Race for the Galaxy: The Galactic Parasite

My education in parasitic conflict began with Race for the Galaxy. This game is super-tight, where actions are always happening and your attention is never, ever allowed to waiver.

Fast Times

I've got the paper version. And I walk around begging people to play it with me, to little luck usually.

So the majority of my play ends up being on boardgamearena.com, and the game here manages to shine even more than it does in real life.

Zero setup time? Almost instantaneous drawing, shuffling and discarding? The 2 player advanced rules manages to stuff 2 turns into each turn, and playing this on the computer ends up in an average game length of approximately 8 minutes. No joke.

8 minutes to build your star empire, expand your tentacles, maximize the economy and dominate your fellow players.

Time for the in-real-life 2 player advanced game is about 20 minutes if both players are running at full steam.

The Early Games

When I originally started playing Race for the Galaxy, it seemed like the surest path to victory was to build 4 resource planets and 4 consume sources, then start producing and consuming until you run out of victory points.

The problem being you can't really aim for that. Who knows what cards you're going to draw? A military strategy also works, if you draw into military cards. Sometimes you can win just by accumulating bigger and better planets/developments and doing it more efficiently.

The cards I respect more now versus when I started playing are the Alien Cards. Few in number, expensive to build, and not very synergistic with anything other than the slim collection of Alien Planets and the single 6-cost development.

But the Aliens are worth a lot of points just on their own. You don't need to have any kind of system set up (although Replicating Robots or one of the 2 cost subtractors for Aliens really helps). Most of the Alien planets are windfall worlds, so you get a very valuable sale resource for free as soon as you play it. Settle an Alien world, sell the resource, and hopefully draw another big point Alien Planet.

That can be enough if you are able to keep it going.

Another amazing card I failed to fully understand is Pilgrimage World.

At first glance, the consume power looks like a negative. I originally assumed the card was good because it gave you a whopping 2 points and cost 0 to put into play. But countless times since then I have been stuck with a bunch of production planets, desperately looking for consume powers, draw Pilgrimage World which can consume an INFINITE amount of resources at an almost 1-for-1 ratio. The more production planets you have, the better it gets.

But Back to Parasitic Conflict!

Sometimes the most important thing you do during a turn isn't even an action you selected, but something your opponent chooses. If you draw an important card during the explore phase, the enterprising player immediately looks for opportunities to play it. Heck, I might not even do anything during one of my actions if I find something superior to do during someone else's action.

Once you figure out a fairly decent game plan, the final struggle for the win comes down to who can use the other player's actions more effectively.

One of the big downsides (there's another one I'm going to save for another post) to the online Race for the Galaxy is being forced to scroll the window down to see what exactly your opponent is working on.

Half the time I end up ignoring my opponent and failing to anticipate upcoming moves.

A production/consumer engine is pretty cool, but being able to also settle new worlds and develop new techs at the same time is even better. By guessing what he or see is going to do, you can actually do up to FOUR things during your turn. And only one or two of those will easily win you the game.

That's why some of the biggest boons in the game are Intergalactic Bank, Replicant Robots, Terraforming Robots and worlds with a production card draw. These cards all allow you to better react and not be caught flatfooted during your opponent's actions.

On the production side, Mining Conglomerate, Consumer Markets and Diversified Economy all give you more cards to pay for things while you are busy with your consume/produce engine.

Whatever your opponent does, you need to do it twice as good, or do the opposite while also taking advantage of his moves. I've seen players do both.

So why do people not want to play this game? Race for the Galaxy has a few things going against it. Firstly, it LOOKS complicated, even though the actual game is extremely elegant. Secondly, the iconography LOOKS like weird undecipherable alien language, when cards are actually quite clear.

I feel like I have at least 2 more posts coming on this…

DC Deckbuildin' and the Violence Inherent in the System

Do you like violence? What if I told you there was a game where the currency was violence. Not implicit, but explicit. Instead of bribery or blackmail, we were dealing solely with punches and kicks. Boots to the head. A jack booted stomp on a Sunday morning.

