Revisiting: Galaxy Trucker

How has this held up? Are you still regularly playing it? Is it a shelf toad for you now? Did you sell it or trade it with no regrets?

I still play this game pretty frequently, probably 6-8 times in the past year. It's a lovely game, especially for non-combative groups. It also draws out the builder in people who get a kick out of that particular part of the game.

That said, there's a huge caveat here: for the game to be truly fun and surprising you need to have players at the table who are pushing as hard as possible for speed in the build phase. The fun and tense part of the 2nd phase of the game are broken ships, hastily put together, coming up against impossible challenges. If everyone furrows brows and builds perfect ships, it really ruins the second part of the game and the game feels like it's on boring autopilot in part two. Similarly, using some of the harder alternate ship layouts becomes key when you get better as well, as they introduce serious challenge to the game.

I also have the first expansion to this, but I play this game a lot to introduce new players who have not played anything more than monopoly so we don't mess with any of the complications added by that.

I could talk about this game all day, I think it's an almost perfectly designed game provided players are playing competitively. I think the reason people sour on the game is that it's a game that subtly invites people not to play competitively in the build stage. I know all about this because my wife doesn't like to play this game that way.

Never played it often, was an early adopter & 1st run wasn't compatible with expansions I believe. It was cute as hell and was fun to see ships getting shredded half a dozen times and then we never had the urge to play it again. Sold.

By the way, I've been loving these "Revisiting" threads, even ones where I haven't played the game and don't post in the thread.

Yeah, this one kind of burned out on me too. I liked it a lot for like six games, and then that usual Vlaada "too complicated for what it is" thing sort of set in. Which is fine in solo Mage Knight...terrible for what should be a light social game. The core concept is _genius_, and the basic mechanic of grabbing tiles to quickly cobble together a spaceship and then basically throw it against an event deck is brilliant. The problem is that it's too bloated in terms of rules...I mean, this is something that should be explained in five minutes and executed in 20. But it's not, it's a 90-100 minute game after you explain it to everybody and deal with all of the fiddly crap.

I remember seeing a post about it on BGG some years ago, "10 obscure rules you might miss in Galaxy Trucker" or something like that, which says it all. This kind of game shouldn't have ten obscure rules. It maybe shouldn't even HAVE ten rules.

But that's really kind of Vlaada's style, add rules until it's strategic.

Looking forward to the iPad game, that will probably be good.

I don't mean to be a dick and put you on the spot, but I don't understand the rules bloat point. What is it that is overwrought? I've taught this cold maybe 6-7 times to new players and I never felt like it was hard to explain or understand. I feel like the rulebook is long because a lot of the building rules are hard to explain any way but visually.

Also, I would say the fix to make the game a quick 20-30 minute filler is simply to play a single run, rather than 3 runs.

No, I should clarify that a bit. It feels like GT ought to be a fast, fun pick-up-and-play game but it isn't. There's lots of extra rules everywhere. Crew, aliens, energy pellets, living quarters, stuff coming from different directions, what happens if your ship has something in particular happen to it, stuff from the cards, the scoring ("ugliest ship"?), etc. I suppose all of that is what makes the game in aggregate, but I find myself wishing that there were just less to it- much like Dungeon Lords, for example.

I've tried playing with the single run, it just doesn't feel complete.

I dunno, it's not that I don't like the game, it's just that I wish it were leaner and more focused on its best features.

I still play this game regularly, avoid the expansions or the anniversary edition, they add more complexity, a speed game doesn't need complexity, and this is already a little complex. My biggest problem is the aliens are too specific to be worthwhile, but the game is still fun. Print out the Rough Road cards and you're golden.

With expansions, it is full-on ABSURDLY complicated.

All the things/rules Barnes mentioned: the thing about them, and the thing that turned me against Mage Knight, is: how many of them are ESSENTIAL to the design? Like, all the rules make simulation sense (in Galaxy Trucker), which is really cool. But in Mage Knight in particular, it feels like there are rules added to make it harder, or at least harder to calculate, but that could be stripped out of the game without REMOTELY affecting the core of the game. What is the purpose for fire magic, ice magic, and for fuck's sake, fire-ice magic? It makes it harder, and it lets them make a "fire attack 8" card, an "ice attack 8" card, and a "basic attack 9" card, instead of just having the one card, which helps fill up the decks...but why? Whether or not that rule adds to the game, which is debatable...it's certainly not essential to the CONCEPT of Mage Knight. Galaxy Trucker's rules very clearly detract from the CONCEPT of "quick-build a ramshackle ship, and then fly it and have random pieces fall off"; they're added to combat that concept's has a fundamental flaw:

That flaw is that, as people get better at the game, the game gets LESS fun. People getting better leads to fewer disasters happening, which goes against the whole "haha, your ship got blown apart!" idea of the game. So the overcomplication is added to make it harder for players to get good at it.

