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.