The DC Comics Deck-Building Game.

The title sticks in my craw like a shiny bent nail every time I type it.

If you have played Dominion, you would probably be familiar with the rules to the DC Comics Game. If you have played Ascension, you are almost 100% of the way to knowing the rules to the DC Comics Game.

There is a spread of 5 cards you can buy from, the always-available kicks as the go-to option if you don't like any of your choices.

Violence is the currency of your purchases. As a superhero, you buy other heroes, equipment and villains for your deck using a series of punches and kicks in the same way Dominion uses copper, silver and gold. Villains you are coercing into your team, of course. Equipment you are stealing from lesser beings. And of course other lesser heroes gain admiration the more punishment you dish out. At least that's how I envision it.

Much like Ascension, you can't think up any big overarching strategy. If you pick a theme, and try to stick to that theme, you are going to LOSE. You also can't just go "big money" because the currency doesn't really go high enough. The kicks are worth 2. Some heroes/equipment might be worth 3, but you have to wait for them to come around. Super-villains rarely cost 8 to buy, but more likely they are worth 10 or 12.

There also aren't very many ways to trash your cards. So your deck will invariably be big. And gloppy.

The first time I played this, I lost in spectacular fashion with a hand full of kicks. The more savvy players went for what they thought was cool, regardless of the associated ability and ended up doing substantially better.

When I eventually won, I had instead built a balanced deck. Equal parts high power cards and drawing abilities to get those high power cards into my hand. I had to build right, and then I had to get lucky.

Each player will have a unique superhero "role" card to give you an added little bonus, and from my experience you have to pay attention to these because they make all the difference. Triggering an extra card, an extra +1 power or both on a normally good hand is what gets you enough power to buy the super-villains, the big point scorers of the game.

There is plenty of luck, but there is also a surprising amount of skill to be acquired, particularly in the card evaluations.

Green Arrow's bow is incredibly strong.

Granting you +2 power, but also subtracting 2 from the strength of the current super-villain in play.

But other cards feel a lot better once you play around with them for a while.

Two Face, for instance, is a terrible card on the surface.

Playing him gets you +1 power, the same value as a punch. His added ability sounds bad…you call odd or even, draw a card and get to keep the card if the cost matches what you called. But if you a familiar with your deck, it gives you the ability to try to sculpt both your current hand and the hard you will draw next turn.

The DC Deckbuilding Game (not the correct title) is short, sweet, with more depth the more you play. It's currently the go-to lunch game and I couldn't be happier. Pretty cheap (especially if someone else pays for it) and the rules can be found here.

5 Take-Aways from Blood Bowl Season 6: My Errant Clicking Finger

My time with Season 6 of my Virtual Blood Bowl League has finally come to an end. It actually came to an end some time ago, but my communications satellite was on the far side of the planet and until I now I was operating in a signal blackout.

But back to Blood Bowl.

I played humans, for the second time. I did not do well, but I did better than expected.

Here are my take-aways.

1) The humans are a pretty fun team.

After some investigation, I think the human team are the Skaven I've been looking for all my life. While the blitzers are super expensive, the rest of the team provides oodles of affordable enjoyment. The catchers are packed full of skills, and they are almost as speedy as their furry Gutter Runner rivals. While the basic Human lineman has to potential to do anything. Love the extra armor point.

2) Boneheaded is a terrible skill to have.

After this season, I hereby vow to never again hire an Ogre to my team. Rolling boneheaded is a disheartening experience. But the way the video game is set up, if you the player are slightly confused it is very easy to also lose a reroll. During one half of one game, I lost every reroll I had trying to reroll boneheaded rolls. I thought I was just really unlucky. But in reality, the computer was taking my rerolls and throwing them in the garbage.

The bitter taste in my mouth really gained an intolerable strength the turn my ogre rolled boneheaded, was knocked down, and then rolled boneheaded trying to stand back up again. And with his companion Loner skill, you can have this happy circumstance 1/6th of the time you roll boneheaded, so it was only a matter of time before it happened again.

