Beadle & Grimm’s is following its 2025 release of Star Trek: Picard murder mystery game and an escape room in a box based on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with two more Star Trek-themed games. This time around, players will be able to enjoy the antics of Star Trek: Lower Decks or prove the innocence of one of the franchise’s sketchiest characters. A Kickstarter campaign for Deep Space Nine: Holosuite Homicide and Lower Decks: Chaos Protocol launches on April 13.
“For all four of these games, we had to come up with a story that was interesting and compelling and understandable, no matter how much or how little of Star Trek you knew,” Beadle & Grimm’s co-founder Bill Rehor told Polygon in a video interview. “It couldn’t be reliant on any particular aspect of lore if that wasn’t something we could very easily explain.”
In Holosuite Homicide, you play a Starfleet Command junior investigator trying to prove the equipment at Quark’s Bar, Grill, Gaming House and Holosuite Arcade on Deep Space Nine didn’t malfunction and kill someone. Getting entangled in Quark’s shady business would typically be Odo’s job as the space station’s chief of security, but Beadle and Grimm’s designers opted against assigning players characters.
“One of the really beautiful things about this whole genre of games is that you can play them with basically any number of players. Assigning specific roles to people might become limiting,” Rehor said. “It seemed better to leave it a little bit less defined.”
Beadle & Grimm’s primarily makes high-end accessories for Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games, and the company brings the same level of design to the props for its Star Trek games. The murder mystery box contains three envelopes which are opened at different phases of the investigation, each packed with clues players need to decipher. Players also get wearable badges that can be scanned with a phone to enable augmented reality elements, like going to a web page to type in a code to get more information.
“We had so much fun creating materials that were coming from Odo, Captain Sisko and Quark,” Beadle & Grimm co-founder Jon Ciccolini said. “We’re coming up with things that we’ve never done before for any of our D&D stuff.”
Ciccolini said he regretted that the poster map included in the Picard game Murder on the Titan-A didn’t have much game function tied to it. So this time around, the map of Deep Space Nine’s promenade is closely tied to some clues and one of the major puzzles. Other puzzles will require players to use a prop to play music and even take their badges apart. None of the components will be destroyed, so you can sell the game or give it to a friend when you’re done playing.
“There are a couple of props in there that are directly lifted from the show that fans of the show will recognize,” Rehor said. “It’s been a very fun process to just figure out each of those pieces individually and how we can make them serve the puzzle, make them look cool, make them exciting for people to discover as they progress through the game.”
A poll of backers of Beadle & Grimm’s first Kickstarter campaign found there was a lot of enthusiasm for Lower Decks, a passion shared by some of the game designers. That inspired the creation of Lower Decks: Chaos Protocol, where players must solve 10 increasingly difficult puzzles in order to free the Lower Decks team from a dormant Federation security system they accidentally triggered.
The game went through extensive playtesting to ensure the puzzles were satisfying to solve, but not too hard. The game’s digital elements also ensure players can get some more information if they’re stuck by asking for help from Q, a mischievous, godlike being who’s made regular appearances in the franchise since The Next Generation.
“The Star Trek universe has this great built-in character of Q that kind of watches everything and knows all and can jump in and provide hints,” Ciccolini said.
Rehor said he hopes these games will serve as a gateway to get Star Trek fans and board game players to try TTRPGs.
“Nobody has to DM it,” he said. “Nobody has to prep. Nobody has to roll up a character. If somebody doesn’t show up that night, it doesn’t stop you from being able to play. I think that a big part of the popularity of these kinds of games is that it’s giving you a lot of those same experiences, but with a much lower barrier for entry.”
The Kickstarter campaign for Deep Space Nine: Holosuite Homicide and Lower Decks: Chaos Protocol launches on April 14. Backers who pledge within the first 72 hours will receive a free Deep Space Nine Pack for Star Trek Online.
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