If you asked me if I wanted to go on a cruise for my next holiday, I’d immediately be thinking of all the other things I’d rather do. If you told me that it was a cruise in space, on the other hand, I’d be packing my case at warp speed! Unfortunately, Jeff and Elon’s prices are a little beyond my means at the moment (perhaps I should stop buying so many boardgames), so Galactic Cruise is the closest I’m likely to get to realising my dream of space travel!
If you asked me if I wanted to go on a cruise for my next holiday, I’d immediately be thinking of all the other things I’d rather do. If you told me that it was a cruise in space, on the other hand, I’d be packing my case at warp speed! Unfortunately, Jeff and Elon’s prices are a little beyond my means at the moment (perhaps I should stop buying so many boardgames), so Galactic Cruise is the closest I’m likely to get to realising my dream of space travel!
Rocket man (or woman)
If you enjoy a strong theme in your boardgames, you’re in for a great ride with Galactic Cruise! From the moment you open the box to find your welcome pack complete with company ID card and lanyard, you’re immediately drawn in to the corporate world of space tourism. Framed as an intra-company competition against other executives, you’ll be building rockets, attracting tourists and launching cruises, all while striving to meet various company goals for the grand prize of becoming the next CEO of Galactic Cruise!
You don’t have to wear the lanyard… but you know you want to!
Go for launch
Beneath the theme, Galactic Cruise is a slickly designed worker placement game from first time developers Kinson Key Games. It’s a game full of familiar Euro mechanics, expertly combined to create a complex yet smooth-playing experience.
A game is played over three rounds, or years, with a scoring phase at the end of each in the form of an AGM. The number of turns is variable and depends on how quickly you accomplish company goals and launch cruises. You’ll never have enough time to do everything, which is a pity because everything you can do in Galactic Cruise is huge amounts of fun – almost every action showering you with rewards in the form of victory points, resources or reputation points.
The core part of your turn involves placing one of your workers into any of the company’s six buildings and performing up to two actions. Each building has two different available actions which are determined randomly at the start of each game. As the game progresses you can pay to build connections between buildings which increases the choice of actions you can take on a turn.
Placing workers to perform actions is the heart of the game.
The actions range from collecting the components and resources used to construct and supply your starships, to picking routes for your cruises and advertising for the ideal passengers to suit your chosen destinations. You can also use actions to unlock more workers and build developments to access new technologies, making later turns even more powerful. Almost everything you can do in Galactic Cruise is immensely satisfying but none more so than launching one of your cruises, working your way through the pre-flight countdown until, finally, blast-off!
Launching a cruise gives you an extra step to perform on subsequent turns: advancing your ship to the next stop on the cruise to collect a variety of rewards and gain bonus abilities. This is where you really start to rack up the victory points and makes all your careful planning worth it.
Having two cruises launched at the same time makes every turn a bonanza of points and resources.
Space race
The beauty of Galactic Cruise’s worker placement mechanism is that you’re never blocked from taking the action you want. If another player’s worker occupies the space you were planning to use, you can simply bump them back to your opponent’s player board. You may be reluctant to do this at first as the bumped player receives a small bonus for their trouble, but you’ll quickly get over this and soon be bumping away happily in favour of taking the action you want. The designers have done an excellent job of ensuring you can almost always do what you want, making Galactic Cruise a satisfyingly smooth game to play.
Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a game if you could always get your own way! You’ll find plenty of competition for the various components you’ll need to build your spacecraft, the optimal routes for cruises and the different types of passengers you’ll be taking, as well as access to the agenda cards which provide powerful, single-use abilities.
Agenda cards grant many game-breaking abilities, such as squishing extra passengers into a cabin, budget airline style!
You’ll also be racing the other players to launch ships and accomplish the variable company goals, both of which advance the game towards the end of round AGM. The more cruises you’ve launched and goals you’ve achieved, the higher your score will be. While there isn’t any direct player interaction (apart from the low-impact worker bumping), there’s more than enough competition to keep things interesting.
Space is big. Really big.
As you’ve no doubt gathered by now, there’s a lot involved in sending people to space and you might find the choices you have to make a little overwhelming at first. To mitigate this, the double-sided main game board has one side pre-printed with actions, technologies and bonuses. This helps to simplify your first few games as each building’s actions are paired in synergistic combinations, making it easier to decide where to place your workers.
The beginner side of the board also helps to significantly improve the game setup time, but even with this, there’s no avoiding the fact that Galactic Cruise is more Saturn V than Sputnik in the size department. Setting up is always going to take time and you’re going to need a lot of table space to accommodate it. Along with the huge main board, you’ll need to find space for the separate marketing board, the player boards and various trays containing the supplies of resources and tiles, not to mention room to construct your all-important spacecraft.
Once you’ve graduated to the advanced side of the board you’ll find a lot more variability in your games. As well as the randomised action spaces, the three company goals and four technologies are variable, as are the rewards for scoring passengers on cruises. Add this to the random order of cruises, agenda cards and ship components and you have a galaxy of game setups to play with.
The Right Stuff
The production values throughout Galactic Cruise are absolutely stellar. From Ian O’Toole’s wonderful retro-futuristic artwork evoking false nostalgia for a golden age of space travel, through the rocket ship-shaped player trays and cheerfully coloured meeples, to the weighty rulebook and player aids, everything just screams quality. The Game Trayz insert does a fantastic job of keeping everything in the enormous box neatly organised and helps to reduce the pain of setting up. While unboxing most games feels like a necessary chore, in Galactic Cruise, it’s an event!
Such a large and complex game demands clearly written documentation and Galactic Cruise’s literature more than meets that demand. The main rulebook covers the game setup and turn order in detail, with lots of illustrations and examples to clarify the finer points of the rules. There’s also a reference book detailing the various tiles and bonus items, along with a player aid booklet for each player. No expense has been spared here, and it makes learning a complex game a joy.
There’s a lot to read, but it’s all beautifully presented.
Even more impressively, if there’s a question you can’t find the answer to in the documentation, the developers are highly active on Board Game Geek and are happy to respond with rule clarifications.
The Final Countdown
I was a little wary of the hype surrounding Galactic Cruise and it took a while to commit to purchasing it. While waiting for it to arrive, I still wasn’t certain that I’d made the right decision: Galactic Cruise is not a cheap game, would it be worth the expense?
I needn’t have worried. From the moment I opened the box it was obvious how much care and attention has gone in to making Galactic Cruise a joyful experience. This has clearly been a labour of love for the developers, and it shows in every aspect of the game.
I’ll admit that, for me, the theme does a lot of work in making the game so enjoyable. Would I have as much fun with the same game mechanics if the theme was planning coach tours to Torquay? Let’s be honest: no. But neither would I enjoy the theme without the foundation of such a solid and well-designed worker placement game to back it up. The mechanics, theme, production values, replayability and the sheer fun come together perfectly to make what will almost certainly be my game of the year.
Zatu Review Summary
Zatu Score
95%
