Designer: Vlaada Chvátil

A long time ago there was a really bad movie called Space Truckers, it’s something of a cult classic now, but when I first heard about Galaxy Truckers the board game it instantly reminded me of that movie. In Galaxy Truckers players must construct space worthy ships using whatever spare components they can find and traverse the dangerous galaxy in hopes of delivering cargo to the other side of the galaxy. It’s a humorous, timed game that borders on being more a funny party game than anything you might take seriously. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there is any strategy to it at all, it’s really one of those games that is just for shits and giggles. You build your ship and hope it doesn’t fall apart on you before it reaches the goal line.

The game is broken down into two main phases. The construction phase and the flight phase. During the construction phase players are presented with individual gameboards, outlines of the ship they are going to build and a pile of tiles representing the many random components they can use to build their ships. Components include things like engines, weapons, shields, batteries, cabin quarters, cargo space and things of that nature. Spacy sounding stuff.

When a construction round begins players must as quickly as possible build there ship because a sand timer can be flipped over and started at any time by any player. Hence the faster you can build your ship the more pressure you can put on the other players. Once the timer is flipped and the time runs out the construction is immediately over.

Constructing a functional ship under pressure is a lot harder than it sounds because each component has different types of connectors and you must construct the ship by fitting these different connectors to each other. There are three types of connectors and the square tiles have 4 sides, some sides don’t have any connectors at all. Now during the construction phase you can only grab one tile at a time, but you can grab as many as you like. Each time you want to pick up a new tile you must put the other one down, which in turn makes it available to other players. Hence the more tiles you don’t use the easier you make it for the other players to construct a functional ship. So the trick is to build quickly, efficiently and with as many of the components as you pick up.

Each component has a different function, batteries for example allow you to power different parts of your ships like shields, weapons and engines. You need crew to survive the flight so the more crew cabins you have the better. You need cargo space so that you can collect cargo so that you can earn money (the player with the most money at the end of the round wins). In essence you need a fast ship, well armed, with plenty of crew, well defended by shields with lots of cargo space. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, in fact, most of the time you end up with a half-cocked, lop sided mess that is barely space worthy.

Once everyone has constructed their ships its time for the race to begin. During the flight phase players will be using a deck of cards representing different hazards along their flight. Each turn a card is flipped over and players must deal with whatever horrific things space throws as them. This might be asteroids, pirates, abandoned stations, trade planets, events like disease outbreaks and all manner of things all designed to blow you out of your sky. You can use your weapons and shields to protect yourself, race to the front using your engines and pick up cargo with your cargo bays.

During your flight your ship is going to get hit by all manner of things (guns, asteroids etc..). As it does, pieces of your ship will break off (components). In order to complete the race your ship must survive, reach its destination and have at least one crew member when you get there. Largely the flight phase is kind of out of your hands, most of the things just “happen” to you and you can only hope that you did a good enough job during the construction phase that your ship will survive the hazards.

Galaxy Trucker is actually a pretty hilarious game, you naturally want to make sure the people who are going to play it with are in the right mood. If you’re looking for a serious strategy game, this isn’t it. This is a game you play for the sheer fun of it, almost like you would a dexterity game or a party game. This game has a lot of really great moments between the race to construct your ship and the race to the finish line. It falls in the same line as games like Formula D or Robo-Rally, the sort of thing you play just to have some laughs.

I really like this one, in fact, I was quite surprised how much praise it given it’s rather silly and random nature. Most of my gaming groups are at least semiserious and very few silly games hit the table, but this one has crept into our consciousness. It’s a very family friendly, really a great family board game night in a box.

Highly recommended if you want to break up the seriousness in your gaming group with a bit of silly fun.