Of the official pen & paper RPGs, Last Unicron's line of Star Trek games functioned best as an RPG, and did the best job of getting the Star Trek feel. Steve Long & company did a tremendous job. The purchase of LUG by Wizards of the Coast led the crew to jump ship and create the line fo Decipher, which was a solid effort, but was a little too D20 like for my tastes. In terms of non-official Trek, I've run both Star Trek Hero (for Hero System RPG), and Far Trek. I love Far Trek, and the author is working on a new edition which should be released some time soon. Far Trek is an outstanding rules-lite game... I highly recommend it.
I haven't played SFB in a long while but A Call To Arms: Star Fleet sounds interesting. If the OP wants a taste of SFB, just download the free cadet version. With maybe a dozen pages of rules you can play a very enjoyable ship vs ship game. I always recommend the cadet version. It's not that hard to get started, once you understand the energy/impulse concept. About 10+ pages of rules give you some great ship to ship combat. My friends played it casually for years and rarely used the advanced books.
Having run many multiple year campaigns with it, I can always recommend the FASA STRPG, but only really for TOS and the early movies. It is a little rules intensive for some, but imho it fits the TOS genre perfectly. And combat/threat encounters can be played out with just four pages of rules -not many other RPG's can boast as much. The 3rd edition box set contains all you NEED to play a StarFleet campaign, and the supplements detail the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Orion's and free traders in exquisite detail (and makes them playable options too!) . Even StarFleet Intelligence is a supplemental playable option, for the more devious minded! As I said, though, since it's background and assumptions are now dated and no longer canon, it can only support TOS, but what it does, it does elegantly.
Unfortunately I never really got into role playing games, wouldn't even know where to find a group now. I do have friends into board games and I've successfully snuck in Star Trek Cataan into a few game nights. Just picked up Fleet Captains and it's two expansions but have yet to find players willing to immerse themselves in so much 'Trek' Really looking forward to playing it, but have been occupying myself by painting the miniatures.
For anyone who has been playing Far Trek, the new edition is out and can be found at: http://fartrekrpg.blogspot.com/ An adventure has also been published as well. And for the next 24 hours the author is offering a print version through Hulu. He makes zero profit, the book runs about $3.29 to cover printing costs, and has a great cover as well.
I only played the FASA RPG once...someone else GM'd it, and, I have to say, he ran a really uneventful scenario. (And that's putting it....politely. ) I mostly played its Starship Tactical Combat Simulator. I used to have tons of material for the FASA RPG and STCS. (Also used to have tons of West End Games' Star Wars RPG). Used to have three miniatures from the STCS, the refit Enterprise (mistakenly called the Enterprise class at the time), the Miranda class (mistakenly called Reliant class at the time), and I think I may have had a Federation destroyer. My friends and I played fast and loose with the Starship Construction Manual so we could build fearsome ships of mayhem and destruction for the STCS. I ended up creating a ship class that, at first, was hella fun to use, but then really made the battles too boring. A torpedo cruiser. The idea..... with energy weapons, you had to charge them up to whatever you wanted to power them to within their limits, and that could get costly if you tried to energize all your weapons at once while keeping your ship in motion. So, since missile weapons (photon torpedoes) only used 1 point of energy to arm (sometimes 2), and did anywhere from 7 to 20 points of damage, I built a ship that had only one (maybe two) phaser banks, and like 30 torpedo tubes all around the hull. For 30 points, I had a warp powered Death Star. When I intro'd it to the game, my friends quickly consulted their copies of the Construction Manual to start building their own "torpedo cruisers." The arms race was ON! . Unfortunately, it rendered our fleet battles really short. What used to be a fun three or four hours of movement, firing, and damage resolution quickly turned into skirmishes that were over practically in a matter of minutes. So, we created a Arms Limitation Treaty.... ships could no longer be comprised strictly of missile weapons. Only forty percent of your weapons emplacements could be missile weapons. The majority of your armament had to be energy based. (and no...we did not allow a ship to have 40 percent of its armament be FP-4 torpedoes, while its remaining sixty percent were basically shuttlecraft phasers. We saw to that before anybody got any wise ideas...and I guarantee, one of us probably would've tried that bit of loopholing. ) One time, we were playing the STCS, one guy was the GM, while I and my other friend were the combatants. I was Klingon, he was Romulan. We had made miniature versions of the hexagon game board so we could plot our cloaked movement (and present our movements to the GM if a dispute came up). At one point during the game, our GM fell out of his seat laughing his head off. When he regained his composure, we finished our game...and then asked him what was so funny earlier. He pointed out on the map where, at one movement phase in the game, we had passed within one hex of each other while cloaked....completely ignorant of each other's relative position. Now we all were laughing our heads off. I never got to try the Last Unicorn version of the role playing game (for which I had the core books for TNG and DS9). But reading through the material, they seemed to do a really good job of trying to stick to canon as much as possible, without weighing the gamers down with it. I even fashioned a home-made construction manual (extrapolating statistics between both core books) for ships. The construction manual that Last Unicorn had in mind, before they transferred over to Decipher, was ponderous. They never released it to market, but I think they may have released a .pdf or similar file sometime back. I had seen it. It was, indeed, ponderous. (Suddenly, the song "Ponderous" comes to mind.) The big problem FASA had, and why they lost their license, was that they were the ones trying to establish dominating canon in the Star Trek universe. Paramount and Gene Roddenberry both disliked what FASA was doing, and did not agree to renew their license when it expired. To this day, though, I still love both the FASA and Last Unicorn games. (Just wish I had the chance to play, or run, an LU Trek game.)
