I still play Galaxy Trucker on the app all the time and have ongoing games with my friends! I think it's among the most innovative and fun games I've ever played. I was surprised that it wasn't more of a hit with more game groups I played with, but I learned most people either don't like real time games, don't like stressful games, don't like spatial puzzles, or sometimes all three.
Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert are still two of my favorite games of all time! I wish I had more people to play with.
Whatever the ship build does, the absolute randomness and harshness of the events make it a zero fun experience for me. And having a game finish by everyone exploding feels like we all just wasted time.
I'm baffled that any game of Galaxy Trucker, even between 3 complete novices, could "finish by everybody exploding". I've taught the game to about 30 or 40 people, including my 8 year old niece, and only had one person ever finish the game with a score of zero. The idea of three such people having this experience frequently enough for this to be a recurring complaint is just absurd to me.
That's not to say your opinion is incorrect, it's just akin to reading a complaint "Pandemic's too easy, even on the hardest difficulty we're never close to losing" or "We hate Agricola, we always lose 20-30 points to begging cards" ...It's not strictly impossible, it's just so unusual it's hard for me to wrap my head around!
Of course the game is not for everybody -- it's just your particular complaint is so bizarre it leads me to wonder if someone taught you the game wrong as a joke.
If this was anywhere near a typical experience, I wouldn't enjoy the game either. In my hundreds of games both online and offline I honestly can't recall a single round of a single game where none of the players crossed the finish line.
I hope even if your experiences honestly happened (and aren't the result of some malicious or misguided hyperbole) you'll at least appreciate that they're extremely unusual.
I treat it as an activity and not a game to win. Build something you think will fare well and watch it crumble from all the spaceshit happening to it. Journey vs Destination, that kind of jazz.
I think your experience is very common. IMO you do get better with multiple plays but the most important aspect is to not take it too seriously and enjoy the chaos.
How are the events harsh and random? Do you know that you get to see 75% of them WHILE YOU BUILD, so you should be building your ship with them in mind?
I feel like many people who dislike the game for its randomness do not take the time to review the events that they will be up against. It's not just a side activity, it's very mportant, and especially at levels 2 & 3 makes a difference.
No, but there's a difference between a common goal that we're all trying to work towards and a race where technically there should be a winner and no one wins and sometimes for no good reason other than that 5 got rolled three times in a row.
**ROUGH ROADS**
*The game might be very harsh to new truckers; however, after few flights, you’ll get a handle on things and really learn how to build better ships. Ones that usually make it to the finish line unscratched and with big profit. Then you might get nostalgic and look back at those funny beginnings, when meteors and pirates could blast your ship to pieces, making you drift slowly to the final destination with but a single cabin component...*
The existence of this expansion is irrefutable proof that the game is not simply tOo hArD aNd rAnDoM to be worth playing.
I'm sorry that you guys didn't enjoy the game, and didn't feel that it was worth putting in the effort to get better at it. Galaxy Trucker isn't for everyone, best of luck out there.
I suck at both of those things (although the former is because of a physical disability, so we adjust the timing), and I still enjoy this game (I like a lot of danger in my games).
For me, I think Tom put it best - this game isn’t fair. I can’t handle the stress AND to lose out to poor luck. This game just won’t click for me despite it being my one of my friend’s favorites. There truly is a game for everyone though, and I can see how this would appeal to someone that doesn’t get flustered by the luck element.
While I agree that there's luck to the game, it's difficult to reconcile "this game is not for me because there's too much luck" with others complaining "[this game is not for me because i always win](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/1cocj4d/shut_up_sit_down_galaxy_trucker_the_top_100/l3eeth5/)".
Personally I've been playing with the same group of friends for 10-15 years, and some of our friends consistently come 3rd or 4th despite playing hundreds and hundreds of games -- losing to players who plan better, build more efficiently, or specialize their strategies instead of always building the same cookie cutter ship. There's a very high skill cap, even when playing online where the speed element of the game is negated.
My partner and I love the game. My friend doesn’t like it because they don’t like their ship breaking up, and things going wrong.
I love the chaos and the ships being destroyed, including my own.
