Galaxy Trucker is not a game of the faint-hearted. This is not a game for those who like to slowly analyze every aspect of every possible action. This is a game where you race like mad to build the best ship you can in a limited amount of time. Then, of all things, you send this contraption out into the big abyss. Hopefully you can land on a few planets to pick up some goods. Hopefully you can make it back without being highjacked, kidnapped, or have your ship torn to pieces by meteor storm. A number of other bad things can happen to you as well.

The first thing you will note about this game is that it comes in a big heavy box. It is about the size of Age of Steam, though a tad taller. Upon opening the box, you will immediately discover the source of its mass: multiple individual player mats of heavy card stock, as well as a singular common mat to track various things. So there is no game board per se. It is played on individual mats. Other components include A huge number of space ship parts in the form of cardboard tiles, plastic astronauts, plastic aliens, plastic ship tokens, small green football shaped crystals which act as energy cells, rectangular cardboard credit tokens, cubes in 4 different colors representing goods, 2 dr6 dice, adventure cards, an hourglass timer.

The game is played in 3 (or 4) rounds. Each round consists of 2 parts: 1) build your ship 2) Send your ship away on its journey. Each round, you build progressively larger ships and consequently take progressively longer and more dangerous journeys.

At the beginning of the build phase, all the componets are turned face down in the middle of the table. The players then turn over components and connect them to their ships. Each components must connect to other components via valid connectors. The components are placed within a spacehip shaped grid. you try to fill this up as much as possible. When a player finishes his ship, he may turn the hourglass one final time. So at least you should have fairly ample time to build a somewhat decent ship.

These are the components and their function in brief:
- Cabin: house 2 astronauts or 1 alien (if the cabin is connected to an alien life support system).
- Cargo holds: store booty
-radioactive cargo holds: stores radioactive (and more valuable) booty
-Thrusters: increase your ranking in turn order by gaining flight days
- Cannons: blow up stuff, including various meteors and bad guys
- forcefields: protect your ship against minor attacks
- connectors: Allow for better connection potential


Once everyone builds their ships, it is time to launch them. The order in which they are built determines when they are launched, which then determines the player order. Once the ships are launched, everyone sits back and commands their ship through its adventure. The flight consists of turning over a set number of cards and resolving their effects 1 card at a time. Everyone flies on the same adventure path, so the cards affect everyone. The player who is highest in player order (i.e. farthest along in space) gets to resolve the cards first, which is usally an advantage but can be a disadvantage if you encounter bad guys. The main goal is to land on planets and pick up goods cubes. When you do this, you lose days and conceptually, you may go down the ranks in player order. When you encounter meteors or if you enter combat zones, parts of ship may get blasted away. No worries, keep flying it unless you lose all your astronauts. There are various encounters, enough to keep the players guessing, such as abandoned space stations, slavers, on-board epidemics etc. When everyone lands (or gets blown to pieces), everyone caluclates their booty and score various bonus points, then move on to the next round. At the end of the game, the player with the most most money (Cosmic Credits)

That is a simple outline of the game

My Overall Ratings

Theme: 9.5 I love exploration games, especially in outer space

Mechainics 8 very novel; a bit hectic and fast-paced with regards to building your ship.

Rulebook: 9 Very easy to understand. No ambiguities. The Douglass Adams Humor is a bit cheesy, but it seems to work.

Strategy: 6.5 Again, this is not a game of slow planning and analysis paralysis. Those who don't like to watch their ship get helplessly torn to pieces by meteors due to unfortunate dice rolls won't be too happy.

Components/Asthetics: 8 The bits and boards are all of high quality. I wish the spaceship parts were a little less pipe-like, but I suppose that adds to the cacaphonous, slip-shoddy appearance of your ship

Overall fun factor 8
I really like this game a lot. Those who don't like the chaotic nature of ship construction and the random nature of the flight events may not warm up to this one. Those who like a little excitement and fast paced gaming will get a kick out of it. The one thing I didn't like, which I didn't mention above, is that all players have the ability to look at 75% of the adventure cards before their journey during ship construction. The rationale is that you can plan your ship construction around your journey. For example if you see a lot of planets, you then build more cargo holds. If you see a lot of enemies and meteors, you build more cannons etc. I feel this takes away from the suprise element. I have been thinking of modifying that rule to the effect that you can look at less cards or something to that effect. Anyways, that is my only complaint, which is a minor one at that. Hopefully they will create new Adventure cards to add even more variety to the game. This also plays well with 2 players, though it may be worth considering randomly disallowing a cube batch on the planet cards with 2 players in order to add extra tension. Any, Happy Galaxy Trucking!!








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Nice review Dan! Could you comment on playing time?

I'm not Dan, but Galaxy Trucker's definitely playable in an hour. And that's for all three rounds combined. You can choose to just play one or two rounds if you only have 30 minutes to play.

As Jon mentioned, it is definitely playable in an hour with 2 players. With more players, it takes a little longer, but not much, since most things are resolved simultaneously

We played with 4 people, 3 of us had never seen the game before, the other had only read the rules and perused the contents, we played 3 ships and it took about 1 1/2 hours, I am not too sure if the number of playes will effect the game too much, building your ship is done at the same time and more players means more pieces exposed in a shorter time and with more players i think you may rush to finish your ship first, so building phase is about the same time, the only time when it could be longer is when an attack is made on the lead ship then if that is resolved it moves to the second ship and so on.

Well given I was sat at the other end of the same table as Mike, I can tell you the precise answer is that you can play a 4-player Galaxy Truckers with new players in 5 minutes more than it takes 4 people to play Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game (the scenario with the truck) AND Ra (both with new players). I would make that somewhere between 1.5 hours and 2.

Galaxy Truckers looks a blast though, I want a go next time.

Look at the theme again - you are actually launching this ship primarily to deliver a bunch of plumbing supplies, which are used to build your ship! Picking up cargo along the way is just your way of making a bonus buck on the trip.