Of the currently printing Trek board and miniatures games, I highly recommend Star Trek Fleet Captains. It's a bit anachronistic because it mashes all the eras together in one setting, but it roughly corresponds to one season of Trek during play. Your spaceships are characters, you equip them with cards, and you go explore (or conquer!) the universe. I don't understand the avoidance to the Bandai card games. I like them even more than Fleet Captains actually, since they are easy to bust out and relatively simple to play. Of course I narrate my card plays while I play to make things more interesting ("Spock and Sarek are having a logic party on the bridge of the enterprise, with a lieutenant arbitrating. Yeoman Rand comes through the red doors, and Farrel of all people is right behind her wondering if she has some salt tablets. Then they go exploring and run into the doomsday machine..."). I've played some Attack Wing but abandoned the system pretty quickly as soon as power creep became obvious. Near the end of my run I really wanted to bring my Mirandas to the table but they were no longer effective in the face of overpowered Borg. Since the release schedule is at breakneck speed, expect to be forced to buy new expansions to stay competitive in the tournament scene. By the way, some ships are only tournament exclusive, so you have to enter the Arena to get them :\
I agree that it can be frustrating. I have a small number of ships that work well together, and I don't do the tournament thing. That said, I think that the system has be superseded. Attack Wing introduced some interesting fleet mechanics, but didn't go very far. Star Wars: Armada did everything that Attack Wing should have, giving more of a naval/fleet feel rather than this (canned) WWII dogfighting feel.
I've played basically all of the Starfleet Universe games I know of though not much since dad died a few years ago. I've also played every official Trek RPG out there (In fact one of our group's GM's is planning to run a Decipher MU campaign that will be a sequel to an older campaign once we finish our current Traveller Campaign.). I have also played all the Trek card games and most of the board and minis games though I am refusing to play Attack Wing again until they come out with some Steamrunner minis.
I recently discovered Fleet Captains earlier this year, and I've already gone out and gotten both expansions and laminated my hex tiles. I'm always looking for opportunities to play, though right now it's just my best friend and me that play. There's a decent Fleet Captains group on facebook with alternative rules/scenarios and a lot of information on boardgamegeek as well.
I started out playing FASA Trek with a group of other players as part of a semi-rotating game (One week D&D, next week Shadowrun, nest week Trek). I really enjoy it, and I think once I ironed out the bumps in my style - it was the first game I ever GMed, I tended to say "anomalous" a lot - my players enjoyed it too. But given that my players were creative types and quickly got bored with dice and number-heavy games, I switched to a much more narrative-heavy style, with very few rolls, more like a choose-your-own-adventure game. Whenever there were rolls to be made, I would have them roll behind a screen where only I could see the outcome. If it didn't serve the plot, I fudged it. (Star Trek, for my players, wasn't a game where you could stay invested if your character was dying all the time. I fudged quite a few rolls just keeping my players alive.) Sadly, my best players moved away, then I moved, and the game fell apart. I haven't played (except a solo game with my wife who loves Trek but dislikes RPGs) since 2004.
I think the FASA combat game is good. The feel of Trek? Every watched DS9: "The Emissary"? Hear the Captain say, "Red Alert, load all Torpedo bays, ready Phasers." With STSTCS you can arm your Torpedoes, charge your Phasers, and raise all of your shields. It makes you feel like the Captain when the give the orders. Like Scotty when you boost the shields. Like Chekov or Sulu when you fire Photons.
LUG was my favorite RPG. Great system, great game design, impressive books. FASA was clunky but solid, and the only game in town for years. Decipher I just didn't care for the rules system at all, though I bought the books for reference. Star Fleet Battles is the grand daddy of all the space combat games, but is only marginally Trek these days. It's based on the old technical manual, and doesn't have any of the current licenses. Star Fleet A Call To Arms is set in that universe as well, whcih is not the mainline Trek verse, but still fun. Oh, and they've got a RPG out there too using the GURPS 3rd editiion system from Steve Jackson Games.
