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 I'm proud to be a trucker! A Galaxy Trucker that is. The newish board game (2007) by Vlaada Chvatil published by Czech Games Edition officially rules! Here are the first impressions.
The game can be played by groups of two to four players. The playing time is about an hour, allthough it can be tailored to fit the constraints of the playing group.
The game consists of three rounds that have a basic two-step structure: First the players build their Space Freightersand then they test them in action trying the makethe most profit.
The game's backstory is simple (from the game's website ):
Corporation Incorporated, the galactic leader in sewer system construction,
is looking for can-do guys and gals to haul materials to remote regions
of the galaxy. Must be willing to fend off meteors, smugglers, and pirates.
Experience working with aliens a plus.
Earn copious cosmic credits with bonuses for speedy delivery.
Become a Galaxy Trucker. It's loads of fun!
The two-part round structure is very addictive. In the building phase the players have a warehouse of used components from which to scavenge stuff for their ships. There are lasers, thrusters, crew cabins, energy banks, cargo holds etc. The building part resembles the city-building in Carcassonne, although there are two differences: the palyers are building their own constructs and more importantly, there are no turns. Basically each player can work as fast as he/she can, except that the builders can never go backwards. There's also a time limit governed by a hourglass so you never can get your ship just perfect.
The latter part is pretty basic card-driven event-based action where in each turn a new event card is drawn and its effects figured out. The players that succeeded in building a ship with features to best copewith the events and profit the most from them will prevail. There's also an element of chance in that each for hit to the ship a hit location is determined by the dice.
So, what interests me the most in this game? One thing is the fact that my wife beat me pretty badly as we played it the first time. I could see that this game is potentially fun, but I was failing so miserably time after time and I couldn't see why. The ingeniuty of the ship-building phase is the time factor: when the sand is falling down in the hourglass, there's no time for analysis paralysis. You have to make very quick decisions and cannot really trhive for perfection. There are also some very interesting decisions to be made: You can peek at some of the event cards that are to be played on the next journey, but do you take the time to do that? What should you prepare for, space pirates (with lots of lasers) or abandoned space-ships or stations (with lots of crew you could scavenge them for resources and credits).
The main draw-back with this game is the amount of chits that are required to play the game. You have your ship part warehouse (with more tiles than in CarcassonneI think), your crew members (two per tile), energy banks, cargo, event cards etc. This makes for a longer setup of the game. There are also quite a many things to learn before you can become a full-fledged player (what do the different ship parts do, what do the different symbols in the event cards mean, what happens in each phase of the game etc.) although you cannot say that the game is very hard to learn. So it is not the best gateway game, but not really heavy either.
A very interesting game for me despite the few shortcomings. I would see this having a long life in my board game collection, although I worry a bit about having enough opponents to play this with.
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