To be perfectly honest I think I would be safer in that than in any ship you make in this game. Don't get me wrong however, the game is a blast. The idea behind Galaxy Trucker is that you are a "Truck" driver, who is braving the harsh mistress called space in hopes of earning a few pennies for yourself, either for a drinking habit your character would be sure to develop or perhaps your child has a disease. A space disease. The game takes three rounds, which grow progressively more difficult the further you get. Each round opens with you and a tile card with an outline of a ship on it, a small ship for level 1, medium for 2 and two different types of level 3 ships (one being a rough outline of the starship Enterprise). You then race against the other players to build your ship from tile pieces in the game lid. These pieces are square and have a number of different purposes, some are shields, others engines and lasers and the like. The tricky part is that they have different types of corridors connecting them, and you need the right kind of corridor to match it to or else it doesn't connect. Likewise you can get penalized for having open corridors leading off into space. Now once you've completed your spacecraft, to the best of your ability, you grab a token representing your place on the board.
The horrors commence once you lift off. Once in space you have a deck of cards for each round, when you draw a card you must fulfill whatever dark lovecraftian prophecy it demands. Sometimes you flip a card and discover a planet that wishes to trade some valuable junk that can be sold later down the lane, or maybe there's a derelict spaceship floating around that can be crewed and brought home. That ship is derelict for a damn reason, space trucking is the equivalent of flying fighter planes in World War 1, after five successful flights your a national hero, otherwise your fucking dead! So lets say you don't get a fun card like the ones I mentioned you get Space Pirates, Smugglers or Slavers, hell a meteor shower even comes along. If you're first in line (you finished your ship first) you deal with it first. If you don't have enough lasers to drive it off or kill it you get smacked around, bad. Now if you have shields you can bear the brunt of the pirate or slavers attack until such time as they move on, to the next player, and the player after that. However shields and certain lasers require batteries to be used to power them, so if you run out of gas (a likelihood as you can't refill during a round) you get hammered by the attacks, or lose precious crew to insidious rapscallions. This is where Galaxy Trucker gets really brutal. In round three, after barely surviving the first rounds I design my Enterprise, it doesn't have all the guns in the world or all the engines, but it does have a pretty good showing of batteries. Well there are certain cards where "combat" occurs, where your ships are matched against each other and the loser of each of the categories suffers some grisly fate. Well when you lose both the laser and engine challenge not even shields will save you when all your batteries are depleted. You rolled for hits to your ship coming from different directions. Most things can be blocked by shields, but shields need energy, so when you run out anything can be a game ending disaster. I was struck by a stray asteroid after I'd run out gas, right in the neck of my ship, scissoring it in half. You could easily imagine the crew (most of which were in the lost half) struggling to the windows, watching as the saucer drifted away without them, then the air runs out. I lost 70% of my crew in a single hit. As I drifted further I encountered pirates who obliterated my cargo holds, then finally a slaver showed up and took my captain for Snoo Snoo. This was literally the first four cards into the last round. Well it didn't turn out that bad for everyone else after I died, after those tragedies it was pretty much empty ships and open planets all the way to the end. That is the essence of this game, maybe something bad will happen in the vacuum, and everyone dies in less than thirty seconds, or maybe you make so much money you can retire and nurture your drinking habit. It all depends on your skills in building and your luck. i highly recommend this game for people with vivid Sci-Fi imaginations.
"Good news everyone, we're going to play Galaxy Truckers! In the Nebula of Melting Brains."
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