Galaxy Trucker

Customer Reviews

Space & Humour together at last. Review by B

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Galaxy Trucker is a game that involves quick decisions when building your spaceship, a little luck and the desire to have fun.

If you enjoy tile placement games and some humour you will enjoy this game.
You will create a ship out of “parts” (the game tiles) so that you have a good balance of different part types and then hope that you created a good enough ship to fly through meteors and space pirates.

Through dice rolling, you will encounter various adventures and hopefully make it will only a few scratches instead of your ship breaking up into pieces. There are some choices to be made that can make you win or lose but in the end you should have a good time.
(Posted on 8/5/11)

Probably more fun played solitaire than anything else Review by Murray

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I got a chance to try out Galaxy Trucker the other day and, though I enjoyed the session, I definitely wouldn't be getting a copy for myself.

First off, the game takes a bit to learn and understand. You really need to play through the first mission to get the hang of it. There are many different components that you will want for your space ship and you'll need to learn what each of them are by sight immediately. Beyond that, you will learn how to place them properly on your ship board to get the most usage out of each component. Finally, you get to see how these things are used during the flight portion of the game, giving you a better idea of how to handle the second mission.

By the second mission, and definitely by the end of your first game, you should be pretty much a pro at this game and should be able to do well against veteran players. However, each game can last from an hour to well over two hours. This is unfortunate, because Galaxy Trucker feels like a game that should play quickly, but doesn't. Aside from learning the game and the resolving of the flight, there are simply way too many components to keep track of and the shifting and shuffling of all the pieces adds a tremendous amount of time to the game. Not to mention it being a nightmare for those trying to clean up afterwards.

The third major complaint about the game is that it is mostly a solitaire game. There is relatively minimum and non-substantial amount of interactivity in the game and the majority of the game can be played in silence, which isn't that much fun in my mind.

While I would not mind playing the game on my own to see how well I would fare against the mission cards, I feel that there are better games to play with my friends with the one-two hours we might spend with Galaxy Trucker.

(Posted on 11/1/09)

Space Trucking - A Perilous Career Review by Keith

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Build a spaceship out of spare pipes, then fly it around a galaxy full of pirates, brigands, and asteroids. What could possibly go wrong?

Galaxy Trucker's game play is divided into three two-part rounds. In phase one of each round, each player is given a blueprint board that is used to build your ship, and an event deck is built from random cards that will do horrible things to your ship and/or let you collect money or cargo. When someone shouts "go!", everyone franticly grabs for chits that are used to build your ship, trying to stuff in as many engines, guns, crew cabins, cargo holds, and other useful bits you can find. It's a race to see who can finish their ship first since starting position determines the pecking order for events as they come up, but as players scramble for parts to finish first, people usually end up forgetting to add critical parts or making invalid connections. The player who finishes first can also start a sand timer which forces everyone to stop building once it runs out, whether they're "done" or not. Once the ships are built, everyone checks another player's ship to make sure it's valid. If a connection isn't valid, that chunk of your ship falls off during take off.

The second phase of the round has you racing through the galaxy, turning over the random event cards. For most of the events, the player in the lead gets to take their action first and collect the best resources on planets, be the first person to salvage a lost ship, or be the first person to fire up their engines in a cosmic drag race. Things get ugly though when pirates show up and start shooting at whomever is in the lead, or everyone enters a meteor swarm that can tear your ship apart. It's not really a question of if your ship will take damage throughout the flight, but how much it will take, and how little you'll make it back home with.

Once the round is over, players collect money for their cargo, the position they finished in, as well as a cash prize for the best looking ship (the fewest exposed connectors). You then need to pay your insurance broker for the damage done to your ship. According to the rules, anyone who finishes the game with at least 1 credit wins. The person with the most credits just wins more. :)

The game is not meant to be taken seriously by any means, as clearly demonstrated by the rule book, as silly flavour text and images are generously scattered throughout. When I first read the rules, I was laughing, thinking this was the stupidest game I have ever seen. You fly around in a space ship made of pipes, watch sections of it get blown off in space, and return home in a shaky junk pile. Every time I have played this game with friends though, it's a laugh-fest from beginning to end as we scramble for pieces, curse at each other for taking what you need, see your ship and someone else's get cut in two by a meteor due to a design flaw, and look at the stack of debris you've left behind. It has quickly become my favourite game to play and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone looking for a fast-paced, light-hearted game. (Posted on 9/14/09)

Great Game, But Not Without Flaws Review by KJ

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Although the gamebox on this states that it is playable for 2-4 players, in my experience, the game at 2 players simply isn't that.. .challenging really. It becomes quite limited, and simply a challenge to see who gets the worst luck during the games ingame events.

With just 2 players, there's really no reason to push the speed of spaceship construction, as you would be handicapping yourself to do so, and the only time that's even potentially relevant is at the latest stages of the game. Examples being state 3 / 3a.

With 3 players however, the game takes on a much more manic tone, becomes simply more fun, and draws out alot of activity and uses alot more of the mechanics.

Basic gist would be for me: If you can get 3 players or more consistently for the game, it is an absolute blast to play. If you are a duo looking for a fun game, this will entertain for a while, but will eventually get quite tiresome. (Posted on 9/8/09)

A rip-roaring space adventure of ship building and racing Review by TR

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Galaxy Trucker has got to be one of the most exciting and fun games I've played in a while. It's not necessarily for everybody, but for those that is it, it'll be hard to replace.

Galaxy Trucker is a 2-part game. In the first part, players race against time and one another to build their ships from a series of tiles. They will need to take and flip tiles, placing them on the ship plan provided to them to create the best ship possible in a limited time. This part of the game will get the heart beating and the fingers trembling as you'll be racing against other players more than the timer for the best parts.

In the second part, players now fly their newly created trucks through the galaxy, dodging asteroids, fighting through pirates and avoiding interstellar wars, while sometimes picking up new goods along the way. It's a race with the best built ship making it to the end first, winning the most amount of money before it all starts again.

Galaxy Trucker is unlike every other game out there right now and it's a definite addition to any collection in my book. (Posted on 3/25/09)