‘Star Trek: Lower Decks – Buffer Time’ is the Perfect Game For When You’re Shirking Work
Shirking (v): avoiding especially difficult or unpleasant work. i.e. the opposite of what you’ll do with Star Trek: Lower Decks – Buffer Time.
Some jobs are great. Panda wrangler, for example. Ice cream taste tester is another. But working in the lower decks of a Federation starship isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And when you’re just a redshirt, you’ll do anything you can to avoid doing any kind of work, at least until the officers start coming around.
Star Trek: Lower Decks – Buffer Time Overview
Star Trek: Lower Decks – Buffer Time is a cooperative, push-your-luck card game about doing a the least amount of important work as possible without getting caught. But along the way, you’ll have your own little side projects to keep yourself entertained.
The basic gameplay is simple. The game is played over 5 rounds. In each round, players will have some job they need to complete. In order to complete the job, they will need to tally up enough Effort points in order to meet the Target value. When the job is complete, players might score a couple points. If the players have scored enough points at the end of the 5th round, they win!
However, the “critically important tasks” aren’t very fun and don’t provide much enjoyment. So, players will also add their own fun side projects to the job as well. These side projects will score a lot more points, but each side project also increases the target value that the players need to reach in order to complete the main job.
Push-Your-Luck or Commanding Officers
Plus, officers also patrol the lower decks; meaning they will be drawn randomly from the deck. Each officer has a certain number of points, as shown by the icons in the corner. If there are ever 4 or more officer points in the pile, the players have been caught slacking. When this happens, the round ends with no points scored.
But, players also have Alpha Shift cards. These can do all sorts of useful things to help the players mitigate the risk. Things like peek at the cards, discard played officers and more. But these cards are very limited. So use them wisely!
Star Trek: Lower Decks – Buffer Time is a balancing act of players adding in fun side projects in order to score more points, but not so many that it becomes too difficult to complete the real job at hand. Plus, knowing when and how to use the Alpha cards to best ultilize their powerful effects.
It’s a lightweight and fun push-your-luck game that’s great for getting a game night started, or for sneaking in a game during work hours.
BoLS does not endorse avoiding work or neglecting responsibility, unless it’s really boring or you super don’t want to do it.
