Lottery Tickets Reviewed: Star Trek
This scratcher’s illustration and overall look belie promise: beneath the classic Star Trek wordmark, a Kirk-era USS Enterprise blasts phasers toward the right side of the card. The game area is a field of reflective silver stars sprinkled over a rosy nebula; nothing you haven’t seen on a hundred t‑shirts and coffee mugs at the mall, but still effortlessly “Trek.” The card’s graphic design is not boldly going where no one design has gone before, but it’s serviceable.
Scratch the game field, though, and you’ll discover a failure as sad as a wet Andorian: while many of the ticket symbols are vaguely space-related, none mine the rich and campy lexicon of the Star Trek universe. This ticket’s symbols include ‘Planet,’ ‘Cloud,’ and ‘Space Shuttle,’ to name just a few. Whiles the Enterprise crew undeniably visited planets, and planet with atmospheres have clouds, could the game’s designers have picked anything more generic and universal? ‘Shoes,’ perhaps, since even space explorers wear shoes? ‘Burrito,’ because even in space, humans need their fourthmeal? ‘Space Shuttle’ is a particularly pokey choice given its non-Warp travel speeds, and ‘Globe’ is a such a non-space baffler one wonders if this game designer is a former high school jock flexing his graphic design muscles to mess with the nerdy Trekker bunch so many years after graduation.
A few simple substitutions that showed specificity and a little love for the series could’ve knocked this card all the way to the Klingon home world; swap ‘Klingon’ for ‘Alien,’ ‘Romulus’ for the generic ‘Planet,’ and they would’ve done right by fans of the Roddenbery franchise and sales would’ve multiplied like so many Tribbles. As is, this scratcher’s a pass.
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Reader Comments
At a fundamental level, the idea of a lottery ticket in itself conflicts with the post-scarcity society depicted in the titular show.
Unless you’re talking about dilithium crystals, because everyone fought after that shit.
They should have made every square a dilithium crystal.