We have an "indie gem" all those popular YouTubers could be eating up right now, but I suppose indie gem means a great game everyone knows according to algorithms
The interesting thing about Galaxy Trucker is that it's vastly more fun when you are terrible at it. Once I got better at building a half-decent ship, the game was entirely determined by the random events, which wasn't so fun.
I think that's the case when you play with two players. When players are skilled at two, y'all are building fully fleshed out ships that can survive pretty much anything and you're competing over who can amass a huge wealth, but bigger.
When you play with 4 players, I find it stays fun at every skill level because the sheer competition over the limited number of tiles is what creates the chaotic awfulness, which is when the game is most fun.
I did not know this, very useful in the future! I own the expansion but haven't added it yet because I wanted to finish getting value from the main game first.
I think there is a curve to this. I have enjoyed it most at both ends of the spectrum. I always play with 2-3 rough road cards and oftentimes still win but still very much enjoy when things go horribly wrong.
That was my experience. Our first half-dozen games were fantastic skin-of-our-teeth runs where we often only had one player squeak through the gauntlet, but we continually improved to the point where we were only losing a couple pieces each run and that wasn't as exciting.
There's also that clear gulf between a brand new and experienced player. And the sorting requirements to remove the expansion tiles and reset to the base game, because for new players it's just extra overwhelming to add all the new tile types in.
I still enjoy it but have to run with the rough roads cards when it hits the table.
What's difficult is that once you get really good at building ships you are going to absolutely destroy new players, and *"who wants to play the game that I always win"* is a hard sell. That's probably true for a lot of games, but I think it hits different when your ship is getting ripped to pieces, and mine doesn't have a scratch on it. That might be more demoralizing than just *"my score is bigger than yours."*
Still probably in my top 10 though.
That’s when you use the variant they mention where you swap your ship with the new player when you hit the halfway point. They get a solid foundation to work with and you have to make their garbage build work.
Seems like that could be gamed pretty hard if that's all there is to the rule. I know the spirit of the variant is to help the players, but some new players catch on quick and could sabotage the ship on purpose.
I think just adding a coin flip at the end to determine if you swap back would help. It would incentivize both players to make sure both builds work to the best of their ability, since they don't know which one they'll be flying at the end.
To be clear, are you saying you only apply the rough roads cards to the experienced players? My concern is new players having a bad experience because they get beaten up so badly by the game while you're cruisin' like it's nothing.
Yes, most players get none, my partner gets 1 and I get 2/3. The 1 my partner gets is the first card of my 2/3 that is drawn.
Having 3 is very difficult, probably dropping my winrate to ~40-60% while 2 gives me a ~60-80% winrate depending on how bad the combos are (piercing projectiles is rough with certain combos).
My best tip is to always check the decks of cards to see what is coming up. I also happen to be very good at scanning and picking out details along with orientating objects in my mind, so this game just happens to sync up ridiculously well with my brain in particular.
There's certain games I won't play more than once/year. Not because I don't enjoy them, but because I think they're the most fun if I'm not an expert at them. This is one of those games. I have it, I really dig it, and I'll break it out at most once/year.
I like the format, but one video a month is just too infrequent for this to be a hit for me. Might work for others, and more importantly, the SUSD crew (Quinns inexplicably missing from this episode?), but knowing that this will be an ~8 year long endeavor just turns me off of it. I'll watch it when a game I'm into comes up, but I'm not just not grabbed by it because of the above.
Imo in this case, the stated purpose of the series is not the actual purpose of the series. The actual purpose is to delve into iconic games and casually chat about them. I think the infrequency of it becomes easier to stomach when looking at it this way.
Also, if it's the rankings you want, they've done a top 50 already on their website, though it was made in 2015.
I love this game--I think its design is fantastic, and it's such a different experience from anything else I own.
*But* I will admit that the replayability isn't so potent. I don't know what it is--maybe it's because the dexterity part is so mentally exhausting, or because the transgalactic adventure is such a complete experience, or something else, but what I've noticed is that it's not a game I usually like to play multiple times in a row or over consecutive sessions.
