Easy Star Trek trivia to warm up the room
Start here. These are the questions that anybody who has caught a rerun, sat through a film, or simply absorbed Star Trek by cultural osmosis should be able to answer, and they give the casual players in the room something to score before the deep cuts arrive.
Read them quickly and keep the pace up — a warm-up round works best when nobody has to think for more than a few seconds.
Q1.Spock is half human. What is his other half?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vulcan
His father Sarek is Vulcan and his mother Amanda Grayson is human, which is the engine of nearly every Spock storyline.
Q2.Which actor played Spock in The Original Series?Tap to reveal
Answer: Leonard Nimoy
Nimoy played the role from the 1964 pilot through to the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness.
Q3.Who played Captain James T. Kirk on television and in the first seven Star Trek films?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Shatner
Shatner carried the role from the 1966 series through to Star Trek: Generations in 1994.
Q4.What does the T in James T. Kirk stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tiberius
The middle name was first spoken aloud in the animated series and stuck as canon ever since.
Q5.Which cybernetic race assimilates other species into a hive mind they call the Collective?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Borg
They arrived in The Next Generation episode 'Q Who' in 1989 and immediately became the franchise's most feared enemy.
Q6.Which warrior race looked entirely human in The Original Series, long before the forehead ridges appeared?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Klingons
In 'The Trouble with Tribbles' only the tribbles could pick a disguised Klingon out of a crowd; the later series explained the changed foreheads as the result of a genetic experiment.
Q7.Which cloaking-device-equipped species turned out to share distant ancestry with the Vulcans?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Romulans
Spock notices the family resemblance the moment a Romulan appears on screen in 'Balance of Terror', and the split between the two peoples became a plot thread for decades.
Q8.What is the Ferengi First Rule of Acquisition?Tap to reveal
Answer: Once you have their money, you never give it back
The Rules are the Ferengi combination of scripture and business manual, quoted constantly by Quark on Deep Space Nine.
Q9.The USS in USS Enterprise does not stand for United States Ship. Give either of the two things Star Trek scripts have said it stands for.Tap to reveal
Answer: United Space Ship, or United Star Ship
Starfleet is a Federation service, not an American one. The early scripts and Kirk's logs use United Space Ship; later ones switch to United Star Ship.
Q10.What class of starship is the original USS Enterprise, NCC-1701?Tap to reveal
Answer: Constitution class
Constitution-class heavy cruisers were the Federation's flagship design in Kirk's century.
Q11.The Enterprise-D from The Next Generation was a much larger ship. What class was it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Galaxy class
Galaxy-class ships carried families and civilians, which is why children turn up on the bridge crew's decks.
Q12.Who commanded the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jean-Luc Picard
The Sovereign-class Enterprise-E replaced the Enterprise-D after it was destroyed, and debuted in the film First Contact.
Q13.Who was Data's identical android brother, the one Dr Soong built before him and gave emotions to?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lore
Brent Spiner played both. Lore came off Soong's bench before Data, complete with emotions, and turned out to be too dangerous to leave running.
The Original Series — Kirk, Spock and the 1960s Enterprise
The 1966-69 run is only 79 episodes long, which is why so much of its trivia is specific: there simply is not much of it, and fans have memorised what there is.
These questions stay with that first crew, though a few of the answers were only filled in later, on film: Kirk's home state, his spell as an admiral, and Spock's half-brother all come from the movies rather than the 79 episodes.
Q1.Which US state is Captain Kirk from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Iowa
He says so in Star Trek IV: 'I'm from Iowa, I only work in outer space.' Riverside, Iowa has been claiming him ever since.
Q2.How many crew members did Kirk's Enterprise carry?Tap to reveal
Answer: 430
The figure is repeated throughout the series — a small town's worth of people on a five-year mission.
Q3.Kirk is famous as a captain, but he did hold a higher rank for a time. Which one?Tap to reveal
Answer: Admiral
He was promoted to admiral and given a desk job, hated it, and was eventually busted back down to captain — which he treated as a reward.
