Galactic Cruise Review

A review copy of Galactic Cruise was kindly provided by Dranda Games. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

I love it when a game takes a different approach to an overdone theme. I’ve seen a ton of different takes on sci-fi and space exploration, and while I still really enjoy it as a theme, each new game that does it invariably draws comparisons to the others. Galactic Cruise takes a sidestep from the queue to wave and say, “Hey there, how about we build and launch rockets, but we do it for tourists instead of hard science?”. Despite taking the jaunty approach, Galactic Cruise is a heavy game with lots of interlocking mechanisms that delivers in spades. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and it’s beautiful, if a little big.

To be clear, Galactic Cruise isn’t the first game to tackle space tourism. I’ve even covered previous games here before, like Last Resort. Where Galactic Cruise is different, however, is that it doesn’t make things nice and light. It’s a heavy, relatively complex game. At the time of writing, it currently has an average difficulty weight of 3.89, which is comparable to the likes of Black Angel and Skymines, which I also reviewed here before. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that number climb as more people get the game and rank it, too. It puts it in a pretty unique place. A heavy game with a theme that’s almost tongue-in-cheek. Think about the heavy games in your collection and count how many don’t have a serious theme, even if that theme is sci-fi or fantasy. Not many, is there?

Far from being a problem, I think the light-hearted approach Galactic Cruise has taken is one of its biggest strengths. The board game market is saturated with heavy games that take themselves seriously, so to be able to pull a game from the shelf with beautiful colours and a setting where I’m advertising space trips to tourists with rooms on my rocket such as an Area 51 Petting Zoo, a 5D Cinema, or even an Ice Cream Emporium, is a real tonic. It leads to what might be a potential problem for it, but we’ll come back to that later.

It’s not rocket science

Despite it being a pretty heavy game, it’s not unapproachable. If you’ve read or watched any other reviews of Galactic Cruise before coming here, or spoken to anyone who’s played it, you’re likely to have heard “It’s like a Lacerda game”. While it’s true that there is something of the feel of one of Vital’s games, I think if it hadn’t come in a big box, with a big board, daubed with Ian O’Toole’s artwork and graphic design, those comparisons would be few and far between.

And no, I’m not just being that contrarian who wants to have a different opinion for the sake of standing out from the crowd. Let’s use On Mars by way of comparison because it is a Vital Lacerda space game (one which I reviewed right here). Both have resources that you need to collect and spend in order to play the game, but the way they’re handled is very different. Gone is the tight-knit resource chain cycle of turning ore into batteries, gathering water, growing plants and producing oxygen, which needs serious planning and execution. Instead, gathering the necessary fuel, oxygen, and food for a successful rocket trip is as difficult as visiting the spot on the board which lets you take any three you like. No fuss, no planning, just turn up and grab them.

Sure, those resources are limited, but another action space rewards you with money for refilling a resource, so you’ll very rarely find yourself unable to take what you want. Heck, you can even trade in any Agenda cards (Agendas give you bonuses for certain actions and situations) for the resources shown on them.

Using the Martian game for comparison again, worker placement is handled very differently. In On Mars, there’s a lot of competition for the action spaces, and a back-and-forth shuttle system which restricts you to half of the board at any given time. Galactic Cruise takes an approach where adding your gear pieces between action spaces means you can use the actions on either side. You can use other players’ gears to gain access to actions you can’t reach if you throw some money their way. Failing that, you can always just bump a player’s worker back to their player board (earning them some income at the same time) and just take the space from them. Using an unlockable expert worker to do the bumping even rewards you for doing it. Nothing is ever off-limits.

I’m leaning on these comparisons to show the fundamental differences between Galactic Cruise and Lacerda games in general. The weight and complexity in this game come from different places, and the difference is refreshing.

Rocket man

I’ve spent several hundred words talking about other games now, which is a rubbish way to review a game, so let’s draw our focus back in on Galactic Cruise. It’s a worker-placement game which uses the same style as Lost Ruins of Arnak and Dune Imperium, where you only get a couple of workers to place. You use your actions to draw blueprints for rooms before building and adding them to your rockets. Then you advertise a cruise, drag in willing tourists, and send them off on their way into the vast cosmos.

While the rockets are away on trips, you find yourself a worker down, as they’re piloting the rockets. I guess it’s some kind of job-share situation going on where researchers are also astronauts? Regardless, as the rockets progress through their trips turn-by-turn, they trigger bonuses based on the colour of the tourists, the colours of the rooms on the rockets, and the type of space the rocket is visiting. This is where the real meat of the game comes in for me. Getting the things you want from the main board isn’t difficult, as you can pretty much always get what you want. ‘Days in space’ stops along the cruise trigger bonuses per colour, based on what’s randomly assigned during setup. When you first play the game, the importance of these spaces isn’t obvious, but with clever play you can ensure that the rockets you have in space are generating the money, resources, and adverts you need for what’s happening back on Earth.

