I am one of the happy few that backed Astroforce (as the Kickstarter campaign may be over by the time you read this). We are in for a treat. But, as it is a reskin of Star Trek: The Dice Game, you can always play the Print & Play version.
Star Trek: The Dice Game was the 2016 Golden Geek Best Print & Play Board Game-winner. Its mechanics are based on Deep Space D6, but it uses them for an hour long adventure game in which you go on missions (well, a five-year mission, as we're talking the original Star Trek here), try to overcome events and hopefully develop some technologies, abilities and upgrades. The dice are your crew, you roll them every turn to see who's available - commanders, medics, scientists, engineers or security. You can also lose dice to scanning, which eventually will lead to extra events.
Every year you'll draw a new mission card, then every round you'll try to do a stage of your mission. For example in "Investigate Spatial Anomaly" you first will take damage and try to repair that. In the next rounds, you'll draw events but also scan the surroundings and have combat with whatever caused it.
Events can be anything from weapons malfunctioning to a Romulan attack. You can allocate your crew to overcome these events, but they may also be needed in the ship for repairs or healing. Or for the next step in the mission of course.
But that's not all. Your crew can also be used for benificial developments. For example giving you extra crew in a later round for one time use, or enhancing the efficiency of your crew permanently, or expanding your ship.
Where Deep Space D6 is a perfect filler game, Star Trek: The Dice Game is a full blown board game. It will take about an hour, and every turn you'll have interesting decisions to make for allocating your crew. Also, the stages on the mission cards and the events that happen will spin a little story. Astroforce will have extra ships, nice dice, and the Away Teams-expansion included.
It is a hard game to win, although I'm sure I will get better at it after playing some more. Also it doesn't matter too much as I'm completely engaged all the time. But, after five losses I am baffled there's an official Kobayashi Maru mode included. I thought I was already playing that!
