by Stephen Agar
based on an original design by Richard Egan, with Andy Bate and Thomas Galloway
1. The standard rules of Diplomacy apply except where noted below,
2. The provinces are “planetary systems”, in three rings (see map) around a wormhole in space. Movement, retreat and support between planets is possible in either direction along the dotted lines connecting them.
3. The game is for EIGHT players. Each race has a home world plus one other additional SC at the beginning of the game. However, the home world is a double SC capable of supporting two units.
| Race / Homeworld | Other owned SC |
| Species 8472 | Dba |
| Borg | Eba |
| Romulans | Fba |
| Vulcan | Gba |
| Federation | Hba |
| Klingon | Iba |
| Cardassian | Jba |
| Ferengi | Kba |
Note that each power starts the game with only two planetary sytems, but three units.
4. In addition there are sixteen neutral supply centres, marked with shaded dots on the map. These are Aaa, Aea, Aia, Ama, Asa, Awa, Aab, Aeb, Caa, Cba, Cca, Cda, Cea, Cfa, Cga, Cha.
5. All units are Starships (“S”) (save for the Borg who may call their ships “Cubes” if they wish!)and players start with two Starships in their homeworld plus one Starship in their other intially owned SC – three in total.
6. Each turn, after movement, each ring moves one step in an anti-clockwise direction around its orbit, Thus after the first season, ‘Borg’ moves to the space occupied initially by ‘Aha’, whilst ‘Cba’ moves to the space initially occupied by ‘Cca’. Because there are 32 planets in the outer ring, 16 in the middle, and 8 in the inner, the inner ring will complete a full orbit in four times the speed of the outer ring. To facilitate this, the GM could publish maps for several turns ahead, or players could make their own adjustable maps on a card-mounted turning “wheel”. Note that the Starships move with the planetary systems they are in, as does the supply centre value of the planet.
7. The Wormhole
At the heart of the map is a Wormhole, which is entered either from one of the planetary systems in the inner ring or from warp drive. Any number of Starships may exist simultaneously in the Wormhole, which borders all eight planets on the inner ring. No conflict is possible in the Wormhole, and Starships there may not give support. A Starship may stay in the Wormhole as long as it wishes, but it may only move out of the Wormhole to a planetary system in the inner ring (for which it may receive support from Starships outside the Wormhole).
8. Warp Drive
All races have access to warp technologies, which may only be used when moving around rings, but not between them. All warp moves require two game moves to complete. To order a warp move a race orders S(Afb) Warp X (where X is a number between 1-9), the destination being revealed to the GM but not the other players. The following move the Starship will arrive at the destination planet which must be X spaces away from the starting location. To enter warp a Starship must stand and if dislodged the attempted warp move will fail. It follows that two or more Starships may enter warp at different places on the board with the intention of mounting a joint attack when they emerge. Additionally a player may opt to divert any Starship already under warp drive to enter the Wormhole instead, if he so wishes.
9. Multiple Units
Starships belonging to the same race may co-exist in the same planetary systems and may move together. Starships from the same race do not stand each other off and will instead be assumed to be trying to occupy the same space together. If more than one Starship is ordered to move to the same planetary system, then the joint attack is carried out at the value of the total number of Starships attempting to make that move, plus supports. A support is made for an attack on a planetary system, rather than for any particular Starship making an attack (e.g. S(Bca) S ROMULAN attack on Cba. Any Starships of the same race which end up at the same destination will be assumed to have merged
10. Builds.
A race can build in any vacant owned supply centre, save that in the home world it can build as many Starships as it wants whether the home world is occupied or not.
11. The victory criterion is control of 17 supply centres.