Star Trek: Ascendancy, from Gale Force Nine, is a new Star Trek themed civilization building game.  The core game comes with three factions: the Federation, the Romulans, and the Klingons.  Each faction starts out on its home world, equidistant from the other players and without having made contact.  Players start with a control node, and all three other nodes on their home world- production, research, and culture.  First, players may spend resources (the same as the nodes), to improve the weapons or shields of the ship, build new control nodes (thus colonizes the planet) and resource nodes once they have spread out into the galaxy, or build more starships.  During the engagement phase, a player may exhaust his command tokens to take actions like build a starbase (which lets you build more ships far from your home world), select research cards (you can never be working on more than you have research nodes), attack another factions ship's or colonies (with military might or with culture), group several ships into specialized fleets, or move.  Movement is very important in the game, because it allows you to build the map.  When you leave one of the system discs you roll a dice that tells you if the hyperspace lane you are building is length two, three, or four.  Place the appropriate length lane on the board and when your ship reaches the end it can arrive at new system disc.  The player would then draw a new system disc (some of which have hazards to brave, some of which aren't planets at all, but dangerous phenomena that can destroy a ship or reward research).  Players can also enter warp by placing the ship just outside the system and laying down a warp token, which allows ships to travel directly to other systems at a distance equal to the number of warp tokens are next to it (more are added every round).  During the final phase players check for victory, collects resource tokens from nodes and trade agreements, and do some house cleaning.  Players that have made contact with each other can then bid for turn order by spending resources.  The first player to gain five ascendancy tokens wins the game (paid for with five culture), or if one player has destroyed the others he wins.