3) Similarly, the apothocary is completely useless. Resuscitation in the Old World has always been a great matter of luck and hope rather than skill. I imagine a Blood Bowl apothecary as similar to the "igor" race from Terry Pratchett's Discworld. But without any of the supernatural stitching-together abilities. And the computer version of Blood Bowl makes the apothecary worse. There are several opportunities for errant clicking. In this case, the errant click means selecting death. You always get to pick death, even if your character didn't die the first time and only dies on the re-roll. And during the season, I always picked death. After a while, I enjoyed picking the dead result. The real crime is life, a famous judge once observed.

4) Style should always go ahead of substance. You aren't going to be an awesome Blood Bowl player. Very people are. So try to reach the goals you WANT to reach. Don't listen to people talk about rankings or victories. Reach your OWN goals. Build character (and by extension, characters!) in your team and try to tell a story.

5) A few really bad things can happen during the typical Blood Bowl game. One of the big things, and its going to happen and you just have to accept it, are unexpected injuries. When your team is suddenly taken mostly out of the game due to unlucky dice rolls, well it happens. Usually in the first half. When that happens, try to see the game from the point of view of your opponent. Because when the slaughter happens to the other team, it is seriously fun times. Try to see their fun times, and realize your dead and bleeding team is contributing to another person's memorable experience. Perhaps you were even slightly incompetent. It happens to everybody!

No one is good at Blood Bowl. Except for the people who come in first, of course.

10 Games To Get Into Each Other's Business

Since my post on interactivity, I've been thinking a lot about player boards. Don't get me wrong, I love player boards set out in front of every person. I don't mind "multiplayer solitaire" style gaming either.

But what I'm doing here now is calling out games on the other side of the fence. Games bucking the individual player board, games focused on keeping the action to a central chunk of the table all players have access to. No mats. No tableaus.

This isn't exactly a "best of" list, except to me. There's probably better out there, but I sure haven't played 'em! All of these titles I've played personally. And they are awesome.

10) Carcassonne

Sure enough, a lot of board games I'm going to go over are typically listed as "family games" or "gateway" games. No matter how much the elite may look down on these games, no one can argue they aren't interactive.

Gateway games get you into the hobby. And its been my experience the more veteran gamers slowly move their tastes away from the single board. The hardcore economic machines like Agricola and Puerto Rico all have highly defined player areas. I think as knowledge and skill grows, there also grows a subconscious desire to optimize your strategy, away from the fickle interference of your fellow players. To prove your raw superiority. And I can't argue that there is some luck and uncertainly surrounding the central board, as you try to maintain control while opponents fight among themselves like a pack of half-starved feral hogs.

Speaking of half-starved feral hogs, the rulebook for Carcassonne bizarrely recommends you talk over each tile placement with your fellow players to determine the optimal play that benefits everyone. Sort of a social activity develop your relationship with your fellow players. Huzzah, what fun!

But my fellow Carcassonne players are no modern band of merry philosophers. These creatures hit the game hungry. Their bellies are empty, they have lost their capacity to hunt. So they turn on their own.

You pull a tile out of the bag. You place the tile anywhere on the growing board where it can fit. Towns must match up to towns. Roads must match up to roads. 25% of the time you will get a tile and find a way to directly help your position. 75% you will draw a tile of doubtful utility to yourself, and the quest becomes finding the place to wreck your opponent's scoring, in as permanent a way as possible.

Because everyone is building on to the same board, you can easily block your opponents dreams with a little thinking. For instance, a partially completed city can so very easily be foiled with the placement of a tile extending out the border in an unnatural direction. And if you can plop a cathedral down, the usual scoring result for that city is most likely a zero.


9) Settlers of Catan

Like Carcassonne, Settlers of Catan started out as some sort of happy little family game.

But if adults are playing (and probably some kids) thinks will get vicious after the first few turns. All the action in this game happens on a tiny little hex board. Much too small to be developed by 3 people without getting in each other's way, let alone 4.

