Game Daze Park Place Mall Manager Recommendation, August 2010
Drew -
As your space ship, which is built on a frame of remainder sewer pipe, starts to be pounded by the meteor storm you happened into, you see the wreckage of another ship nearby and realize that space pirates are closer than you thought. Do you have the lasers to drive them off and the shields to survive the storm? And, most important, how much money are you going to get from the cargo in the hold?
Galaxy Trucker is a game of building spaceships, then racing them through space and dealing with the threats and money-making opportunities found there. Because, in the end, it doesn’t matter how well your ship held up or how many pirates you defeated, it’s how much money you made the company that counts.
The game has two phases to each round: Ship-building and Racing. In the Ship-building phase, each person has a board representing a space to build a ship. As the rounds go on, the possible size of your ship increases, along with the risks of failure. The parts for building ships are tiles piled facedown in the middle of the table. At a signal, each player starts grabbing tiles, flipping them over, and looking to see if it will fit on his ship. Tiles have different functions: shield, laser, battery, living quarters; and differing connections. A tile has to connect properly, or it will fall off the ship and be lost, which loses you money at the end of the round. When one person has built his ship to his liking, then a one-minute sand timer will be flipped, giving everyone else that much time to finish their ship.
Once the ships have been built, the next phase comes into play. A series of cards will be flipped over and faced, one at a time. During the first game, some of those cards can be looked at to give you a leg up on the rest of the players, but doing so costs you valuable building timeSome of the cards are opportunities to claim cargo, assuming one has an appropriate cargo hold on board, or crew an abandoned freighter, assuming you have enough crew to spare. There are no major consequences, other than losing money, to being unable to do these cards. Some of the cards are meteors that you must avoid or stop with your shields, or pirates you must attempt to blast with your lasers. Being unable to do so means losing parts of your ship, which loses you money at the end of the round. Three rounds of the game and whoever has the most money wins.
The game plays fast, with the first part being a no-turn free for all to find the parts you need and build your ship to the best specification possible and the second being a white-knuckle wait while you see if your ship will survive. There is an expansion as well that adds in new ships, new cards and new items to build your ships with. All in all, Galaxy Trucker is a great game for the whole family.