Marc Leblanc turned me on to this board game. He's one of the superstars at my new company, Mind Control Software, and he's also the kind of guy who walks around with an encyclopedia inside his head that seems to contain every game ever made, whether tabletop or digital. For example, here's the actual conversation where I learned that this game exists: I was singing the praises of Through The Ages. It's long and definitely not a game you want to try with your more casual board gamer friends, but totally worth the 1+ hours per person in my opinion. I blogged about it a bit here and it's still in heavy rotation with the hard-core part of the Wizards crowd. Anyway, I described it as being by "some Czech game designer" and he responded "Vlaada Chvatil?" I said I thought that sounded right, and he told me I should try Chvatil's latest game: Galaxy Trucker.

In Galaxy Trucker you first have to assemble your spaceship out of Carcasonne-style tiles that have things like engines, guns, crew quarters, and cargo bays on them. Then everybody's ships are subjected to a (somewhat) random collection of obstacles as they fly around and try to collect cargo to sell. The flavor is actually pretty awesome and as a generator of cool narratives I like the game a lot. There's also some really cool mechanical elements in the game. However, as published I'm not actually a fan of the way the rules work.

The problem for me is that the ship construction itself is actually a twitch game masquerading as a thinking game. The rules for ship construction work like this: You can only have one tile in your hand at a time and once you place a tile onto your ship then you can never move it. All the tiles start out face-down and anytime you like you can pick one up and turn it over. If you don't attach it to your ship then you put it back face-up and anyone else can then take it for their ship. So what this turns into is a mad scramble where you're constantly scanning all the rejected face-up tiles and looking for the perfect one. Furthermore, whoever finishes first gets a head start in the obstacle course portion of the game, which is a pretty nice advantage. Did I mention that after you start building your ship you're also allowed to look at some of the hidden obstacles that you'll be flying through? There's just way too much information there for anyone who hasn't played the game dozens of times to parse.

Ship construction seems like it could be (should be?) this cool experience of min-maxing various aspects of your ship given some random resources and some (but not complete) knowledge of the hidden obstacles to come. But in practice it's a twitch game. How quickly can you grab tiles, parse their consequences, and attach them to your ship? I'm being a little bit unfair, since the game does reward quick-thinking rather than pure twitch, but the whole experience just felt really bad to me. Robo Rally is probably the most similar game I have played but Robo Rally is better in that a) You don't have to track what cards your opponents are programming (or choosing not to program), b) you don't get punished for being the last person to decide how to play out the turn unless you take significantly longer than your opponents (which seems fair to punish), and c) there's more randomness in resolution such that you aren't punished nearly as badly for making mistakes.

I think I would like Galaxy Trucker a lot more if each player got dealt a random selection of tiles and then had to construct their ship out of those. Now you can't accomplish everything you might want to (so you don't have to feel bad about not being perfect) and now you don't have this wonky interaction with your opponets that gives a huge advantage to experienced players.

All in all, Galaxy Trucker has enough cool elements that it could be a game I really like, but only if you replace the twitchy ship construction phase with something more like a "sealed deck" experience. Meanwhile, the game is nothing whatsoever like Through The Ages, which is pretty impressive and means that Vlaada Chvatil is a name well worth remembering.