Q4.In the final episode of The Original Series, Kirk was played by an actress. What was the episode?Tap to reveal
Answer: 'Turnabout Intruder'
Janice Lester swaps bodies with Kirk, so Sandra Smith spends the episode playing the captain and Shatner plays Lester.
Q5.Christopher Pike captained the Enterprise NCC-1701 before Kirk — but Pike was not the first either. Who was?Tap to reveal
Answer: Robert April
April took her out on her shakedown cruise and commanded her first, then handed her to Pike and Pike to Kirk. He was introduced in the animated series and has since turned up in live action.
Q6.Which actor played Khan Noonien Singh?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ricardo Montalbán
He played Khan just once on television, in 'Space Seed', then returned fifteen years later for The Wrath of Khan.
Q7.Which member of the original crew flatly refused to trust the transporter?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dr. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy
His objection to having his molecules scattered across space is one of the show's longest-running gags.
Q8.In which Star Trek series did the reptilian Gorn first appear?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Original Series
In 'Arena' Kirk is made to fight a Gorn captain hand to hand and wins by improvising gunpowder from the minerals lying around.
Q9.What is the name of Spock's father?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sarek
The Vulcan ambassador appeared in The Original Series, the films and The Next Generation, played throughout by Mark Lenard.
Q10.Spock has a half-brother who rejects Vulcan logic entirely. What is his name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sybok
Sybok was introduced in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, in which he hijacks the Enterprise in search of God.
Q11.Which feature of Spock's appearance worried the network before the show aired?Tap to reveal
Answer: His pointed ears
Executives thought the ears and eyebrows made him look satanic, and had them airbrushed out of some early publicity material.
Q12.Which blue-skinned Federation species is identifiable by the antennae on their heads?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Andorians
They first appeared in 'Journey to Babel' and later became one of the founding members of the Federation in Enterprise.
The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine
The 24th-century shows are where Star Trek got dense. The Next Generation ran 178 episodes, Deep Space Nine 176, and between them they built a political map with treaties, occupations and a war.
Deep Space Nine is the one that rewards attention: it is set on a station rather than a ship, it has a continuous story, and it is the show most likely to separate the Trekkies from the guessers.
Q1.Deep Space Nine guards a wormhole at the edge of which planet's star system?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bajor
The station was built by Bajor's occupiers in orbit of the planet, then hauled out to the mouth of the wormhole in the pilot episode and handed to a joint Bajoran-Starfleet crew.
Q2.Which species occupied Bajor for decades before the Bajoran resistance drove them out?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Cardassians
The Occupation is the wound the whole series is built on — nearly every Bajoran character is a former resistance fighter or collaborator.
Q3.Odo is a shapeshifter, but what is his species properly called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A Changeling
Odo spent his life believing he was unique, then discovered his people had founded an empire without him.
Q4.The shapeshifters who rule the Dominion are worshipped by their subject species under what title?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Founders
The solid species they dominate worship them as gods, which is precisely the arrangement the Founders wanted.
Q5.How did Captain Sisko know Jadzia Dax before either of them came to the station?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dax's previous host, Curzon, had been Sisko's mentor and close friend
A Trill symbiont carries the memories of every host, so Sisko's old mentor turns up as a young woman — and he keeps calling her 'old man'.
Q6.Two Next Generation characters went on to become Deep Space Nine regulars. Name either.Tap to reveal
Answer: Miles O'Brien or Worf
O'Brien transferred over at the start and stayed all seven seasons; Worf joined in the fourth and changed the tone of the show. Keiko O'Brien came along too, but as a recurring guest rather than a series regular.
Q7.Who is Quark's put-upon younger brother, the born engineer who ends up on the station's payroll?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rom
Rom spends years being told he is a failure at being Ferengi, which turns out to mean he is good at everything else — including fixing the station.
