Cry Havoc!

As a young Star Trek fan, I remember watching the Season 2 finale episode “The Jem’Hadar” and thinking how the Dominion, and particularly the Jem’Hadar, were truly frightening. They wiped out an entire Bajoran colony in the Gamma Quadrant and destroyed a retreating Galaxy Class starship just to make a point. Throughout the next several seasons, anytime the Jem’Hadar are mentioned it is with a mixture of fear and awe – even by other citizens of the Dominion. In them, the races of the Alpha Quadrant were confronted with a frightening, bloodthirsty, and implacable foe with a lust for battle and carnage that made the Klingons look docile by comparison. Preferring my science fiction a bit darker than TNG standard fare, the thought of the Jem’Hadar discovering and reactivating an Iconian Gateway and using it to inflict carnage without warning, virtually anywhere in the known galaxy, was nothing short of terrifying (and exciting!). And yet, the Star Trek 2e Dominion player never really has had a way to build a deck that appropriately incorporated that kind of potential for combat and destruction until now. In the Nth Degree, the Dominion adds Vandros IV, Restore Iconian Gateway to its mission suite and the possibility of building a truly frightening Dominion combat deck becomes a reality.

The Dominion has always had ways to initiate combat with potentially devastating results: Bred for Battle, Limara'Son, Fierce Soldier, Invasive Transporters, Toman'torax, Obstinate Second, and others have been available throughout the history of 2e. But, putting it all together in a reliably effective way has always proven more than a little difficult. When it comes to noun-based mayhem, ironically has always been the stand-out player: cheap ships and personnel + reliable ways to get the verbs needed to initiate battle + a tight Tillman pile = virtually guaranteed destruction. The Klingons are similarly good at murder. But the Dominion, sadly, has always lagged a bit behind and from a Trek-sense standpoint, it never made any, well, sense. With Vandros IV, and supporting cards like Devastating Melee, now the Dominion player willing to devote the needed resources to carnage and create a combat deck that rivals any other faction or affiliation for the ability to “cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”

The story behind the creation of Vandros IV is an interesting one. Both initial competing design teams, working separately and without communicating, came up with remarkably similar ideas for bringing the Iconian Gateway to 2e: one team created a mission that put personnel and equipment anywhere when completed, the other created a unique Artifact event that played on a completed mission and allowed the owner to move personnel and equipment from that mission to any other during the Execute Orders phase. What finally made it through the production process of design, playtest, and revision was a powerful, elegant, and deadly marriage of those two ideas. Vandros IV allows the Dominion player, upon completion, to place “any number of Jem’Hadar and/or hand weapons from this planet on any player’s ship or planet mission.” Will the Dominion player use this text to instantaneously appear to another of his own missions, say Teplan Prime, Subjugate Planet or even The Siege of AR-558 and try for the two-mission turn? Or, will the Dominion player use this text to put her Jem’Hadar aboard an opponent’s ship and decimate the crew? With both options available, Vandros IV gives the Dominion player a way to finally build an effective combat deck that still allows the flexibility and versatility to keep it competitive.

The attached deck is a simple riff on the theme of the Jem’Hadar combat deck: Mobilization Points allows for the more expensive personnel to be discounted; Bred for Battle, Devastating Melee, and Limara'Son, Fierce Soldier each allow the Dominion player to begin combat; and the equipment are there to help fuel Devastating Melee as well as Toman'torax, Obstinate Second. Our Death is Glory To the Founders is there for needed control/prevention, Invasive Transporters is there to get your nouns off a ship (or on it, if you can’t solve Vandros IV in time), and Shrouded in Light is there to help your Jem’Hadar to avoid random selection. Building the dilemma pile is simple: put together your best attempt to stall your opponent until you can build up the necessary forces to begin your assault.

by Michael Shea, Designer