There are 5 different resources, and they are all necessary for pursuing all the different avenues of development. Much thought goes into figuring out a way to get a least some access to all 5 of these resources with the initial 2 settlement placements. Because if you are ever completely cut off from a single one of these raw materials it can mean disaster.

And then the robber comes out. Sometimes, if you get boxed in early in the game, the only option left is to buy development card after development card. Most development cards are knights. Resulting in you robbing people, over and over again. You rob them…pull a card out of their hand…then chuck it in disgust because its not the resource you wanted. Next turn you rob them again. You will never forget the experience, and neither will they.

In a non-conflict version of Settlers, everyone would be able to settle exactly where they wanted to. The focus would be just on creating the perfect economic engine, whereas with the shared board the planning must also take into account getting there FIRST.

8) Takenoko

I really wanted to find at least one game for this list I could describe as interactive, but non-competative. At least not cutthroat. I think Takenoko fits the bill. Each player has their own set of hidden objectives, and its hard to interfere with them for the most part. Unless its one of the really complicated ones, like the 4 stalks of 3 height bamboo which you aren't realistically going to grow at all unless the other players are for some reason concentrating the panda's attentions on the other side of the board.

You can also get shafted if someone puts a plot next to yours and stops you from making one of your plot objectives. But as long as you don't invest all your objective slots in plots you are probably going to be alright.

Maybe I just haven't played enough yet, but when Takenoko is over, you don't seem to really despise your opponents, even half-heartedly, and I think that fact is quite remarkable.

7) Rattus

Rattus has each player taking turns controlling the disease vector of a bubonic plague outbreak during the Black Death. People are getting a little worked up about Tomorrow, but Rattus does something very similar without the scary black future board.

All the action happens on a single map of Europe. Something like Risk, but with only civilian populations instead of armies. And then you murder those civilian populations.

You want to avoid taking too many roles (because you are more susceptible to the plague) while taking roles to grow your own population as fast as possible. Sometimes you can make the plague pawn land on a huge pile of your opponent's populations, and a huge slaughter begins. Other times, you will try to infect a smaller group of your own people, hoping the losses will be minimal which reducing the threat of future outbreaks.

Because of the shared board, you can use your opponents as part of your strategy. Big piles of your civilians aren't as tempting of a target when they are placed on the same countries as your opponents. And big losses on your side are ok as long as there is a nice juicy area next door ready for plague when your turn comes around.

The closest version to this without the map is probably the classic Nuclear War. A really fun game, with the best spinner ever created. But not a lot of tactics, other than mutually assured destruction.


6) Ticket to Ride

Another family game!

Much like Settlers, the Ticket to Ride board is really too crowded for all the players trying to build routes on it. So people are going to be blocked off, and being blocked off is TERRIBLE!

I have a confession. Until I played this game a bunch, I used to think the optimal strategy was to draw all your cards, and then start building your track only when you had every single route all lined up.

But this will only ever work if everyone else is working at a very sub-optimal level. This strategy can't even beat the "normal" A.I. on my Ticket to Ride phone app. And it certainly won't beat a skilled human.

Every time you choose to draw instead of play a route, you are giving your opponents one more chance to play exactly where you NEED your train to go. Because unlike Settlers for instance, a Ticket to Ride route can be placed ANYWHERE on the board, without warning, assuming you have the cards.

Playing a 6 length track out in the middle of nowhere is never a bad play even if it doesn't mess up your opponents. Heck, its worth 15 points. But you will probably mess them up, at least a little. You know what feels really bad? Spending 6 white trains on 3 two-train routes. The point difference is 6 vs. 15. And if you can prevent them from completing a ticket, the game is lost for sure.

Before you choose to take your next draw, make sure to contemplate the board thoroughly (although preferably on someone else's turn).


5) Rummikub

Invented by Ephraim Hertzano in Israel after WWII. Rummikub combines rummy with what looks slightly like Mahjong tiles. Most people associate Rummikub with games you only play with your grandmother. But believe it or not, this actually won the Spiel des Jares back in 1980.