My experience: I had never played a single board game until a couple of years ago, when a couple of friends showed me The Lord of the Rings LCG, and a few others. Right now they seem to be undergoing a massive upswing in popularity. I thought they looked horrifically complex. But actually, once you have seen someone else with experience play one, you can play anything - most of the time, they are having to dip into manuals and stuff, to ask questions as they go along - so don't be intimidated by the absurd complexity some seem to have. There are now, finally, solid Star Trek games coming out, like Star Trek: Fleet Captains: Most board games tend to have little or nothing to do with the setting they depict, and don't accurately model it at all - take Star Trek: Catan for example - it's just a lame re-skin of a board game about people moving across land on wagon trains. Take Star Wars: X-Wing or it's clone Star Trek: Attack Wing as another example - this time it models the setting, but only one minor aspect - combat; making it boring and unworthy. But in the last couple of years, a couple of companies, such as Fantasy Flight Games and WizKids, have been producing really solid adult and thematically accurate games. Some have been Star Wars or Tolkien, but recently the Star Trek license has started to be used with the same degree of seriousness and consideration - the games coming out now are no longer just gimmicky tat: Star Trek: Fleet Captains is a rock solid game that models the exploration of space by a small fleet Star Trek: Ascendancy is an upcoming game that seems to be like Birth of the Federation Star Trek: Frontiers is an upcoming game that where you actually lay down new tiles as you explore So right now, the only one that's part of this modern wave is Star Trek: Fleet Captains - and it's good, and re-playable - and it has good miniatures and decent card quality (which adds a lot to any tabletop game, I can tell you) - but I expect that this year, we are about to get two very strong contenders. WizKids is starting to use the license properly. Soon we will have Trek games that are the same quality as House on Haunted Hill, The Lord of the Rings LCG, the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame, the various Star Wars stuff, etc. And what anyone will tell you is that these games are 100 times more enjoyable if you enjoy the setting - so a Trek game of this quality would be the best thing ever, since the setting is startlingly interesting. Fleet Captains for example models missions, landing parties, combat and exploration. That's already a pretty solid chunk of what makes Trek what it is. The Battlestar board game is an example of a non-Trek one that works and feels exceedingly accurate - you play as any BSG character, and one person is secretly a Cylon - it feels just like seasons 1 and 2 of BSG. Thats the kind of thing I'm looking forward to from a Trek game. Just bear in mind the number of players - if you are gonna have trouble getting friends to play - I think Frontiers and Ascendancy might be solo-able, but Fleet Captains ain't - and it is hard to play if say, you have 5 friends round, or another odd number. Star Trek: Expiditions is solo-able, but it seems to be something you can only really play once before you have seen it all. We could easily have this forum providing support and stuff like boardgamegeek.com. If anyone needed any advice on rules, like regularly gets posted there - I, for example, might be able to help, having played three games of Fleet Captains. What tends to happen, is at a geeky session, people will always be getting on their smartphones on boardgamegeek to ask about any rules that are unclear. As for RPGs, Trek is sort of unsuited, as it's an ensemble genre. And wargames like Warhammer 40,000 also don't suit it for obvious reasons, so Star Trek: Attack Wing really doesn't seem worth it to me - just a cheap cash in on the Star Wars: X-Wing game, which is itself boring. You need more than that.
I've had my issues with ST:AW, as you can see from above, but I disagree with the dichotomy you are drawing between it and the new games that are coming out. First, Attack Wing is mostly a reskinning of X-Wing Miniatures Game. However, that was an appropriation of Ares Games' WWII miniatures game, Wings of Glory/Wings of War. Second, Star Trek Frontiers will be a reimplementation of Mage Knight by Vlaada Chvatl. Third, it appears that Frontiers will have the same component quality as Attack Wing and Fleet Captains, which concerns at least a few gamers. Will that make it a bad game? No. The designer, Andrew Park, designed Core Worlds, my favorite game (which I think he should rework as a Dominion War themed game). Fourth, there isn't a whole lot known about Gale Force Nine's Ascendancy. I've seen no public demonstrations, and there has been scant information released. GF9 has been on a roll with games from licenses, so that is encouraging. Fifth, there is a third game coming out this year, Star Trek Panic, a reimplementation of Castle Panic, that has been getting some good early reviews.
What I mean is Attack Wing has absolutely no "fluff", aside from a few cards - it might as well not be a Star Trek game. It has little to do with what we see in Star Trek, since battles probably take up less than 3% of all Star Trek's screen time. Frontiers is something I can imagine having a lot of nice fluff, and a game system that is used in appropriate ways, such as for exploration, science, landing parties, etc, not just battles. Thats the only difference I was drawing between them; not card quality or anything. I was hoping some future games would have better quality cards and miniatures.