Pairs well with: Pabst Blue Ribbon and caffeine tablets.
Brutus scale: 6/10
Have you ever wanted to be a space pirate?
Of course you have, why did we even bother asking. Well this game isn’t for you. This game is for the people who want to live on the right (ish) side of the law, piloting glorified piles of scrap-metal held together with prayers and duct tape through the far reaches of space, shipping cargo from one end of the galaxy to the other at the mercy of reavers and smugglers and so on.
To be honest though, even the space-pirate aficionados would probably have fun playing this game as it is, to use the technical term, ‘a right laugh’.
Galaxy Truckers is a deceptively smart yet utterly bonkers tile placement game in which every player must build their own beautiful, sparkly spaceship from a range of components. Once built, you’ll experience a series of random encounters per round that will test how well you have planned and built your ship.
Easy, right?
Wrong.
The moral of this game is that you are, in fact, not very good at building spaceships. Yes, even if you try really, really hard. Even if you nick all of the components that another player wanted. At some point parts of your ship are going to be blown off, you’ll lose cargo and crew, and you’ll fail to sell any goods at the end of your ship’s whole eventful ordeal.
The game is played over three rounds, as encounters in each round become progressively more difficult. To account for this, you can build bigger and bigger ships1. The round begins with frantic ship-building. A pool of tiles is placed face-down in the centre of the table, ostensibly within easy reach for all players (but in practice it always feels like everyone else is closer to the good tiles). All players simultaneously pick tiles one at a time from the pool and place them on their boards as ship-parts.
This stage looks and feels a bit like a manic, grabby version of Carcasonne, except that it’s possible to return tiles to the pool if they won’t fit on your ship.
The aim is to build a ship that will fly out of miscellaneous bits and pieces, survive pirate attacks, and carry valuable space-goods to space-market2. Components must marry up with one another in order to have a legal ship that can actually fly (so as well as the tussle for good tiles, players are also simultaneously putting together a puzzle), and will need include several component types to be able to earn you some sweet, sweet money. Engines are pretty essential, without them you would endlessly drift through space. As are storage facilities. Lasers are also quite useful, as they can shoot down hostile space pirates and small asteroids which would otherwise damage your ship. Shields, similarly are helpful for asteroid protection and for when you bump into stuff. As well as these you can build quarters that provide you with crew, battery cells that fuel lasers, shields and engines, and alien habitation units x 3.
All the tiles are useful, is what we’re saying. But in their own special ways, and only when strategically placed (a challenge, given the aforementioned building-panic). If you were, for example, to build a mighty ship replete with enormous weapons and powerful engines, it would not do you much good to place those engines behind the exhaust ports. That is how you get an exploding ship. Similarly, you want cargo holds to be hidden deep in the bowels of the ship, out of harm’s way.
The poor placement of tiles, though useless to that particular player, becomes the hilarious for everyone else.
In the end you (perhaps unsurprisingly) end up with a ship that looks an awful lot like a 7-year old child’s desperate attempts to construct a flightworthy vessel out of macaroni, aluminium foil, and a cardboard box. But you are a noble, brave space trucker on a mission and on a deadline, so off you go. Galaxy Corp, Inc., your shady parent company, are not paying you to lollygag around. Any ‘illegal’ or unfinished bits of ship are assumed to fall off or burn up in take-off, so particularly unlucky or unwitting players may end up with just an engine, a laser, and some pipes. Others, like Chris, have played this game so many times with and without expansions4 that he can build an efficient spacecraft replete with 360 degree shield-coverage in his sleep.
‘Have you seen John’s ship?! It’s just a million batteries tied together with some string. There isn’t anything for the batteries to even power. There’s only one engine and its stuck on the front. John I can’t wait for you to meet our good friends the asteroids.’
You might think that the mad ship-building is a game in itself, and you’d be right, but there is also the small matter of actually flying the damn thing. Bonuses are paid for a speedy delivery, but any *cough* merchandise you pick up en route is yours to profit from. A particularly good-looking ship will also win prizes, but that’s probably not something you would want to bank on, given the gamut of asteroid fields, pirates, and slavers standing between you and your destination.
Of course, if you happen to lose any tiles from your ship on the way, you are technically losing company merchandise, and will unfortunately have to pay for it. This may result in bankruptcy, starvation, and, ultimately, death. A suitably miserable game after all!
