Match Report 28th March 2011

The evening our legal beagle won Galaxy Trucker by a mile (or is that a light year?)

With Crispin still away in sunny Florida and Ben off sailing around the west coast of the British Isles the turnout was always likely to be small. Strangely Gwen didn't join us as she was working away in her study on a job related issue, only to find the following day she was made redundant – funny old world!

The good news for the games evening however was that Daniella, Natalie and Malcolm were able to join me the former two both bringing some home made munchies.

Galaxy Trucker (Age 10+, 2-4 players, 60 min playing time)

With a pile of games to choose from in the corner of the room the group elected to have a go at Galaxy Trucker (a game Gwen gave me for Christmas and that I had tried out with Ben and Alex one evening the previous week). Given the name I was asked by at least two of the players if this was going to be anything like Race for The Galaxy, to which I said no and they then went ‘well
that’s OK we will play it then!’. Sadly whilst Alex and I think Race for the Galaxy is an excellent game it has not lit the fires of enthusiasm in our fellow gamers, quiet the contrary in fact.

With the decision made we started getting the game out and what must be hundreds of playing pieces. The game is played in two distinct phases and through three turns (we only played two).

Phase 1 - You take the phase 1 space ship board. This is laid out with a square grid in roughly arrow head shape. You turn over all the component tiles in the middle of the table to make the warehouse and then somebody says ‘go’. The idea is to take components from the warehouse (the centre of the table) and try and build the optimum space ship for the first adventure. In doing this you have to consider a number of factors:

1. That linking components must be of the appropriate type e.g. you cannot have a single connector meeting a double connector on the adjacent tile.

2. That the phasers should generally face forward and not have a ship component placed directly in front of them.

3. Engines should surprisingly be at the rear of the ship and again not have any tiles placed so as to obstruct their jet exhausts

4. Batteries are needed for…., force fields are desirable because……, cabins are needed to hold…….., etc, etc, etc.

Phase 2 - Having built your ship you check it for mechanical /design defects and then you can launch off into out space, where you will be bombarded by asteroids, pirates and all manner of other nasty things and if you are lucky find deserted space craft and space stations. When you adventure is over and you land at tour destination you run through a series of post flight checks and depending on these, gain or loose Space Credits and yes you guessed it space credits are what you need to win the game.

Having successfully or otherwise completed the first mission you than dismantle what is left of your space ship and take the board layout for turn 2 or 3 as appropriate and build progressively bigger and bigger space craft with progressively more dangerous missions.

This game we all found to be very funny and all the more so as our engineer Malcolm who I thought would be a sure fire winner at a game with engine components and pipes came in in 4th place (having seen parts of his space craft separate during flight from the main body and drift off into space) whilst Natalie, our legal beagle (not an obvious engineer) won by a margin of 50% ahead of her nearest rival. Well done.

With the delicious cakes sampled, two of our team had to head home before the engineers closed the main road for resurfacing thus bringing our evening to an early close.