Being a look back at cards from the Star Trek CCG, and what I thought of them back when they were fresh and new... in EPISODE order. Home Soil wraps with a rare facility...
PICTURE: Youch, the candy colors of orange and purple are kitsch enough that the clunky model need not have looked so terrible too. This is one paltry facility when you compare it with others (though the Colony is also pretty ugly). Looks like something from a much cheaper show. A 2.7, which is at least a little atmospheric.
LORE: The lore fails to do one very important thing - mention the station!!! It's an okay comment on terraforming in general, and the exact station is identified by planet, if you will, but it's pretty thin, all in all. A 1.8.
TREK SENSE: Cute, but pretty conceptual, which is rare for a noun card. The Neutral nature of the facility makes it useable by anyone (though the one in the pic is Federation), but that's okay since terraforming could interest any of the affiliations. And its Shields are low, even lower than a Colony, but it's a low priority target, so again, that's fine. The game text, however, is ludicrous. On the surface, it's a fun idea that you could terraform mission requirements to other mission requirements (as long as you had a planet to plant the terraformers on), taking decades (the space between games) to do so. But you don't have to go very deep at all to see that it's nonsense. First of all, there are no decades between games or else we'd have trouble using the same personnel over and over again. Second, why would anyone terraform an already habitable world like Risa, Romulus or Earth? But you can! Also, terraforming has nothing to do with mission requirements. Making an inhospitable planet hospitable might take out the harsh requirements of Strength and Security and make the mission something else, maybe to do with Medical instead, but you'd be hard pressed to justify most changes. A fun concept (original!), but has trouble leaving the ground. A low 1.5.
SEEDABILITY: If you have regular opponents, you could use Terraforming Station to change the requirements of a mission on the spaceline for your next game. The uses of this include tightening up your skill redundancy by adding a mission with the appropriate requirements, and creating a fun Barbering deck where all missions require the exotic skill which makes mission theft more difficult, or even converting your opponent's favorite mission into something entirely too difficult so that it won't be used in the next game. The best reason to use the card of course, is for fun. I've always enjoyed retooling missions, then changing their names to something similar but more appropriate (redefine Brute Force's STRENGTH as INTEGRITY and you get Nonviolent Resistance, for example). There are plenty of possibilities, but you have to expect to face the same opponent again. That's why it won't work in tournaments (or very seldom). But in friendly play, you could probably use it. The SHIELDS are ultra-low, but it won't make for a priority target unless you're abusing it or threatening your opponent's planet mission. Fun factor is high, and with multiple Stations, you could do some damage, but it's more of a curiosity than anything else. A 2.4 from me.
TOTAL: 8.4 (42%) It's sad, but those are the criteria.
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