Your grandmother is one smart lady.

Similar to other rummy games, in Rummikub you try to get rid of all your tiles by making sets. In this version, you can use other people's played tiles pretty much with impunity.

All the unwashed masses get so worked up about Texas Hold 'Em, when Rummikub does it even better. Every turn someone plays more tiles out on the board. These tiles are now basically your tiles, if you can find a way to use them.

Eventually, sufficient options are created and "going out" becomes possible. The last piece to the puzzle is played. The turn is passed. And you make all sorts of sputtering, squealing noises as you lay all your tiles out.

You might be tempted to hold on to your tiles as long as possible, so your opponent can't use any of them. But normally you are playing multiple "hands" of Rummikub, with the losers getting the "points" by adding up those remaining tiles.

And if your final play gets too complicated you might end up like me and forget exactly what you were doing in the first place. The penalty for leaving an unrecoverable game state is quite severe.


4) Belfort

In modern gaming parlance, Belfort is both a worker placement game and an area control game. You can purchase locations to use, and these locations are then represented on a central map. You can maximize your engine all you want, but at the end of the game you need to have the most buildings built in enough different areas to claim majorities and seal up the game.

At the beginning you might care about gardens or pubs because they give you more workers. Or banks/blacksmiths/other properties that give you more resources. But at the end you will care more about Guardhouses and Keeps, which give you more control over the big map.

This game is probably the closest in this list to the "modern euro". There is in fact a tableau of buildings you develop that only your guys can be placed on. Yet because these buildings also interact with the big map, securing you area in the town, I say it fits.

3) Troyes

A worker placement game with a difference. You play your workers in one of 3 districts: church, nobles or comercial. Your workers collect dice based on those districts. The dice, once rolled, are used to buy and affect other buildings you construct. Each player can buy into the different buildings. Buildings, districts, dice and NPC attackers are all on the central board.

Each player has to fight for space in the districts. You have to vie for position in the buildings, getting your guy in there before the opposition. And did I mention you can steal each other's dice? You have to buy them, but the "selling" player has no say in the matter and most often does not want to see them go.


2) Neuroshima Hex!

It has the exclamation mark right on the box. In Neuroshima Hex, players are trying to find strategic positions within a very tight hexagonal arena. When the arena fills up, or when someone plays a battle tile, the shooting and hacking starts. Machine guns. Snipers. Chainsaw warriors. It's a big dust-up. Then the shooting ends, the build up starts all over again.

Your brain has to think quite a few turns ahead, keeping all the pieces in careful initiative order. And all 4 races play very differently while also being very well balanced. There is some unfortunate consequences if you manage to draw some non-personnel tiles at the very beginning. But it all tends to balance out as the game goes on.

There's approx. a million expansions and new armies for this game, but the 4 that come in the original box are really all you need. A great game!


1) Mission: Red Planet

In the vein of El Grande, M:RP is an area control game. But instead of the bidding, each player has a series of role cards in their hand with powers similar to those in Citadels. Each player gets to move a few tokens around the large map of Mars, with majorities being scored at 3 different phases throughout the game.

Unlike El Grande, the powers are pretty simple. Each of the 9 abilities involves adding tokens, removing tokens or moving tokens on the board. One role, the Saboteur, actually explodes a ship killing any tokens on board. Another role, the Pilot redirects a batch of astronaughts to a completely new section of the board. Good for both offensive and defensive purposes! For some reason I can wrap my head around these powers way easier than the bizzare randomly bid-on powers of El Grande.

Secondly, you fight over territory TWO different ways. There's the area control on the planet surface, but then you also have to fight for space on the rocket ships to get there! Delay your turn too long, and all the space on the ships will be taken and you will be out on the action.

Thirdly, M:RP has a very satisfying intelligence-collecting element. The "frontier" sections of Mars begin the game unexplored. You can use the "scientist" role to look at the hidden attibute of that space. It might be extra-bountiful. It might be full of radiation, killing all the astronauts at the end of the game before final scoring takes place. Only the person who used the scientist knows (unless someone else uses their scientist on the same spot). This opens up the game to a certain amount of bluffing and second-guessing.