The big problem here is the relative lack of interaction. In an interactive game, as players get better, they are getting better at FIGHTING each other; this is why most great games get BETTER as players get better. In a multi-player solitaire like Galaxy Trucker MOSTLY is, where you're just adding up your score at the end, getting better just means your final scores at the end get higher; there's no way to use your new skills to make your opponents' lives harder.

Despite all this, I like Galaxy Trucker still. Haven't overplayed it yet. But it's no Knizia, where you're fighting the other players and figuring out how to use the game's pieces to fight them and trying to figure out what other players are thinking. You're fighting against the game, a la a computer game; Vlaada's games remind me of computer games more than any other designer except Hamblen.

As I said in some Vlaada thread, I think Space Alert is his best game, because it specifically turns that "overcomplicate EVERYTHING" tendency of Vlaada's into an advantage, really into the core of the design. Everyone divides up the tasks because no one's brain can handle following everything at once.

some good points here by all. I think it's right that it's easy for people to slip into sitting there and trying to build a ship without mistakes,so either you need to really have some players rushing to finish or use some kind of draft, or auction system so that people end up with components that literally can't build a perfect ship. I don't know who all the expansion rules are designed for because it feels like this game should be aimed more at casual lightweight gamers and gaming and there its best to streamline it all down to the basic engines, batteries, lasers, cargo, crew. Like a lot of Vlaadas games I feel like there is a better game in there somewhere but he never quite finds it. It also has the annoying feature (though this may be my lack of experience) that once the "race" starts (which also has the other annoying Vlaada feature that its an all too brief run on rails section, like the "dungeon" you build in Dungeon Lords) I've found that very often almost all the cards work out for one ship, theres not enough cards, and not enough variety to really allow people to try for a muthafuckinmegalaser ship vs a fiftythousandcargocrates vs a fastasabarracuda ship. And not enough ships blowing up, and why didn't they include something where the players ships went head to head in a shootout by the way. It feels like the kind of game that should be a "must have" family game but I've never got it to work in reality the way I think of it in my head. That might be as much my fault as the games though.



PS
doesnt Goblins Inc include some of the concepts of GT - never played that one but many some of you can compare them?

I like the game and think it is a great concept but agree that it takes the FFG's Horus Heresy approach which is to start with a simple game and just add more and more onto it to make it feel more interesting. One that I would like to play more though but to be honest for me the rules fiddly-ness makes me look at the box when pulling stuff off the shelf for gameday and think "Eh...Too much of a hassle."

I like it a lot, but I agree with the bloat. I only bought the first expansion and we never use any of it because there's already so much shit to get straight. For many people, just keeping track of what the different ship parts do is hassle enough.

It often has the same problem as Dungeon Lords. I liked that game okay, but every single time it was a learning game, either because someone was genuinely new or because no one remembered all the fussy nonsense involved. I sold it because I would rather play something else than learn Dungeon Lords AGAIN. Vlaada has some great themed ideas but then he adds a lot of junk to it so that the gaming gets in the way of the theme.

I've sometimes thought of trying a GT variant where you give everyone one laser and one engine, divide up the rest of the tiles (face down) among the players, and then you build whatever you can out of what you have.

This is all kind of touching on my issue with the game. It usually gets pulled about once a year, which is fine. But its just complicated enough that its always a learning game. When we do the 2nd phase we have to look up what the cards do each time. All of it just slows the game down so its never the fast-playing build'n'smash it feels like it should be. I always feel disappointed when I play this game because I really want to like it or maybe I expect it to be something its not each time I play.

Huh, sounds like maybe I have fewer problems because I play it more regularly.

Gary Sax wrote: That said, there's a huge caveat here: for the game to be truly fun and surprising you need to have players at the table who are pushing as hard as possible for speed in the build phase. The fun and tense part of the 2nd phase of the game are broken ships, hastily put together, coming up against impossible challenges. If everyone furrows brows and builds perfect ships, it really ruins the second part of the game and the game feels like it's on boring autopilot in part two.

I love this game, but this is a really good point. I'm always the guy flipping the timer and driving the build phase, because the people I play with would like nothing more than to calmly and quietly build a flawless ship. You really have to force yourself to buy into the theme, and be reckless about the build phase.

And I also agree that the rules are fiddly. I've played this game dozens of times, and I simply can not internalize the small asteroid / big asteroid / small laser / big laser rules about how to defend those things. I ALWAYS have to look at cheat sheet printed on the center board.

Some of the expansions add more competition and conflict (although with added complexity). Probably the best game of Galaxy Trucker I ever played, we were using the first expansion where each player randomly draws a card that has some special circumstance or rule for that phase. We had a card that said that each time somebody new took over first place, everybody else got to take a pot shot at him. Then there was another card that said each time a player lost a section of ship, it was treated as a "big asteroid" for everybody behind him. OH MY GOD. Between those two rules, there was so much death and destruction, it was freaking hilarious.

I'm very excited about the upcoming iOS app. That could be very cool.