It's Star Trek's 46th birthday! Happy birthday, Star Trek. We got you a Google Doodle, but once that goes away, you'll still have a Settlers of Catan reskin.
Franchise reskinning for board games can be a fairly lazy manuever to cash in on a few extra licensing dollars, and Star Trek is pretty notorious for this anyway. However, as io9's Ed Grabianowski notes, Catan actually makes for a pretty successful Federation refit:
The development cards have been retooled to fit the theme, of course, but there are also support character cards. Each character (from the original series) has a special ability that a player can use twice during the course of the game. Chekov lets you move the Klingon ship, Uhura allows you to force a resource trade with another player, and Spock gets you extra resources, for instance.
It's pretty fitting that a frontier-themed game like Settlers would be reconfigured for Star Trek. Not many remember that one of the major influences on the original show, apart from classic sci-fi, was the Western. And let's be honest, if you're playing a game about settling the frontier, why not the final one?
(Except not in the Star Trek V: The Final Frontier sense. Let's forget that happened, okay?)
Star Trek: Catan, available through Mayfair Games, is scheduled for US release by September 13th.
Via io9.