating cards. If you feel like you keep coming up with the same planets over and over again, these decks combined will absolutely smash that.
Using Galaxy Builder Cards
So how do you actually make use of the Galaxy Builder cards? There are a few different ways and they are both fast and easy to use. First of all you can use Galaxy Builder in your game planning. When you are a GM and coming up with the next mission for your crew, grab your deck and pick a star for the system’s center. Then you can flip over as many planets as you want or pick the types of planets you’d like to see (or a combination). Then, if you have it, assign one or two traits from the Planet Traits deck to each one. Bam! In just a few minutes you have the basics of a star system which you can fill with random elements from the cards and narrative elements according to your mission idea. If you didn’t start with a mission idea, you can even come up with it at this point! Why is that glacier planet luminescent? Why is this moon over here radioactive? Sounds like someone needs to take a closer look.
The other way to use Galaxy Builder is for on-the-fly sandbox play. Often Federation crews have specific orders to proceed to particular systems, but sometimes they might be surveying an area (like the Shackleton Expanse) and can choose which order to visit things. You might also have a Klingon crew, civilian vessel, or another situation where missions are not as strictly directed. In these cases, you can have a large number of systems that are generated on the fly as your crew expressed an interest. Maybe you have big ideas for a few of these, but you can fill a hex map full of star systems fairly easily. Most will be a session of dealing with a quick issue (from these cards) while others will have multi-session stories waiting to be stumbled onto. Obviously, games of Captain’s Log will use such sandbox generation pretty exclusively.
A hybrid of these is unexpected detours that the crew takes. You might direct them to the third planet in the Whatever system, but the plot causes them to check out the other planets in the system. Oh no! You can snub their ideas by saying that the other planets are uninteresting or unremarkable or you can flip a few cards and have ready made worlds for them! Maybe you even improvise a new ending from their good idea, moving the Romulan base to a different interesting planet or establishing a hidden Bajoran site with important clues.
Expansion Packs
At present there are two expansion packs for adding more cards to your Galaxy Builder decks. The Asteroid Set (for which you can find a free sample version) has a smattering of different asteroid types, like an asteroid minefield or crystalline asteroids, and some related traits such as a creature nest. The Spooky Set (with a similar free sample version) is similarly different sizes of dead (post-extinction) worlds and shrouded (hidden from sensors) worlds as well as traits like “space tomb.” Each of these sets has 9 new cards (six planets and three traits) meaning another 18 different options when you fold them in. I’d caution against folding them in permanently, though, since they can skew the deck a little bit. Adding another 12 planets to the deck which are specific will leave you with 20% spooky/asteroid options which gives you a high probability of strangeness.
In addition, there are a number of accessories that can really enhance your experience with the cards and most of them are free! The Planet Data Sheets are an excellent addition to the process, but there are lots of Star Trek Adventures options so you might be set with data sheets. Similarly there are Label Cards which are print-and-play cards for making your own planets. Generally the label cards are designed to collect the info of planets and traits in one card, but you can make your homebrew material too. Again, you might have Star Trek Adventures options for these already but they are free and they incorporate all the systems of the Galaxy Builder cards so I say go for it!
Lastly, the Star System Mats are large sheets of empty orbits to collect your cards together. You don’t need them, a kitchen table is enough for flipping down a star system using Galaxy Builder but I really like these sheets and they also make a great backdrop for zooming your minis around. Continuing Mission has some battle grids (check out “Space Tiles” on that page) which can also work but, again, these mats are specifically designed for the Galaxy Builder cards so it makes it extremely easy.
Conclusion
I think this product is great and, while it is designed for potentially any sci-fi game, the application to Star Trek games is quick and easy. It’s not foolproof, I had more than a few flips that I scrapped because it didn’t fit what I was looking for, but there’s something tactile and fun about flipping cards that is just much more interesting than rolling on tables or matrices. It’s also faster: rolling, looking up, reading, and noting down has twice as many steps to it as flipping over and reading.
I had a ton of fun with these as part of my Captain’s Log storytelling and used them to quickly generate a star system for a mission I was writing. The process was smooth and created some ideas that I just know I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Despite wanting drama, defaulting to an M-class planet that resembles southern California is something that every Star Trek fan has a bias towards. Instead, my characters visited glacial tomb worlds and comets with cosmozooic creatures that challenged my preconceptions. This product definitely led to a more exciting experience for me and it can for you too!
This is so cool. What a way to supplement any STA game.