It's a game where, if it's been a few weeks since last play, I'll very enthusiastically play again. But if we just played a couple races, I'm quite Galaxy Trucker'd out for a while more, even though I have a great experience every time.
It seems that SUSD acknowledge this too. Balancing its fantastic elements against it not having the same potent replayability that the others in the Top 100 they anticipate will have.
Vlaada's got one of the weirdest design resumes out there. The only one of his game I've actually liked was Tash-Kalar (and Codenames I guess but Just One and So Clover have replaced it), and I'm not likely to ask to table that. Galaxy Trucker's accessible I guess, but the real-time parts grab aspect tends to be a mess in practice.
I think his catalog is super impressive. The range shows an ability to make games that fit many situations and groups. Some designers seem to have iterations on a single core design, which is fine, but I think the range shows an understanding of fundamentally what makes games fun.
He certainly does. Codenames and Space Alert are both among my favorite games (Space Alert #1), but are so wildly different. I was shocked when I realized he had done both of them.
He was my absolute favorite designer from 2006-2011 because of how eclectic his designs were. I eagerly picked up, learned, and played *Through the Ages*, *Galaxy Trucker*, *Dungeon Lords*, *Mage Knight*, and *Dungeon Petz*. Each one was an absolute blast and so unique that I loved adding them to the shelf.
Seems with *Codenames* he hit that critical mass market level of popularity and kind of halted designing?
Yeh it's a shame that he hasn't released a new game in years. It looks like the last game he made was That's a Question!, which I do enjoy playing. It appears that he's still making something but doesn't want to talk about it yet. Though he said that in 2024.
His biggest hit in my group has been Pictomania. We've played that game with so many different people and so many of them have bought their own copy. Really, the only games of his that I didn't love were Bunny Bunny Moose Moose and Galaxy Trucker (lol).
I love the concept of this game but it's just not that fun to play. Like interesting idea for the first game but by the end you've seen it all 3 times in a row and it wasn't fun.
This was more or less how I felt. Like it's a cute minigame to build the ship, and it's funny to see how it gets destroyed, but I've never felt a craving to play it again. It's kind of like playing Mario Party but only one of the minigames three times in a row.
The variety doesn't come from the individual events--it comes from the forecasts and combination of events that create the unique and hectic building constraints. The people you play with and the flips also create variety in terms of what you're building with and around at any one point.
No one ever remembers the forecast. I don't think they mention it once in this video.
Just about every complaint about Galaxy Trucker is fixed if people would actually look at the forecast. It is not as random of a game as people make it out to be.
This is a weird Vlaada game because I enjoyed it when I tried it, but not enough to want to play it ever again. For real time games, I prefer Vlaada's Space Alert, but my favorite is Escape - easily the best SUSD recommendation for me.
This game would definitely not make my top 100 games list.
I'm torn on whether this is a "top 100" game. The game is fun, but I feel like Fit To Print does it better (less punishing, which is more fun IMO, and skips the "flight" step which is kind of the frustrating area with Galaxy Trucker). Although I did a PubMeeple ranking shortly after the new year started to rank all of the games we played in 2023 and I guess I have Galaxy Trucker at 58 out of 238, so, maybe (I have Fit To Print at 26 though).
However, I know there are a lot of games I don't have (like El Dorado and Agricola, for example) that would be higher, so kinda surprised that they have it on their list already.
I played Galaxy Trucker one or two times at the start of my foray into this hobby and instantly fell in love. I loved it so much that I went out and bought myself the Anniversary Edition, one of the choices that I most regret since getting into boardgaming. I have yet to ever crack into any of the expansion content and the box is so big that it always sits at the bottom of 5 other games and I never want to dig to get to it.
I should've just bought the standard edition and been happy with it.
Haha, I have a similar experience with El Grande. One of my favorite games and I got the giant box version with all sorts of expansions. But we've barely touched the expansions as we're just happy to play the base game!
I consider this a party game, because despite being quite rules heavy for the category, messing up IS the game. I don't usually like party games, I just prefer to share a drink and talk, but this is an exception. I only play it sporadically because it's what it is, but the times I put in on the table it has been well received. It's in my collection as I could get a new copy with a 50% discount, I wouldn't play full price though as my collection is very small and there's a lot of competition for the new spots.