Q8.The Jem'Hadar soldiers of the Dominion are kept obedient by addiction to what substance?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ketracel-white
They are bred unable to produce an enzyme themselves, so whoever controls the supply controls the army.
Q9.Which two Deep Space Nine regulars married each other during the series?Tap to reveal
Answer: Worf and Jadzia Dax
Their Klingon courtship and wedding ran across several seasons, and Jadzia was killed off at the end of season six.
Q10.Which Star Trek character did Terry Farrell play?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jadzia Dax
Farrell played the station's science officer for six seasons; Nicole de Boer took over the symbiont as Ezri Dax for the seventh.
Q11.Spock appeared on The Next Generation. What was he doing there?Tap to reveal
Answer: Working, as an ambassador, to reunify the Vulcans and Romulans
The two-part episode 'Unification' aired in 1991 and put Nimoy on screen with Patrick Stewart for the first time.
Voyager and the Delta Quadrant
Voyager took the premise the other shows avoided: a Starfleet ship flung 70,000 light-years from home, with a seventy-five-year journey ahead of it and no reinforcements coming. Kate Mulgrew's Janeway was also the franchise's first female captain to lead a series.
The questions below run from the pilot to the finale, so they work well as a closing round for a Star Trek night.
Q1.In the pilot, Voyager is pulled into the Delta Quadrant while chasing a ship commanded by which suspected Maquis?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chakotay
Both crews are stranded together, so Janeway's first command decision is to make her pursuit target her first officer.
Q2.Kes belongs to which Delta Quadrant species?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Ocampa
The Ocampa live around nine years, which means Kes reaches middle age while her crewmates barely change.
Q3.In the episode 'The 37's', the crew finds which famous American aviator held in stasis on an alien world?Tap to reveal
Answer: Amelia Earhart
The episode's answer to the disappearance is that she and Fred Noonan were abducted along with hundreds of other humans in 1937.
Q4.Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram goes nameless for almost the entire series. In the finale's future timeline, which name has he finally taken?Tap to reveal
Answer: Joe
He flirts with names for seven seasons, Schweitzer among them, and settles on none; in 'Endgame' the future Doctor turns up married and explains he could not get married without a name, so he borrowed his wife's grandfather's.
Q5.In 'Scorpion', Janeway allies with the Borg to fight which enemy from fluidic space?Tap to reveal
Answer: Species 8472
The only species the Borg had ever failed to assimilate, which is what made the alliance possible — and Seven of Nine arrives as part of the deal.
Q6.What was Seven of Nine's human name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Annika Hansen
Her parents were researchers studying the Borg who were assimilated along with their daughter.
Q7.At what age was Seven of Nine assimilated by the Borg?Tap to reveal
Answer: Six
She spent eighteen years as a drone, which is why relearning how to be an individual takes her four seasons.
Q8.Which Seinfeld star guest-starred in the Voyager episode 'Think Tank'?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jason Alexander
He played Kurros, the smooth-talking front man for a group of problem solvers who want Seven of Nine as a trophy.
Q9.Which Voyager crew member is half Klingon and half human?Tap to reveal
Answer: B'Elanna Torres
Roxann Dawson played the ship's chief engineer, whose Klingon temper and human self-doubt fight each other for seven seasons.
Q10.Which warlike Delta Quadrant species, split into rival sects, were Voyager's main antagonists in its first two seasons?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Kazon
Eighteen sects with no central authority, which made them impossible to negotiate with and easy to play against each other.
Q11.In the finale 'Endgame', who travels back in time to get Voyager home sooner?Tap to reveal
Answer: Admiral Janeway, the captain's future self
Twenty-six years later and unable to live with the crew she lost, Janeway breaks the rules she spent seven seasons defending.
Behind the scenes — the cast and the crew
Star Trek has employed working actors for sixty years, which means half the cast has a second career hiding in their filmography: a children's television host, a Shakespearean, a soap villain and the grandchild of a crooner.
This round is the one that catches people who know the shows but not the people who made them.
