Review of Galaxy Trucker: Missions

Blurb from the publisher: 'What's more fun than flying a spaceship made of sewer pipes? Flying a spaceship made of sewer pipes, radioactive isotopes and high explosives!

Each flight becomes a special mission with its own story, rules and rewards. Get ready to haul superheavy cargo, enigmatic artifacts or tasty beverages conveniently packaged in fragile bottles of glass. Does this sound too easy? The new adventure supercards will double the danger!

You can combine this with previous expansions, but no other expansion is required. The missions are a great addition to the basic version of Galaxy Trucker.

In 2007 we started Czech Games Edition by publishing the Galaxy Trucker board game. Over the years the game has had several expansions.

In 2014 we released Galaxy Trucker as our first app for tablets and smartphones. And because we like it when a digital game has a storyline that the player can discover and experience, the app includes a campaign in which the player can work as a Corp Inc. trucker, flying across the Galaxy, discovering new planets and space stations, earning new ship designs, meeting interesting characters, and, last but not least, flying the challenging missions that the characters offer. Later, we also added missions to online play.

Our players loved the missions, and several websites named Galaxy Trucker as the best game of 2014 or the best digital implementation of a board game ever. And we started to think about our tabletop truckers.

So now, the idea has come full circle. This expansion brings the Galaxy Trucker missions experience to your gaming table.'

What you get: Your EUR 24,99 or USD 29,99 or GBP 19,99 will buy you the Galaxy Trucker: Missions Expansion, an expansion for Galaxy Trucker, a humorous, real-time, sci-fi tile placement game that accommodates from two to four players in less than an hour. In addition to the English rulebook which can also be found on the publishers' website, the game also contains the following: 70 Payload Components, 16 Missions and 26 Supercards.

In contrast to the basic game, the Missions Expansion is not language neutral. There is heavy use of text describing each mission. Additionally, it is not a stand alone game; you need Galaxy Trucker to play.

Gameplay: The Missions Expansion (henceforth: Missions) brings into the board game version of Galaxy Trucker the innovation that its digital edition brought into the franchise.

You might remember the complaint about not having themed missions to add credibility (and variance) to your galaxy trucking? The 16 Missions in the box are here to take care of it. Each of them describes the new set up of the game, including some or all of the additional components of the box. Alien Design gives some quirky prerequisites on how to build your truck and triples the reward for the best-looking ship at the end of a round. Easy Peasy replaces all the unknown cards of the mission with Supercards, making for a very random, and very hard, game. Not only the rewards for the best-looking ship but also the rewards for finishing are doubled. Radioactive Isotopes adds the, well, radioactive isotopes, as if your current cargo was not dangerous enough. The rules, once again, change a bit, and so on and so forth. Each mission states what type of ships it can or can't be used with, or whether additional expansions are required to accommodate particular types of ships.

As if the the types of components of the basic game were not enough, Missions adds another five. All these have a different, purple back, since they are not drawn as per the initial rules but follow their own and are linked to particular missions. If the Explosive Cargo explodes all eight modules around it perish. Fragile Cargo perishes if any of its eight surrounding modules gets destroyed. Heavy Cargo is impervious to cannon fire or meteorites hitting your ship, it however takes a heavy toll on your engines, effectively reducing their output. Radioactive Cargo cannot touch more of its kind, and cannot have either batteries or upright crew figures live near it; the modules can be there, but they cannot be staffed (or stuffed). Artifacts are a major pain in the ass, seeing how, depending on the artifact, nothing in its row, column or both row and column will work. Cheers for great truck design!

Supercards are adventures taken to eleven. Again you will encounter Tactical Zones and Pirate Fleets, as well as a few more surprises like the Robopolice, all sorts of dusts and contaminations (suddenly Stardust looks like a gift), as well as the... Black Hole? Seriously? That some nice instadeath right there, unless you installed a ludicrously high number of engines on your ship. The idea is to make the game a lot more challenging than it used to be.

Rules also change. Players start with 20 Cosmic Credits and may choose the three Flight Levels. If you feel that 3, 3A and 3 from the basic game are the rounds you wish to play at, that's your three Flight Levels right there. Those of you with more expansions can choose amongst the other ship designs. Missions are picked semi-randomly, first picking up 3 out of the 16, and then either selecting or picking again at random from these three.

The strong points: I do not own any of the other expansions and somehow this feels just great! Missions is probably the best place to start from: more theme, more components, more mayhem. Like the basic game, this expansion addresses itself to the gamer that wants to have fun at his own expense through half-arsed designs in limited time. The byzantine design rules are 50% more, even though you might not need all of them in every single mission. More deadly adventures are included, demanding a lot more effort and thought-process going into the design. This, by definition, means one thing: as of now Galaxy Trucker takes itself more seriously.

Sure, it is still a game where you are unlikely to remember who won but will remember with excruciating detail how a limping ship managed to deliver or how an otherwise healthy ship blew up due to a single oversight. It assumes however that after all these years (the basic game came out in 2007, if you remember) you are ready for the next step: more thinking; more effort; better designs. On the other hand one cannot overlook Missions' origins. This is what the digital players have been playing. I would not make the assumption that all of them had played the board game version before. Thus, the question of whom this expansion addresses itself to is answered quite easily: to the board game players who felt left out and could not enjoy the features of the digital version, as well as the digital players who felt disappointed because their board game experience did not resemble the one they had online.

Gameplaywise, it all frankly makes sense. Of course it is better to have themed missions instead of a bland race; to play three hard rounds instead of always starting from the easiest level; to face adventures for which only the best ship design can save you... If you get lucky. The replayability of the game just went through the roof; frankly, it feels as if I just got a new game.

The components are of sturdy cardboard, in line with the basic game. It might take some rearranging but in the end the basic box fits everything.

Like the basic game and in line with most Chvátil's games, the rulebook is written in a humorous, patently non-linear way. That is definitely funny the first time one reads it, can however make your life difficult when searching for particular rules. In any case, you will have a blast reading it the first time, or when looking at the goofy art and in-world quotes.

Including resealable bags in the contents shows class and interest for the customer. I wish this was standard practice for all publishers.

The weak points: It might bear repeating, but it doesn't matter, I can do it all day: Galaxy Trucker is not an easy game in itself. Missions adds even more options, considering that you are already intimately familiar with the basic game. Putting the basic game along with Missions to a newbie is counterproductive; you are seriously running the danger of driving people away from gaming. Missions is clearly for trucking veterans.

The new orientation of the game might put some people off. Seeing how harder the game becomes, a lot more effort needs to be put into it for the fumbles and carnage to be funny and not pointless. I am fine with this, and can truck in either basic or Missions. If you feel that you do not wish the game to become even more of an intellectual puzzle than it already was, you might want to try before you buy.

Not having played the digital version I understand that not all of its features have been ported into the boardgame, the most important being the ability to play solo. That is kind of disappointing, not so much for other features but for the possibility of solo play. Many games handle solo acceptably even though they are clearly designed as competitive exercises; Dice City is the first that comes to mind.

Conclusion: If your are a Galaxy Trucker veteran, or if you decided to get into the board game version from the digital one, one thing is certain: you will eventually buy this expansion. That's as certain as to what happens if you don't have the engines to escape a black hole.

For more info on the Galaxy Trucker: Missions Expansion and Czech Games Edition, visit their website at http://czechgames.com/en/.

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