But, as ever, the real space bad-ass is board games.
However it normally works, they’re all gathered together and mixed up at the moment. Probably for the best.
And so, each player picks up and redistributes meeple throughout the game, using their skills to generate victory points. Briony is particularly good at a strategy relying on market traders: it’s always satisfying to generate enough points in a single track to beat everyone else and their diversity tactics. She annoyingly does this with the science track in 7 Wonders and is rarely, if ever, beaten.
As we understand it Board in the City has a large collection of games that will gradually be increasing during the first couple of months of its opening. Their page has been publishing some pictures of this as it unfolds. Mmmm, more games, said every board gamer ever. Effectively, the lure to go and play will heighten over time, so basically there is no excuse not to go and check it out.
Excitingly the venue will be running some special events of their own. But how can they possibly make board gaming with your friends, in comfort, while supporting the community more fun you ask? Well, firstly by running a huge murder mystery game during the opening evening, involving the entire audience which was followed up with some delightful live music by our very own 
Bananagrams is probably a game a lot of people have seen while Christmas shopping as it’s sold in a lot of stores that don’t even specialise in games. Usually when we see a game like this we instantly assume it’s terrible – Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit notoriously belong to this same category and have hurt us in the past. Rather amazingly Bananagrams is actually fun. It’s a game very similar to Scrabble where players are given a set number of tiles (usually 21 but depending on number of players) and must make connecting words with them. Unlike Scrabble there is no point scoring system, and instead to win the game you must get rid of all of the tiles in the central pool first. You do this by using all of your hand tiles and then shouting ‘PEEL!’**** Each player will then take an extra tile from the pool and continue trying to form words. For the player who shouted this means that you now have only one letter to get rid of, and fortunately the game allows breaking up and reforming words. The game pitches your intellectual Scrabble ability against that of time pressure and the abilities of the other players. This can be a bit distressing when you think you’re doing really well but it turns out you’ve only been laying two and three letter words, whereas your friend opposite has practically written a novel*****.
Star Wars: The Card Game is a two-player deck building game. It is set loosely during the height of the Empire’s control in a way that allows the different card affiliations to have beef with one and all of the others at the same time. Although not plot-specific, the decks will feature characters, places and events that occur during the novels, films and general Star Wars universe.
Units cards, like Chewie, are used for attacking and defending in engagements and may also contribute to balancing the force (don’t worry, we’ll come back this like Han Solo comes back to bars). Enhancement cards do what they say on the tin – play the card to do or get a better thing, or to improve existing cards. Event cards are sudden effects which are played directly from the hand instead of having to be placed in the play area first. They usually cost resources or cancel effects of other cards. Finally, fate cards are similar to event cards but usually have more powerful effects. You can only play these during a certain phase, and when used correctly can be a game-changer***.
During setup you’ll also pick and layout three objectives. These are what the game is really all about: each player will be trying destroy their opponent’s objective cards. A light side victory requires the destruction of three objective cards (even though more may be played throughout the game). A dark side victory occurs if the death star dial advances to 12. This is a dinky little clock which will advance once per turn, and twice if at the beginning of the turn the dark side of the force is more powerful.
The force struggle phase happens at the end of each turn, in which players commit cards to the force. Whoever has the most committed points to the force means that for that round, the force will be changed to their side. Committing cards to this however means being unable to use them in the later stages of the round.
In conclusion the game is very well thought out and balanced. The art, and range of characters and cards are excellent. It is a constant struggle from beginning to end, but once you get better at it it feels like you have the might of the Empire emanating from your very being. Unfortunately, like similar deck-building games such as Magic the Gathering, it’s going to take a while for you to get really good, kid, and until then you’ll need to be prepared to loose a lot. But it’s ok, even the best Jedi loose sometimes.
After much tweaking, the first play test actually went well! They came out with a better functioning game (would’ve sucked if it had just got worse) and so they were able to turn their attention to the graphics and other features that needed work. By the end of Saturday evening they had a range of fully written and themed cards ready for use, and had worked out what they wanted the board to end up looking like.
The second stage is known as ‘the ardgy-bardgy bit in the middle’. This is where each player’s elks are passing one another in the middle, and moving basically anything becomes tense and difficult. Often there is a lot of stone sharing for both elk, and things are both tense and cosy.
Misery Farming 