If you took a single-player (and less-than-stellar-budget) videogame spin on Risk, The Final Frontier Edition, worked in the option to either auto-resolve or directly control each engagement on the simply-rendered strategic map, shot-gunned the entire thing with Trek-flavored sprinkles and spent the entire development-cycle subsisting entirely on Romulan Ale and pretzels, you'd have something like Star Trek: Conquest -- and Gene forgive me, some of this is actually praise, of a sort.

Conquest assumes an all-out (and essentially unexplained) war between several of the main powers of the Star Trek universe; at least as far as the TV shows are concerned (The Federation, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, the Cardassians, the Dominion, the Breen). The gloves are off in this one, even for The Federation, and there aren't any high-minded, Trek-ly notions of diplomacy, interspecies goodwill or any of that seek-out-new-life stuff; this is purely a territorial space-grab, stripped to its military-industrial framework.

The armchair-fleet-admiraling of this war is done on a strategic-level map displaying the simple, iconic star-systems in the galaxy, with just-as-simple transit lines connecting them. Players choose a race and prosecute the war with up to three fleets of starships (each assigned to "admirals" who impart defense, attack and movement bonuses to their fleets). Star systems are essentially identical, differing in the materials that their capture can provide for the war effort. Furthermore, each system can support a Starbase, fleet, bank of defensive installations, or a research/production facility.

Each instance of fleet-to-fleet (or -to system) combat can either be "simmed out," or you can take some rudimentary, arcade-style, hands-on command in ship engagements (controlling your ship, utilizing weapons and shields, etc). As funds roll in from the greater scale of the war, you can upgrade your ships, play to the various base skills of your admirals (as well as the intrinsic pros and cons of each race), and develop uber-weapons that you can start throwing at the enemy on the strategic level of the conflict.

In a board game like Axis & Allies, such "research" might take the form of developing abstractly-represented rocket technologies, or atomic weapons. Here, it can lead to the bizarrely un-Trek (albeit, it must be said, perversely compelling) specter of the Federation wantonly slinging world-killing Genesis Device WMDs like water balloons at enemy systems, before sending in mop-up fleets of dreadnaughts to attrition-down whatever resistance remains ("Give me your hearts and minds, or I'll terraform your damn huts back to the Stone Age.")

As with many of the simple, iconic board-games it seems to emulate, the gameplay of Conquest is prone to falling into some familiar cyclic patterns: races starting in the same initial locations, cramming the strategic bottlenecks with fleets to protect the home-frontier industrial base, and sending wave after wave of reinforcements to their inevitable grinding attrition-death on the front lines until a crucial strategic imbalance overwhelms one side or the other. Of course, there is a certain knuckle-dragging satisfaction to jumping in there to influence the engagement yourself by slugging it out.

It's a stripped-down package of a game, and while it's true that are some simplistic differences between the various races (including some nice-touch variations in interface, ambient communications-chatter, etc.), you've really only got the main game and a back-up mode that drops you into individual battles devoid of connection to any larger framework (beating the game with various races unlocks new skirmish maps, however). There's no form of multiplayer -- a crime, that -- and no conceit of a Story mode. The visuals and ambient music are easy on the eyes and ears respectively, for the most part, but the repetitive audio one-liners in battle can get a little grating over time.

Strangely, the game's very stripped-down simplicity and beer-and-pretzels strategic mentality are what give it its charm, and there's enough incentive to at least give the various races a chance in the rotation. Far from the worst Trek game out there -- and just as far from the best -- Star Trek: Conquest boldly (and somewhat clumsily, and flippantly) goes where no Trek title has gone before -- with illogical, albeit somewhat interesting, results.