I’ve had my eye on playing Galaxy Trucker for a while.
That Vlaada Chvátil knows how to make a crazy game!
In a galaxy far, far away… they need sewer systems, too. Corporation Incorporated builds them. Everyone knows their drivers — the brave men and women who fear no danger and would, if the pay was good enough, even fly through Hell.
Now you can join them. You will gain access to prefabricated spaceship components cleverly made from sewer pipes. Can you build a space ship durable enough to weather storms of meteors? Armed enough to defend against pirates? Big enough to carry a large crew and valuable cargo? Fast enough to get there first?
Of course you can. Become a Galaxy Trucker. It’s loads of fun.
This is a game you really need to see being played to understand the fun and tense feeling you get while playing it.
Building a junk ship is a lot of fun. Only having a minute or so to do it, using one hand, and having so much to concentrate on it makes it really tense and difficult yet oddly rewarding.
Thinking about making sure you have no open connectors, enough lasers, crew, engines, shields, storage capacity, batteries etc all within a very strict time is tough. But fun.
Flying
After building your ship you get to check each player’s ship over to look for errors. Usually, you find the odd problem. Once you put something on your board it can’t be removed so anything that’s there that shouldn’t be will go into a little box of bits that gives you -$ per piece.
The components are nice, and nicer than they needed to be. Also, the crew are adorable!
The point is to get around a board while event cards throw meteors, smugglers and all kinds of stuff at you and you try and soldier on, hoping your ship stays together.
Of course, there are always ‘Open Space’ cards which have no effect, which is great… Unless you don’t have any engines left…
Galaxy Trucker Summary
All in all, it’s a fun game. As long as you don’t take it too seriously and you are OK with your precious ship getting ripped apart and accept that as part of the game you should get along with it fine.
One I would play again (But not buy, it’s REALLY expensive!) just to see how things go next time.
Jesta ThaRogue