We are a board game family. The more complicated and long a game is, the happier it makes the older boy. I don’t mind a super complicated game sometimes but I find I don’t have the mental space needed to stay chipper during an extra long game all that often during the summer. So this summer I instituted a new family tradition of playing a 3-player Galaxy Trucker on Friday afternoons! I figured that way we could play a long, involved game to make the older boy happy at least once a week and I wouldn’t have to learn all new complicated rules each time we sat down to play a game. Plus I’ve yet to win at Galaxy Trucker so I hoped that playing it repeatedly would eventually help me get better at it.
It sounds simple. You build a ship by grabbing components and properly placing them next to other components on an empty ship board. That isn’t hard, right? Except you need to grab the components before the other players do, you need to finish your ship before the timer runs out and you need to be certain that all the bits go together properly or you might loose half (or more) of your ship during the spot check before you even launch into space.
This is one of my best ships. You want guns. You want people. And you want engines. Other things are good too. But really if you have those three things and can keep them, you’re doing all right. It isn’t perfect and it definitely isn’t the prettiest ship. But evidently my standards are low for intergalactic travel.
The game says “The game ends after Round 3, once all the rewards have been collected and all the penalties paid. Add up all your cosmic credits. If that number is 1 or more, you win!” It took longer than I would like to admit (a surprising number of bad things can happen to your ship during the three rounds through space – meteoric swarms, smugglers, pirates, slavers and so on…..even simple, friendly open space can be the end of your ship if you somehow lost all your engines before the empty space), but I had actually ended the game with more than 1 credit before this summer.
This is one of my ships after many of those bad things happened one game. I’m not going to lie – this can be pretty demoralizing. Especially if the other ships breeze past all of the bad things due to a combination of better design, planning ahead and luck.
The rules go on to say “Of course, the player who has the most credits is a bit more of a winner than everyone else.” I am never the person to end with “a bit more of the credits”.
This is the most credits I’ve ever ended a game with. 60 credits!!! I was very proud. I still didn’t win that game. Maybe someday….
But I did get to spend hours and hours with my teen and tween this summer hanging out together. So I’m going to count that as a different kind of win.