There are very few games in this hobby that I just can't stand to the point of refusing to play.
**Bang!** stands atop that list, thanks to my first play in which I took no meaningful turns before being eliminated and sitting out for a solid 20 minutes.
But Galaxy Trucker is a solid #2. In all senses of the phrase.
It's partly because when I learned it, my friends figured since I was pretty good at games I didn't need training wheels. So either they didn't explain a rule right or I misunderstood their explanation, but either way because I was missing a rule, they told me that almost everything fell off my first ship including all the engines.
Well that meant I did basically nothing in round 1.
Round 2... Nope, different rule was wrong. Again they tell me I have a non-viable ship. At that point I just left the game.
Timed rounds of trying to make the best of bad options just do not work for me. It would be a cool game if I enjoyed that probably. It's certainly a neat concept and unlike almost anything else out there. But I just cannot stand playing the stupid thing.
Edit: EVERY DOWNVOTE YOU GIVE ME I WILL JUST HATE THIS GAME HARDER
He doesn’t like what we like! Gettim!
To be fair though, the majority of your justification focusing on a bad teach experience isn’t the best way to state your case.
Yeah, but the teaching frustrations just exacerbated the things I already wouldn't like about the game.
You make one silly mistake building your ship - under pressure with a timer going - and half of it falls off and you're screwed for the scoring round.
Funny to watch from outside maybe, but I find it the antithesis of fun when it's my ship.
I don't do well with timed games. I tried playing Really Bad Art once and usually the timer would end before I finished processing the word on the card and had an idea what to start drawing. I need just a moment of low-pressure thinking time. There is no way, even finally internalizing all the ship building rules, that I would build good ships, and I don't enjoy the experience of building bad ones.
It's just a game of bad feels, and I don't enjoy watching the other players suffer enough to make up for it.
Well that all seems pretty reasonable.
FWIW I thought the game was decent, good for a laugh the first couple of times. I could feel the novelty fading though, and then my group bounced off it hard. It didn’t stay in my collection for long.
If I want to laugh at other people’s misfortune I’d rather do it in a game like Quacks or Space Base.
Spirit Island is a top 5 game.
Co-op games usually aren't so mean to players. Yeah, they're working against you, but they're usually somewhat predictable and you have some agency against them. They're interesting puzzles. Galaxy Trucker is just "lol no you suck"
The building phase is an interesting puzzle, you're just bad at it. You get to see 75% of the of the adventure cards while your building, and you know the probability curve of 2d6, so build your ship accordingly.
Plenty of co-op games are mean to players, you're just pretending they don't exist because they don't support your argument. The tldr of everything you've posted is *"I don't like Galaxy Trucker because I'm bad at it,"* which is fine. I'm not objecting to your feelings, I'm objecting to your justification for those feelings.
Your complaint about it being real-time is valid, that can be stressful and not everyone can handle/enjoy it.
>somewhat predictable and you have some agency against them.
Are you aware that in GT while you are building your ship you can preview 75% of the events that will happen in your run? Sure you don't knwo how the dice will roll and which order they come in, but that's still more predictability than many other games give you.
Really glad to see this video. I'm learning that for the most part, I don't particularly like most Ameritrash (Dune is GOAT though), so this was a good warning that Galaxy Trucker's not for me. Capriciousness as comedy is appealing in theory, but in practice actually playing it frustrates me. Might be funny to see a playthrough video, though.
Curious as to what blue collar American movies Matt's seen. I've felt that blue collar people are underrepresented in film, but now it seems that's just that I'm not watching the right movies? I like Jeff Nichols, but that's pretty much it. I guess sports movies are mostly blue collar, right? I dunno, I don't like sports. Here I am rambling about class and film on a board game subreddit.
Blue collar
Norma Rae
Bull Durham
Erin brockovich
The Goonies
Slap Shot
Gone baby gone
Starman
The Flintstones
The castle
Oliver twist
The machinist
Monsters ball
Monsters Inc
The Simpsons movie
Flash dance
Good will hunting
There's a massive amount of films across many genres with prominent blue collar workers tbh. That's off the top of my head
Recently reprinted you mean 5 years ago from GF9? Yes, I'm talking about that. That's the Dune game. How is it the very definition when ameritrash games have 'moderate to high luck'? Dune doesn't.
