The Borg Queen betrayed no interest in a male "counterpart" in the Voyager television series, but don't think for a moment that this makes your personnel -- male or otherwise -- safe from assimilation in a Voyager-focused environment. The Collective is still all about assimilation -- now in a purer form, less polluted with creeping notions of individuality.

A Borg deck well-stocked with defense drones and copies of Assimilate Species has easy access to personnel battle authorization -- and potentially a whole host of new drones (formerly your opponent's key personnel). Assimilate Species can be used aggressively, as the engine driving a personnel assimilation deck; this works especially well in a comprehensive environment, where you can use Add Distinctiveness to score points from assimilated personnel. It can also be used defensively, held in reserve until needed to remove a pesky biological infestation (your opponent's intruders) from your ship.

You do need an Assimilation Table or Borg Nanoprobes to actually assimilate personnel using Assimilate Species, but neither card is terribly difficult to come by. Using Activate Subcommands or (if timed properly) Awaken, you can download the Procurement Drone and/or the Antitoxin Drone, who in turn can download the Assimilation Table or Borg Nanoprobes (again, watch the timing carefully).

Combos:

Assimilate Species + Fifth: Scuttle your current objective if an opportunity for mass assimilation of opponent's personnel presents itself.

Assimilate Species + Borg Nanoprobes + one or more Talon Drones: Maximize your potential for assimilation. Assimilate one opposing personnel per Talon Drone, one more with the Nanoprobes and any defense drone, and all the rest (if the target species) with Assimilate Species.

Assimilate Species + Cranial Transceiver Implant + Gowron of Borg + First + Fifth: Never lack for personnel battle attack authorization again.

Many Star Trek fans have debated whether they prefer Alice Krige or Susanna Thompson in the role of the Borg Queen. Now Star Trek CCG fans can debate which actress got the better card.

As with the First Contact version, this Queen has a selectable skill, which can save you an Adapt: Negate Obstruction (and turn!) when facing dilemmas. Typically, OFFICER, Diplomacy, Empathy, or Treachery are the best choices here, as these skills aren't easy to find on other Borg personnel – no drone has them. (If you're playing in a Voyager-only format, your two most likely considerations in choosing a skill for the Queen are Hazardous Duty and Implication.)

From there, this incarnation of Her Royal Borgness takes on a different tone. In place of a normal card play, she may download any Borg Only event or Borg Only interrupt. There are a few cards this won't actually work with; this download is in the place of a card play, so you can't use it, for example, to put an Adapt card in your hand for later use. However, there's so much it can get, that small shortcoming hardly matters. Need to build up drones for a mission attempt? Get Activate Subcommands. Want some extra resource manipulation? Get Alas, Poor Drone. A Borg Ship dilemma just came into play? Get Retask. And don't overlook We Are The Borg.

In Constructed Warp Speed play, a Borg player almost certainly wants the Borg Queen as their one seeded personnel – everything else can cascade from her. In other formats where seeding is not an option, stocking extra copies of the Queen works too. Since she has all three subcommand icons, she'll be a successful probe for all the core Borg objectives. She also has the enigma icon you're looking for on Harness Particle 010. The extra speed of drawing her in your opening hand and being able to use her from turn one more than offsets the possibility of having a few extras piled up in your hand by game's end – and there are always things like Handshake or Mutation that you might add in moderation for taking care of that situation.

Combos:

Borg Queen + Unicomplex: Nothing beats playing the best card in your deck for free.

Borg Queen (The Borg) + Borg Queen (First Contact): Want the best of both worlds? (Pun most definitely intended!) The new Queen is arguably more efficient for preparing your group of scouts in the early game, while the original is arguably more efficient at replacing any drones you happen to lose once you begin scouting. That's the perfect recipe for persona replacement. Get what you need out of one Queen, then switch to the other at the start of your turn when the situation changes.

The Borg expansion's Referee icon card comes at a perfect time in the game's history.

First, there's the revitalization of the Borg as an affiliation, which gives the Collective incentives to Establish Gateway. Not only does Resistance Is Futile still make the objective more lucrative, but now Nine of Twelve makes probing for it easier than ever. Okay, let them complete their objective at your mission if it's so easy. What they don't know is that your Hidden Agenda is Feedback Surge, and that those points are now yours. You can still sweep in and solve your mission, now dilemma-less, for its actual points. A better counter than Access Denied in my book!

Second, players have been screaming for an Ajur'n'Boratus counter, the duo being responsible for the shuffling of many a dilemma combo. Your opponent might now think twice before trying to eliminate multiple dilemmas from a mission. As long as you seed at least 4 dilemmas under planet missions, the Vorgons will cost your opponent at least 10 points when they do their thing.

And as better and better dilemmas come out, the temptation to use either Ajur and Boratus or Senior Staff Meeting to get rid of them definitely increases. What's worse? Losing lots of personnel to Ankari "Spirits" or Replicator Accident? Or taking a 10 point penalty for removing the dilemma? Of course, it doesn't disappear into thin air - you get to re-seed the killer card(s), even under the same mission!

At the same time, we get a new and very powerful counter to Q-bypass strategies. Definitely worth a surge of positive feedback ;-).

