Star Trek turns 60 this year, and the franchise’s most quietly influential era is getting the bulk of the attention.
Three separate releases in 2026 pull directly from the Enterprise-D years, and none of them are the kind of anniversary filler that gets announced and then forgotten. Card games, collectibles, a Magic: The Gathering crossover. If you grew up on Picard’s crew, your wallet is in trouble.
Start with the one landing in October.
Fluxx is coming back out of the vault
Looney Labs is reprinting Star Trek: TNG Fluxx on October 20, 2026, alongside reissues of its other classic Star Trek editions and a brand-new Lower Decks Fluxx.
The TNG version first showed up in 2018 and features Picard, Riker, Data, Q, the Borg and other faces from the Enterprise-D era. It’s been out of print. Now it isn’t.
The Lower Decks addition tells you something about how Paramount and its licensing partners see the era now. TNG isn’t a nostalgia object sitting under glass. It’s the load-bearing wall the modern shows keep building against.
Magic: The Gathering is pulling from the whole franchise
Wizards of the Coast launches its Magic: The Gathering x Star Trek Universes Beyond set on November 13. The set pulls characters, ships and stories from across the entire franchise, and several of the cards are TNG-based.
Universes Beyond has done Doctor Who, it’s done Lord of the Rings, and it tends to treat source material with more care than crossover products usually manage.
Meanwhile, Master Replicas already released Destination Star Trek: The Next Generation earlier this year. It takes the long-running Destination taxi-style board game formula and reshapes it into a trip across TNG’s seven-season run, with missions built out of classic episodes.
Why TNG keeps earning this
The series debuted in 1987 and had the unenviable job of carrying Star Trek past Kirk and Spock. It worked. Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard led a crew that became just as unforgettable, and across seven seasons the show produced “The Best of Both Worlds,” “The Inner Light” and “The Measure of a Man” while filling in the Borg, the Klingons, the Romulans, Q and a dozen other corners of the universe.
Deep Space Nine and Voyager inherited that tone. So did basically everything after. Picard and Lower Decks are both, in different registers, arguments about what TNG meant.
Nearly 40 years on, that’s still the chapter people point to.
And 2027 is the one to actually watch
“Encounter at Farpoint” aired September 28, 1987. Which means The Next Generation turns 40 in 2027.
Paramount hasn’t announced a TNG-specific movie, series or anniversary special for it yet. What’s confirmed is elsewhere in the franchise: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns for its fifth and final season in 2027.
But a 40th anniversary is too big to let pass unmarked. The cast never really left, thanks to Picard reuniting most of the Enterprise-D crew in its final season, and the characters, ships and ideas the show introduced keep turning up across the franchise.
There’s a full year of runway left. Expect collectibles, books, games, retrospectives, something.
For now, though, the Borg are back on a card table in October.
