Star Trek: Five-Year Mission is a cooperative dice placement game for 3-7 players who take the roles of crew members of either the USS Enterprise (from the original Star Trek series) or the USS Enterprise-D (from Star Trek: The Next Generation). Each crew member has a different ability and the crew’s abilities differ for each crew.

In these roles, players try to cooperatively solve a series of blue (easy), yellow (medium) and red (difficult) alerts to score points, attempting one of 6 different difficulty levels to win before failing five such alerts, or the Enterprise being destroyed. Players must deal with injuries which lock dice out of play, ship damage that can force players to attempt harder alerts, urgent events that must be completed in 3 minutes, the prime directive, as well as yellow and red alerts that force additional alerts cards to come into play pushing you closer to failing.