My plays were all with a prototype copy of Excursions kindly provided by Kinson Key Games. All artwork, components, and rules are subject to change.

🚀 The Excursions Kickstarter Campaign goes live on October 6th 2026. You can find out more and back it by clicking here 🚀.

Excursions does for Galactic Cruise (read my review of the original here) what Sanctuary (review here) did for Ark Nova (review here), and Ares Expedition (review here) did for Terraforming Mars. A distilled, concentrated taste of the full thing. It’s all at once different to Galactic Cruise while also being immediately familiar. If you’ve already played Galactic Cruise, you’ll adapt to Excursions very quickly, and have a good time, too. Feeling like Galactic Cruise but coming in lighter, smaller, faster, and letting up to six people play at once is quite a feat.

VERDICT

players 1-6 | playing time 60-90 mins

Excursions delivers the Galactic Cruise feeling, but in half the time and with six players. What’s not to love?

six players

simultaneous actions

galactic cruise

Let’s get the important things out of the way. No, Excursions is not an expansion for Galactic Cruise. Yes, Excursions is a standalone game. No, you don’t need to know how to play Galactic Cruise. Yes, if you already know how to play Galactic Cruise, it’ll help.

With that out of the way, Excursions is a game about sending tourists into space. To do so you need to plan some cruises, make sure your rockets have enough food and fuel on board, and of course, make sure you have some tourists who want to pay for their trips. I mentioned Ares Expedition above, and Excursions does something similar with the way actions work.

excursions main game board — The main board with its rotating bonus wheel.

One player chooses the current action, and all players carry out that action. The person who chose it gets an additional bonus. The actions are laid out on a central wheel, and it might seem like there’s an instant stumbling block here. What happens if you don’t want to, or can’t take the chosen action? One of the actions in the game is to place developments; little cogs that can go between action spaces. If you have one between two actions, you can take the adjacent action instead.

If you’ve played the full-fat Galactic Cruise, this might sound familiar, because it is. Buy the cogs, put them on the board to increase your options, and simultaneously increase your storage limits for food and fuel.

Play progresses around the table with players drafting cruise cards to plan their voyages, spending adverts to entice tourists, and spending money on upgrading their rockets. It’s a simultaneous action game too, so everyone takes their turns at the same time. It means the game absolutely rockets along (pun intended), playing out in less than half the time of a game of Galactic Cruise, even with a full complement of six players.

Vive la difference!

This section is squarely aimed at people who’ve played and enjoyed Galactic Cruise. I’m one of their numbers, and your biggest questions are likely to be the same as mine were.

excursions player board — The player boards are small but gorgeous.

How is Excursions different to Galactic Cruise?

Is it different enough to make it worth buying?

While it feels very familiar, Excursions is quite pared down compared to Galactic Cruise. For a start, there are only two resources to worry about when you launch ships: food and fuel. Oxygen is gone. Also, the pilots are now robots, so you don’t need to have a food for them. The player boards still feel premium. They’re still dual-layer, still have spaces for the little development cogs, and the wooden columns to track resources. But they’re smaller. Cuter. Less imposing, which matters.

Cruises, too, have had a big overhaul. Instead of claiming cruise tiles and advertising to them, you collect cruise cards and lay them next to your boards. The cards have the icons that trigger as the cruises advance.

Even the way the game end is triggered is different too. Instead of relying on a mass of cubes filling boxes, as soon as a player hits 50 VPs, the end of the game (one more round) is triggered.

excursions developments — Developments give access to other actions and can unlock technologies.

The other, bigger question then. Is it worth owning both games? The answer is a rock-solid, 100% iron-clad, maybe.

Honestly, it depends on who you want to play with. If you have a regular group of 3 or 4 and play Galactic Cruise and love it, then maybe there’s not much reason to get Excursions. But if you often have bigger groups, or a group with players who prefer lighter, briefer games which don’t demand as much brainpower or time, then Excursions is a great option.

Final thoughts

It’s tricky to write a (p)review for Excursions without directly comparing it to Galactic Cruise. I could try, but people know Galactic Cruise, and people want to know how they compare.

Excursions is lighter, for sure, but I wouldn’t go as far as calling it Galactic Cruise Lite. It’s a fully-fledged game, and it’s a brilliant option if you have a bigger group. I often play games at a local cafe and at a group where we regularly have more than four people around a table, and your choice at five or six is really limited. Not any more!

goal cubes — The goals give players some steer with big rewards on offer.

Within 90 minutes, you’ve had a really engaging, fast-paced, enjoyable game. It doesn’t feel like you’re making do. It’s not like when you go, “Oh, we’re six? Better dig out 7 Wonders again <sigh>”. Excursions doesn’t feel like a compromise.

Tons of variability in setup, lots of ways to play, great components (even in the prototype I spend time with), a clear rulebook with loads of examples. It’s great. My advice – If you have a smaller group who enjoy heavier games, stick with Galactic Cruise. If you have a regular group of 4-6, and especially if some of them prefer slightly less complicated fare, go for Excursions. It’s going to surprise a lot of people when they play it and realise it’s not just Galactic Cruise Lite.

🚀 The Excursions Kickstarter Campaign goes live on October 6th 2026. You can find out more and back it by clicking here 🚀.