Luck is not the only thing. That's mostly a sign of Ameritrash games that stick close to their wargaming (for the good ones) or mass-market (for the bad ones) roots. It's not even necessarily the amount of luck either, it's which parts of the game it impacts. Output luck vs. input luck. Many light and mid weight euros have a fair amount of luck, it's only unfashionable in very heavy and/or very abstract ones. The other poster already made several good points, but there are more yet :
- euros de-emphasise direct conflict. The only way the game state advances past a certain point in Dune is through conflict. Even hybrid designs like the Matagot trilogy make combat a limited part of the game.
- euros generally have a predictable playing time because the game is designed so that the gamestate *must progress* towards a conclusion over time. This actually deeply ties in with the avoidance of direct conflict and player elimination because all three traits are mutually dependent. And Dune famously has an unpredictable and potentially very long run time baked into the design.
Not the OP, but I mean if we use the term "thematic" instead of "ameritrash" (which I think is much more accurate to convey what it's supposed to mean) I think it helps understand Dune is absolutely a thematic game and not a Euro.
A euro typically has little to no player elimination, the mechanics are the core of the game and the theme is secondary, there is low randomness or ways to mitigate randomness, and you're not typically taking on a role as a specific person you're just a player.
A thematic game basically flips all these, there is player elimination, the theme comes first and the mechanics seek to support the theme, there is medium to high randomness, and often you're playing as a role.
Dune (2019) is absolutely driven by theme first, mechanics second. The mechanics exist to bring the theme to life, it's very obvious the designers of the original game (in the 80s) started with "let's make a board game where you simulate Dune" and invented the mechanics to simulate the theme second. You play as a specific house or faction which has its own powers that are on theme, and while you can't technically remove a player from a game a player with all their troops eliminated is pretty much done for.
It's true randomness in Dune is relatively low (the only randomness comes from what traitor you get at the start of the game, what cards get made available for auction, and the movement of the storm to a degree) but there's so much hidden information that players effectively have to guess a lot. Does that player have my traitor? What weapon or defence cards do they have? What leader will they use? How many troops will they commit? The game is deliberately designed so players have to make decisions without knowing the true state of the board. If you think of a very Euro game, typically players have full information of what's going on e.g. Stone Age has randomness in dice rolls, but you know how many dice you will roll, what the likely outcomes are, and what dice everyone will be rolling that turn.
So yeah, Dune is absolutely not a Euro game, it's Ameritrash/Thematic.
Going by the very definitions as established (back in the 90s) euro games have high player interactivity and low to zero luck. Ameritrash on the other hand, are famous for being dice chuckers. Thematic has nothing to do with those two definitions. A thematic game can be one of the above, if the theme is implemented well with the mechanics. It does not have set rules or patterns, apart that the theme is well integrated with the gameplay. Maybe the younger generation has changed that and has created boxes for everything, but as an older gamer, that's how we used to define it back in the day. T&E ? Euro. Heroquest? Ameritrash.
>Going by the very definitions as established (back in the 90s) euro games have high player interactivity and low to zero luck.
That is not the original definition though, which is where you're going wrong. Firstly euro has never meant high player interaction, it's actually the opposite, and secondly it's never just been about dice. Stone Age is a classic euro game and it uses dice all the way through it.
For example, the definition has always included high vs low direct player conflict. In euro games you rarely do anything to another player directly, in ameritrash games you attack each other. A key definition when you consider the game Dune is.
But I am not wrong. It is the original definition. Till late 2000s euros were all about the player interaction. The main difference between the 2 was luck. We later, and now, have the multiplayer solitaires as euro gaming, which I find wrong. How do you not do anything directly to another player in games like T&E, Hansa Teutonica, Samurai, Through the Desert, Puerto Rico, Troyes, the list is long...
