Review: Galaxy Trucker

I am a big believer that it is enjoying game that is important, not winning – that is until I sit down to play a board game and a competitive monster inside me raises its head and screams: ‘Attack!’ Despite that, there are several games that I have never won, yet I enjoy them immensely. One of them is Elysium, and another, most recent game that managed to beat me every step of the way is Galaxy Trucker. I am quite good at Elysium, just not good enough to sit on the top of the pedestal. However, I completely and utterly suck at Galaxy Trucker. Yet, somehow, this never dampens my enjoyment of the game and has not discouraged me from playing more. It is not like it is impossible to win the game – other players can do it. It is just I am particularly bad at it and that’s fine by me.

In Galaxy Trucker the players take on a role of the intergalactic truckers that travel in space collecting goods, navigating asteroid fields, fighting the bandits and participating in other space related adventures. The game is divided into three main phases and has three rounds, where each round raises the stakes just a little more.

The first phase is probably the most fun I had playing a board game in a while. It is also the beginning of the path to my intergalactic doom. The players race against each other and the clock to build the best ship possible out of parts available to them.  There are engines, guns, batteries, cargo holds, connectors and shields; you know… the essentials! Every ship, ideally, has to have a good balance of each component that are also arranged according to the rules. For example, all engines need to be directed in the direction of the flight, away from the player, otherwise they have to be discarded. Of course, as everyone is racing to build their ships at the same time, some components could run out. The players could agree between themselves how fast or slow they want this phase to be. They could all race against time with the help of sand clock, included in the game. Or they could agree to build ships at their own pace, aiming for the best layout possible. How fast the ship is completed is important as that determines the player order for the next round and the first person to complete the ship has an advantage.

However, I would say, that the order is not as important as how fault proof the spaceship actually is. In the second phase of the game, the ship’s sturdiness will be tested by laser blasts, asteroid fields and on board epidemics, and the better built ones tend to lose players the least amount of points. In the end, the better your ship is built the better you are at this space trucking business.

Having this in mind, it is quite easy to see that those players who played the game a lot and have a good familiarity with the variety of spaceship part tiles available, have an advantage. Having a fast reaction and good tile grabbing skills also helps. I have played a game where all of the players were new to Galaxy Trucker, and so finished within minimum point discrepancies from each other. While the other game, that had a mixture of ‘newbies’, a relatively experienced player and me, in my own category of horrible ship building, showed different results. The experience player had a much easier time dealing with space troubles than the rest of us. I lost to everyone miserably, but even so, I had a lot of fun.

This might be because there is something satisfying in building a spaceship, in my case held together by gaffer tape, and watch it fall apart in a meteor storm. Every time a card with a massive meteor storm or a bandit attack would be turned over, the whole table would erupt in a collective groan. Yet everyone would proceed joyfully discussing which part of the ship they have lost and how many exposed parts they now had. Once the ship got blown up in two completely separate parts and we all agreed that it was pretty amazing. While there is definitely a scoring system in the game, as the player who earns the most money after the three rounds wins, it is much more in the background, compared to building and then promptly destroying your own ship.

Galaxy Trucker has quite a lot of replayability. Every time the spaceships built will be different, the events cards are shuffled and dealt randomly, and players determine the attacks of the asteroids or lasers by rolling the dice, making each game quite different from one another. There is also just enough ‘luck’ factor in the game. While you attack rolls could certainly be devastating for the ship, the better built spaceships will survive the asteroid storm more easily. Yet building the spaceship depends on the available pool of tiles, and how fast the other players are to picking up the better ones. However, the variety of ship part tiles is wide enough to be able to rectify almost any constructional issue. There is always a good balance between random game elements and strategy elements.

Seriously, Space Billiards are MEAN!

I want to give a special shout out to the rule book for Galaxy Trucker. While the game is pretty straightforward to understand, there are still a lot of rules to go through. The player has to be familiar with each space ship component and ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ for their arrangement. There are also events cards and their outcomes, as well as other general scoring and turn order rules. I bet you started falling asleep, while reading the last two sentences. Rules are never an exciting read, especially for the games with lots of little minute details, like Galaxy Trucker. The designers, however, realised that this would be the case and filled the rule book with lots of little jokes and quips, along with adorable humorous illustrations. This made all the difference and, I am sure, helped many to remember the rules better too.

I can find very little at fault with Galaxy Trucker. However, I can see people not liking the game because of the concept – spaceships are not everybody’s cup of tea – or the racing to get the best tile aspect of the game. The later could be considered ‘unfair’ and thus spoil someone enjoyment of the game. However, I think, the trick to playing Galaxy Trucker and having fun, is not take the game too seriously. Build crazy ships that have all the guns and no batteries to power them. Watch the ship fall apart under attack and the crew getting completely eliminated by an epidemic. This is where Galaxy Trucker is the most fun. As for victory points, they are there to keep the competitiveness of the game, but they are also the last thing one remembers about the game.

Tags: Czech Games Edition, Elysium, spaceships, Vlaada Chvatil