Finally, Mission: Red Planet is the only game on this list that will be somewhat difficult for you to find. Unfortunately this game started out as a sort of flop. Then it got popular again after being stuck in the clearance rack for a while. So no likely reprint, plus now its a bit of a collector item.

Would I spend big money for M:RP? Not ever. You see, there were a couple issues with the manufacture of this game. The original French version (Planet Rouge!) had a neat circular mars board. When the game was printed over here in the U.S.A. for some reason they used this big floppy square board instead. Mars is in the middle, but the whole thing does not fold very well and tends to warp upwards unless you put some weights on the corners. Ship board is the same way. They also didn't include enough victory point markers to score an entire game, so you almost always run out at the end. Weird manufacturing decisions!

If you don't have M:RP, I would suggest another game that just game out called Triassic Terror. I don't know if its at all close to what you want. But it looks very similar to El Grande, only it has dinosaurs. That's what I would do if I hadn't already snarfed up this copy of Red Planet.

End Game

So this list took a lot longer that I thought to make. I have more respect than ever for guys like Tom Vassel who can make a list of 100 titles with ease. And thanks to Tom for inventing lists of 10 things, a technique I of course cribbed for this entry.

Have a good one I missed? Put it in the comments or send me an email.

My next list might not be for a while, but I'm leaning towards games that don't use a victory point mechanism for determining the winner. I'm curious what ones I can come up with.

King of Tokyo, No Expansion Necessary

King of Tokyo's basic mechanic is rolling 6 dice, with 2 rerolls. This concept is at least as old as Yahtzee, and probably older than that. But King of Tokyo makes it fun by attaching the rolling and re-rolling to the exploits of large mutated monsters.

With the proper results, you can gain victory points (stars!), heal yourself, gain energy (currency) or attack your fellow players.

I've managed to play this bash-a-thon a few times and can finally share some insights.

Attacks cannot be directed, and I think this is part of the game's way to keep those health levels under control. When a monster inside Tokyo attacks, the damage is done to all other monsters. When any monster NOT in Tokyo attacks, the damage is always done to the critter currently ruling the city.

Damage is always being dealt, and is almost impossible to avoid.

So unless you are trying to heal above all other considerations, your health will slowly be ticking down even if you aren't occupying Tokyo.

I almost never heal. Hearts get re-rolled to try for attacks, or energy to advance my position. Only when you look down and realize you have 4 health left do those hearts start to look better.

As the name of the game suggest, you will win if you can stay in Tokyo long enough. But the straightest path to victory does not always lead into the city!

My current problem is my desire to stay in Tokyo when the evidence is clearly against it.

Winning with victory points seems the obvious choice at the beginning of the game. But since health is always slowly trickling down the end game often switches to who can kill all the other monsters first.

If you have 12 victory points (winning requires 20) and your opponent is down to 4 health, the logical choice would be to abandon Tokyo the minute the opportunity presents itself. Your opponent will not be able to heal, and you can swing your claws with impunity. Maybe heal up a little.

But after fighting over Tokyo all game long, you get a little sentimental. You've gotten used to fighting over Tokyo. You want to be the King of Tokyo. But you probably aren't going to be.

The last game I played it was OBVIOUS to everyone around the table, including me, that I should abandon Tokyo to the other last standing player. But I did not. And continued to roll my dice. And failed to attack with enough power. And was subsequently destoyed by the much more calculating opponent.

So my final words of wisdom are this…know when it is time to leave Tokyo.

But then we have the expansion to talk about.

It's been mentioned in many places this expansion is almost mandatory.

But I have almost no interest.

I haven't played with Power Up! and maybe that would change my mind. I'm just making assumptions right now. And we all know what happens when we make assumptions. We make an ass out of the umps or something. And its bad!