Combos:

Feedback Surge + opponent's Q + your 5 dilemmas at same mission: -50 points and you can re-seed the dilemmas right back under there.

Feedback Surge + opponent's Establish Gateway + your Investigate Quantum Singularity: 70 points for a mission with no dilemmas.

Feedback Surge + Q the Referee: Don't want to tip your hand with an obvious Hidden Agenda on the table? Suspend play with Ref-Q to get the Surge into play after your opponent is in too deep.

When you're looking for non-Borg Borg cards, here's one card you want. (That was the Mandatory One pun.)

One doesn't have much for plain skills - Youth comes in handy in odd places, and SCIENCE is just a useful thing to have a spare of, but you'll be adding him for his special skills.

We'll do the last skill first - he's a one-way Interlink effect with all Borg (the species, not the affiliation) at his location. While you don't get the big skill love-in that the Borg (the affiliation, not the species) gets, you can pull together skills from both player's Borg (the species, not the affiliation), whether they're "freed" or still part of the collective. With the large number of "freed" Borg to choose from, you'll have a great source of duplicate skills.

One's other special skill gives you something to do with all those new-found abilities - One can beam through any SHIELDS. There's plenty of obscure tricks you can play here - with Seven of Nine's Computer Skill, you can beam him onto a Nor to allow your ships to dock (or just send him to Ops to commandeer the place, if you prefer.) With his STRENGTH of 10, he's not the worst choice to send to your opponent's under-staffed ship to kill the crew (and if Seven's still around, you can Commandeer Ship).

On the icon side, he has all three subcommands, which will let you sub for a Leadership with Crisis or (if he's unselected) save another Away Team member from Denevan Neural Parasites. He's also an easy way past Invasive Procedures.

Combos:

One + Seven of Nine: Everyone loves Seven's skill set - why not have two? Add the Scission, you can have four!

One + Tribbles: Send One to take your opponent's tribbles back to his own ship.

Dear ol' Reg makes a regular TV appearance in the Delta Quadrant and although getting him there might be a little tougher, his skills definitely won't go to waste light years from home.

Providing many a key skill, Reginald will offer excellent backup to your prime dilemma-busting and mission-solving personnel, whichever quadrant you're in. Helping out his marooned Delta pals he goes a long way in solving many Delta Quadrant missions from a variety of mission selections: Aftermath, Inversion Mystery, Prevent Annihilation and Return Life Form to name but a few. Alpha Quadrant crews will find him equally useful in the plethora of missions with two or three skill requirements.

Because Reg is so flexible in contributing his regular skills to solving missions, you'll benefit even more from his special skill. Plus 5 points, just for having Reg anywhere in play, each time you're solving a DQ mission? Talk about a must have for the Voyager Environment! His INTEGRITY>7 and Honor combination preps him right up for an Ancestral Vision to boot. Backing up your Delta cutting edge mechanics with good ol' Alpha reliability suddenly seems like a great idea.

Combos:

Reginald Barclay + Angelo Tassoni + Alyssa Ogawa (Premiere) + Hannah Bates + Heal Life Form + Assign Mission Specialists: 55 points from a Fair Play protected mission, anyone feel like adding Barclay's Protomorphosis Disease?

Reginald Barclay + Reginald Barclay (FC) + Visit Cochrane Memorial + Espionage + Federation DQ missions: Switch Barclays to meet your moment to moment needs.

It's the Borg Headquarters... well, sort of.

The Unicomplex is categorized as an outpost in the game for a number of reasons: (1) it's a space-based facility and all other headquarters have been planet-based; (2) an outpost gives 50% added SHIELDs protection to docked ships, keeping those Borg ships with point boxes safe from attack by the Hirogen and Kazon; and (3) you can seed a Spacedoor on an outpost to download a universal ship, something that can't be done at a Headquarters.

Just like the Borg Outpost, the Unicomplex seeds at any Delta-quadrant space mission with no affiliation icons. Through the Borg expansion there are seven such missions to choose from. By using either the Interlink Drone (Nine of Eleven) or a Borg Vinculum you'll be able to scout the mission while skill-sharing even though the majority of your Borg are safely aboard your facility - away from the nasty Species 8472 dilemmas.

Let's get to the special game text on this outpost:

Once each turn, Borg Queen OR one unique drone OR one unique ship may report for free here.

In the First Contact expansion, there were two unique ships, the Queen's Borg Sphere and the Queen's Borg Cube. The Blaze of Glory expansion added Locutus' Borg Cube, while Trouble with Tribbles got us our first black-bordered unique drone, Third of Five. The Borg expansion literally bubbles over with unique drones and unique ships. There's another ship for the Queen to command. The five "Borg children" appear as unique drones, while Seven of Nine makes her official appearance in an expansion, along with former unimatrix partners Two, Three, and Four of Nine.

You'll now be able to stack your deck with a lot of unique ships and drones. And with the new Borg Queen, you'll be able to use your normal card play to get a [BO] Event or Interrupt and then still play a unique Borg drone or ship to the Unicomplex. Pretty nice, huh?

Finally, did I mention its SHIELDs of 74? Hey, attack decks, try and blow this thing up... yeah, I didn't think so!