Galaxy Trucker

Since my no-baking period has just been doubled by my dentist, I want to take this time to talk about a game that I played for the first time about a year ago. This game has an uninteresting name and box art, nothing that should capture your attention, but if you know something about board games then the name of its designer, Vlaada Chvatil, will probably hint you about its qualities. Let me say that Galaxy Trucker is an easy, enormously enjoyable and completely unforgiving game.

What I find highly original is the game's structure. The players take roles of galaxy truckers that transport cargo across the space. The whole game consists of 3 rounds, each round has two parts. In the first part, the players are tasked with building a space ship. Each player gets a board with an outline of a ship and fills it with tiles, each representing a room or equipment that the ship will need. The ship needs cabins for the crew, storage rooms for the cargo, lasers to attack, shields to defend, jets to move and batteries to power it all. A good ship needs everything and everything must be connected properly to its neighbouring tiles. The problem is that there is not enough space to have enough of everything so as a constructor, you have to decide according to your priorities - do you want your ship to be the fastest (which will need a lot of jets) or the safest (and sacrifice space in your ship to shields and lasers), have enough room for cargo you might find on your way or have enough crew so that you can leave some on deserted stations that will earn you credits?

a blurry pic of my ship

After the first part where you built the ship of your dreams, comes the second part where you go on the space journey. Players play in the order according to the sequence in which the players finished building their ships. The leading player draws cards from a deck that represents the events that happen on the (space)road - they may vary from finding planets with cargo on them, being attacked by space pirates to flying through a meteoric swarm. These events will test your spaceship-building skills as you may gain credits or even precious cargo if you have enough space and/or crew, or your ship's parts may get destroyed by meteorites crashing into them or pirates shooting them which can be prevented by well-placed shields or lasers. Here you will see the shortcomings of your ship as it gets blown into pieces.

The second round, the ships are still compact

After this event deck is finished, players have arrived to the final destination and sell the cargo they still have in their ships. After getting paid, second round of the game begins which is quite the same but with a bigger ship and more dangerous encounters on the way. After that, the third round offers an even bigger ship to build (an advanced version of the ship's blueprint is somewhat reminiscent of SS Enterprise) and even more difficult encounters. After this, the credits from all three rounds are counted and the player with the most credits wins. Yay!

I really don't want anyone to get an idea that the game is repetitive. The first round lasts only about 11 encounters, each of them is dealt in less than a minute. It serves more like a practice for you to see how to build a ship and what can damage it and in what way. The whole game takes about 45 minutes, maybe even a bit more than an hour if someone keeps building their ship for a long time (that may happen to perfectionists), and most of it takes place in the second and the third round.

It is really a lot of fun to build your own space ship and send it on an adventure but somehow I can't but feel sad when my ships get torn to pieces by a meteoric swarm that just keeps hitting vulnerable spots. Once you build it, you can't touch it anymore.

Although this might be patched in the expansion that was released some time ago but since I haven't played it yet, I can't really say. And even if it's not fixed - plan ahead and face the chance - it is the feature of the game.

Truckstar Galactica