The Premium edition of Stern’s Star Trek takes Steve Ritchie’s celebrated 2013 design and adds the showpiece toys that make this deep, fast machine sing. The Master of Flow built it for speed and stacking, anchored by a U.S.S. Vengeance bash toy, a memory drop target, a spinner, and a “Fire” button on the lockdown bar, with the Premium layering extra mechanical spectacle over the Pro. It’s a tournament favorite that rewards a player willing to dig into its layered scoring.
The structure revolves around mission modes and warp factors. You play through Level One missions, then chase the Kobayashi Maru wizard mode — and how well you perform in each mode directly inflates the value of that mode’s shots later, up to 7.5 million apiece. The genius wrinkle is the warp system: Warp 9.1 starts double scoring, while Warp 9.9 doubles scoring and adds a ball, so the elite play is to time a warp to coincide with a multiball for enormous jackpots. Combos rule the table, since any shot that’s part of a combo scores double.
There’s tremendous depth — completing a mode three times bolts a permanent 2X multiplier onto a main shot, finishing three modes in a row lights super pops, ramps, or spinner, and a well-maintained spinner can rack up millions per shot. Klingon Multiball, Vengeance Multiball, and the medal-fed Kobayashi Maru bonus give a player endless threads to pursue. Fast, brilliant, and bottomless, the Star Trek Premium is Ritchie at his most ambitious — a deep-space masterpiece in its fully-loaded form. Make it so.