But look at my evidence:

1) Magic: The Gathering (Revised Core Set)

Take a look through the collectible cards present in Revised Edition. This is the "revised" core set, after the infamous Black Lotus and its Moxen brethren were removed from the printing schedule forever.

The cards are still horribly unbalanced. I had no idea what I was doing back in high school, but at least I understood you could get more value out of a Black Vise instead of an Armageddon Clock.

2) King of Tokyo Power Cards

Included within King of Tokyo are some power cards you can "buy" using the energy you collect during dice rolling. Very similar to Roll Through the Ages' "goods" mechanic, except KoT's energy does not also spread disease.

These cards are just as bad. There are some really good cards. There are some really bad cards. And the energy costs don't really match up. Which is fine, this just means you have to understand how to value the cards. Grab the ones you want, or flush (which the game lets you do) the row and draw some better cards.

Now, lets examine Power Up!

The expansion gives each monster their own static "level up" powers similar to the mutation cards. Each particular monster has a list of abilities attached to them that you can power up by rolling 3 hearts during your turn. But looking at the previous two factors, I have no confidence these powers are at all balanced.

Right now you can pick your monster based on appearances. Functionally, they are all identical.

 I don't think I want to play a version of this game where one monster might be slightly better (or worse, MUCH better) than the others. This can only lead to arguing (especially among children) about who gets what and I don't need that.

There shouldn't be a "optimal" monster someone can prove mathematically is better than the others.

Instead we just grab out monsters and start rolling, and I like that.

Galaxy Trucker: A Different Sort of Game Entirely

And now for a horse of an entirely different color. The horse refers to board games. And the color, of course, is Galaxy Trucker. What a way to screw up a metaphor. And a Wizard of Oz reference.

With Galaxy Trucker, you get 2 games in 1. How fortuitous! The first half of the game players are madly trying to assemble their space ships from a communal pile of parts in the middle of the table. Eventually, if you are really lucky, you might end up with something like THIS.

Believe it or not, this is a spaceship.

And everyone looks at each other's ships and tries to nitpick any illegal tile placements. It pays to be fastiduous. If a faulty connection has been made, the usually result is pieces falling off the affected ship during launch, hurting them from the get-go. You always want to do that.

Here is the central board, which exists merely to keep track of everyone's order in line. This is not actually a race track. You might be startled at first when everyone starts flying backwards, but this is a normal occurence. All of the events you draw use up time and cause your ship to go backwards. Unless your adventure comes up with the "Open Space" result, there is very little opportunity to advance. If you manage to lap anyone, they are immediately removed from the game, which sounds awesome but I have yet to see happen.

Galaxy Truckin'

The cards are divided into hazards. You might encounter pirates. You might fly through a meteor shower. Your ship might become infected by disease. These hazards will hamper your ability to take advantage of the occasional good result…the abandoned space station or the rich planet you might be able to trade with.

Flying through space is solitary.

The competition in this game really happens at the start with assembly. You are constantly hunting through the stacks for just the right piece while your eyes dart furitively around looking for an already-turned-up piece you can snipe from out of your opponent's clutches.

When you get to the flying stage, it's basically time to kick back and let whatever happens, happen.

Do not skimp on lasers.

Do not skimp on shields.

But if you do, you are better off skimping on engines as well and building just a big solid block of cargo bays and crew compartments. Because the last thing you ever what to be is unprepared and rocketing towards the front of the line.

The guy in front is going to catch all the crap first.

If you are lazy enough, and hang far enough behind, dangers have a way of being taken care of before they get to you. Pirates are defeated. Smugglers are shot. All you need to do is put up a strong defense against the meteor showers and hopefully have enough cargo space to loot the leftovers your companions leave in front of you.

My son actually uses this strategy successfully all the time. His ships tend to be art projects rather than successful pirate-fighting designs. He loves batteries, but sometimes forgets to include anything that uses them. But he is getting better. And he still almost always wins because my ship gets torn apart in hails of laser fire.

The other way to succeed at Galaxy Trucker is the route my wife chooses. Technical Perfection.