Q1.Which actor played Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott, and died in 2005?Tap to reveal
Answer: James Doohan
Doohan was the chief engineer who kept getting handed the transporter controls; some of his ashes were later flown into space.
Q2.Which Next Generation cast member spent those same years hosting a children's programme on PBS?Tap to reveal
Answer: LeVar Burton
Burton played Geordi La Forge while also hosting Reading Rainbow, a job he held from 1983 to 2006.
Q3.Which Star Trek captain also played King Richard in Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Professor X in the X-Men films?Tap to reveal
Answer: Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard)
Stewart came to Star Trek from the Royal Shakespeare Company and left it a blockbuster regular.
Q4.Before he played Worf, which actor spent three years as a California Highway Patrol officer on CHiPs?Tap to reveal
Answer: Michael Dorn
Dorn played Officer Jebediah Turner from 1979 to 1982, then played Worf across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and the third season of Picard, plus four films — more screen time than any other single Star Trek character.
Q5.What was Gene Roddenberry's job before he became a television writer?Tap to reveal
Answer: He was a police officer with the LAPD
Roddenberry flew bombers in the Second World War, then joined the Los Angeles police, and wrote scripts on the side until he could quit in 1956.
Q6.Gene Roddenberry married an actress from his own series. Who was she?Tap to reveal
Answer: Majel Barrett
They married in 1969. She played Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi, and the voice of the Federation computer across decades of the franchise.
Q7.Which Star Trek actor had a recurring role on Night Court as a hapless small-time criminal?Tap to reveal
Answer: Brent Spiner
Spiner played Bob Wheeler on Night Court before he played Data, and the comic timing never really went away.
Q8.Which Next Generation actress is the granddaughter of Bing Crosby?Tap to reveal
Answer: Denise Crosby
She played Tasha Yar, who was killed off in the first season, and then returned repeatedly as the half-Romulan Sela.
Q9.Which actress played both Dr. Katherine Pulaski on The Next Generation and Rosalind Shays on L.A. Law?Tap to reveal
Answer: Diana Muldaur
Muldaur had already appeared in two Original Series episodes; L.A. Law then gave her one of television's most notorious exits, down an empty elevator shaft.
Q10.Alexander Siddig, who played Dr. Julian Bashir, was credited under a different name in the show's early seasons. What was it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Siddig El Fadil
He changed the credit partway through the run because people kept mispronouncing it.
Q11.Leonard Nimoy directed two of the Star Trek films. Which ones?Tap to reveal
Answer: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
The Voyage Home was the most commercially successful of the original-cast films, and Nimoy followed it by directing Three Men and a Baby.
Frequently Asked Questions
What order should I watch Star Trek in?
For a first watch, release order works best: The Original Series, then The Next Generation, then Deep Space Nine and Voyager, which ran alongside each other. Chronological in-universe order scatters the callbacks and spoils several reveals, so save it for a rewatch.
Did anyone ever say 'Beam me up, Scotty' in Star Trek?
No. The closest Kirk gets in The Original Series is 'Scotty, beam us up fast' in 'The Savage Curtain', and — to the wrong officer — 'Beam me up, Mister Spock' in 'Arena'. The animated series has 'Beam us up, Scotty' and the film Star Trek IV has 'Scotty, beam me up', but the exact famous line is never said anywhere. It makes an excellent trick question for a trivia round.
Which Star Trek series is best for someone who has never watched any?
Start with The Next Generation from season three, or with Strange New Worlds if you want episodes that stand alone. Deep Space Nine is the richest but assumes you already know the universe, so it rewards patience rather than curiosity.
How many Star Trek questions do I need for a trivia night?
Around 20 per round, two or three rounds. Split them the way this page does — a general round everyone can play, then era-specific rounds — so casual fans score early and the Trekkies get their moment later.
What is a good Star Trek tiebreaker question?
Use a number nobody guesses exactly: how many episodes The Original Series ran (79), or how many episodes The Next Generation ran (178). Closest guess wins and a tie is impossible.