Each rocket also takes a tile from your board with it, which then unlocks ongoing bonuses from the top half of your player board when you place it there when the rocket reaches a coloured tourist stop. At the same time, you can start generating some serious VPs by spending advert tokens at these stops. It’s a cyclical process, where you’re trying to build and launch rockets, getting more rockets ready to go while those are in space. If you’ve done any kind of Lean or Kanban in your job, the concept of JIT (Just In Time) is something you might be familiar with, and it’s a good way to approach Galactic Cruise. Having a large surplus of any particular resource feels like wasted potential.

A lot of the fun in Galactic Cruise comes from manipulating your player board in different ways. There’s a bunch of tiles on the left side, some of which provide you with income during the Call a Meeting action (i.e. taking your workers back off the board), while others give you a one-off bump of one thing or another. These tiles move to the top of your board with each rocket launch, as I mentioned above, and the way they alter the rules for you personally, present some really interesting options. For instance, you can unlock the ability to build more rockets, and to make them taller than the default three-room offerings, or maybe one which gives you bonuses for every step up the reputation track in addition to being able to drop the track backwards to claim them. Combine that one with the bonus reputation upgrade during a game where the reputation bonus is available for days in space, and you’re talking some serious bonus income.

Big business

There’s no denying that Galactic Cruise is a lovingly produced thing. Ian’s artistic choices and design language is all over the place, so you already know the limited iconography is good and clear. The pieces, even in the retail edition, are premium. GameTrayz inserts and player trays, those nice linen finish rulebooks and even individual player aid books. Chunky wooden pieces, socketed little boards that sit on the main board, dual-layer player boards, and a huge main board.

I have to admit, though, circling back around to what I said at the top, the production left me wondering who the game is aimed at, and who it’s going to appeal to.

Heavy, serious games attract heavy, serious gamers. Pretty games with chunky pieces tend to fall on the lighter side of the scale, and when you combine that with the jaunty, light-hearted theme of the game, it’s one which could easily land in the lap of a person who think it’s a less complex game than it is. Make no mistake, despite Galactic Cruise being a more accessible heavy game, it’s still one which could overwhelm people who would usually opt for something like PARKS or Cascadia.

I spent a long time pondering this, and realised that it’s the sheer size of the box and the space the game takes up on the table which might be its saving grace. If you saw this huge, heavy box on the shelf of your FLGS and saw it’s close to £100 price tag, it might immediately tell you that it’s not for you and your Ticket To Ride loving group. That’s a good thing, because this is such an excellent game for the right people, that I hate to think of people sitting down at a game they have no experience of when it comes to complexity, having a horrible time of things, and warning others off.

If the game board was smaller – and it really could be – and if the pieces were all much smaller, and the whole scale of the physical production was scaled back, and it were cheaper, I think it would regularly be bought by people who won’t enjoy their time with it. So, while I appreciate the concerns of people when it comes to games which don’t comfortably fit in a Kallax cube, I think it was almost an inherent necessity this time around.

Final thoughts

Galactic Cruise was a bold undertaking for newcomers to the scene Kinson Key. I had to look them up to see they’ve only made one game in the past, the almost unknown Delivirus. But designers T.K. King, Dennis Northcott, and Koltin Thompson have absolutely blown it out of the water. Out of the water, onto the launch pad, and off into space. It’s an outstanding game, shy of the weight that one of Mr Lacerda’s games usually aspire to, but heavier than most. That said, it might be just the game you want to bridge the gap between the medium-weight and super-heavies in your collection.

The rulebook and player aids are both excellent, with useful callouts on every page, as well as a separate glossary-style book included. The production quality is outstanding, so while it makes for a very expensive impulse purchase, it’s one which makes you feel like you’re getting your moneys-worth, something which is important these days.

I like just about everything about Galactic Cruise. I like the lack of round structure, which sees players recalling their workers at different times and making the board state constantly different. I love the way there are opportunities to score all over the place, without making it feel like a pot-pourri point salad. I love how swingy the agenda cards can be, and how absolutely everything in the game is rewarded. Refill the card display? Have some stuff. Advertised a cruise? Have some money. Doing nothing on a day in space? Fill your boots with bonuses. It’s like having dopamine on drip, and it means there’s almost no such thing as a dead turn, just because you took a sub-optimal turn before.

I think the only people who won’t enjoy Galactic Cruise as much as I do will be those looking for a heavier experience, or the people who love direct player interaction, because it’s the one thing that’s largely absent from the game. For the rest of us, though, Galactic Cruise is a Joy. It’ll be a tough act for Kinson Key to follow, and I really hope they manage to. Stellar stuff.

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