Star Trek Catan expansion on the way

Last year the release of Star Trek Catan seemed to spark some excitement, so board game playing trekkies should be very pleased to hear there's an expansion due for release next month. Star Trek: Catan - Federation Space adds a new two-part map of Federation space to the game.

The inspiration for the Catan expansion.

The designers wanted to base the new maps on real space, in a similar way to the real-world based maps in their Catan Geographies range, so they looked for an appropriate map in the Star Trek universe and landed on one of the graphics seen several times in Trek. That original map includes many real stars, which the Catan designs built upon a little, adding in a few more Star Trek references, and tweaking the arrangement a little to suit the Catan system (you can read a bit more about the design of the new expansion on the Catan blog). Here are the new maps:

Thanks to my reader Steve Mollmann for pointing me towards this!