Build your ship with the maximum laser capacity allowed in the front. Build your ship with the maximum engine capacity allowed in the rear. Add 1 purple alien. Add 1 brown alien. Maximize your crew and cargo carrying capacity.

When my wife is bored, she plays the type of "casual" games you used to see on Facebook but now come in a broad range of delivery systems generally attached to mobile platforms. She plays these games with a religious fervor. She stacks blocks and rescues pets and rotates patterns and what have you.

As far as I can tell, they have all trained her to be a living DEMON during the Galaxy Trucker assembly phase. A place for everything. A thing in every place. And the first place token, thank you very much. A demon of perfection and grace.

My only way to challenge this technique so far is try to talk her up to some of the more difficult ships, notably good old IIIA.

There are a number of bottlenecks on the IIIA you never want to see hit by anything. If a meteor or laser should strike just the right location, the ship can easily snap in half, forcing you to choose which broken twisted pile of metal you want to continue piloting to your destination.

Otherwise it's hard not to despair when her credit totals come back and leapfrog past mine by a magnitude.

If you decide to get Galaxy Trucker for your own collection, know that this game goes well with a New Year's or other holiday celebration. When you are slightly inebriated, the ship designs really "click" together in a satisfactory way, even if the end result offers less than ideal performance in space.

Kids really like building ships too, and will give you a run for your money even if its not the technically best ship because of the benefits described earlier to hiding in the last place position.

And the rounds go by quick enough you never become overly disgusted, even when your ship blows up and you are left rocking a big zero at the end. 10 minutes later you are going to be building a new ship anyway.

I've been talking about interactivity and good game design lately, and Galaxy Trucker seems to throw all my points and suggestions out the window. I love playing it, and it has almost no identifiable attribute I would promote in another game. Something to think about…if you can't do it the conventionally right way, do it in a way that makes your game difficult to measure by the normal standards. And people may love it anyway!

Because Galaxy Trucker's going to be on my shelf for a long time.

EDIT: for a quick review of some of the expansion tiles, check out here.

Table Talk Back 4: The Slow Player

How many of these Talk Back videos are there? Lemme look…NINE?!!!



OK, I gotta hustle.

Luckily there aren't very many slow players among the people I play with.

Really!

Although if it's anyone's fault…and someone should probably take the blame…it should probably be me. I am the guy steering these big dumb hands when my turn finally swings around.

That's real problem I am facing…the turn swinging around.

I think a lot. I spend a lot of my time thinking. And especially if I begin to understand how a game works, I want to make the right play. And the problem is that I focus too much and I don't notice when it becomes my turn. So my problem is NOT that I am a slow player, I just don't know WHOS TURN IT IS.

This can also happen if I am patiently waiting for my turn, decisions all figured out, and someone asks me a complex question and I have to discard all my thinking and immediately respond to them. Then its my turn and I'm talking and I'm the one who looks like a jerk.

Carcassonne is a particular problem. In Carcassonne we pass a bag of tiles. This runs into its own problems, because the bag of tiles tends to get out of sync with the turn progression. People like to hold their tile and think about tactics before their actual turn comes around.

I am a veteran with this particular condition, however. There are a few coping mechanisms.

1) A "your turn" player token. Really, this could all be avoided if someone would just fashion an oversized YOUR TURN token. And it doesn't have to be a token. A gold-finished amulet hung from a suitable lanyard. A mug full of chits. A magic wand. A squirming, kicking hamster. Something you can hold in your hand to remind you any time you start wondering who's turn it is.

2) Is the room strangely quiet?

3) Covertly checking to see if everyone is looking at you. Are they? It's probably your turn.

4) Asking "is it my turn?"

Better to ask if it is your turn then to continue sitting in silence when the fact is obvious to everyone else and be proven something something.

But, yes Rodney, I am a slow player. And you better not get stuck behind me in game of Ticket to Ride, because this train is going to be at the station ALL DAY.

But I know its a problem. And knowing its a problem is the first step in may situations!