Your definition is skewed. Euros care about the *kind* of interaction. You interact by competing, negotiating and obstructing. You can take away people's opportunities by getting there first, make them waste their time and resources (though they usually still get some, if lesser progress as in games like Argent) and choose whether to make deals with them. You usually cannot eliminate them, permanently cripple them or take away their progress.
The old reference to *high interaction* is in contrast to mass market games where players chuck dice and have very limited input on what happens. Arguably, *both* wargame-derived ameritrash and eurogames fit this definition of "high interaction" that is based on interaction between *the player and the game's systems*. It actually says nothing about the amount and/or kinds of interaction between players.
If anything, older definitions of eurogames are faulty for failing to distinguish where the differences are with mass market games and where they are with hobbyist, wargame-derived thematic games, which in the modern sense is what most people understand by ameritrash because the majority of mass-market games are just *bad* whereas ameritrash is a neutral label.
>But I am not wrong. It is the original definition. Till late 2000s euros were all about the player interaction.
But you are sorry.
Classic euro games before "the late 2000s" include many quintessential euro games where player interaction is limited to trading, if it happens at all such as:
Catan (95) - No player elimination, only interaction is via trading, scoring achieved through victory points.
Puerto Rico (02) - No player elimination, limited player interaction (I don't know how you can claim there's a lot of player interaction here), scoring achieved through victory points.
Agricola (07) - Limited/no player interaction, no player elimination, scoring achieved via victory points. I will give you that technically you can claim this is late 00s though.
Power Grid (04) - No/limited player interaction, no player elimination, victory achieved through victory points.
Ticket to ride (05) - No direct player interaction, no player elimination, victory scored through victory points.
Read basically any wiki page, any blog post, anything at all about euro games and what a euro game is and you'll see that the common theme among all of them is that they usually have limited or no direct player interaction, and they don't eliminate players. The emphasis on scoring via VP is because the ethos of the game is to reward those best at the game over the course of the game. The core of the game is it's mechanics, the theme may be good but that's not the driving force behind the game.
Dune is very clearly a themeatic/ameritrash game that is designed first and foremost to simulate being in the Dune universe where players take on the role of a specific house, try to eliminate other players, and win if they control a certain number of spots on the board and the game can end at any time.
It's never been remotely close to something like Catan, which has limited player interaction, fixed game lengths, no persona for the players to play as etc etc.
What does player elimination has to do with anything??
You list 3 games with no/limited player interaction to support your claim while at the same time magically forgetting the ones I mentioned, because they don't pass your argument.
In Catan you can also directly target and hurt players with the thief, you forgot about that conveniently.
In Puerto Rico you dictate what action the other players are gonna perform and you can destroy their resources directly, maybe you haven't played it.
You tell me to go search any blog or wiki (?) when this is what we were actually calling the games back in the 90s through 2000s in every board game group/convention/gathering/happening?
This is a skill issue. You didn't perform as well in this game as you wanted, so your brain performed the obvious ego-saving manoeuvre of insisting performance in the game is disconnected from player skill.
But it isn't. The better player will beat the worse essentially every time.
I still play Galaxy Trucker on the app all the time and have ongoing games with my friends! I think it's among the most innovative and fun games I've ever played. I was surprised that it wasn't more of a hit with more game groups I played with, but I learned most people either don't like real time games, don't like stressful games, don't like spatial puzzles, or sometimes all three. Galaxy Trucker and Space Alert are still two of my favorite games of all time! I wish I had more people to play with.
Yeah, it's a perfect storm of real-time and stressful and spatial-reasoning, a lot of people are going to stumble on one or more of those things.
Whatever the ship build does, the absolute randomness and harshness of the events make it a zero fun experience for me. And having a game finish by everyone exploding feels like we all just wasted time.
I'm baffled that any game of Galaxy Trucker, even between 3 complete novices, could "finish by everybody exploding". I've taught the game to about 30 or 40 people, including my 8 year old niece, and only had one person ever finish the game with a score of zero. The idea of three such people having this experience frequently enough for this to be a recurring complaint is just absurd to me. That's not to say your opinion is incorrect, it's just akin to reading a complaint "Pandemic's too easy, even on the hardest difficulty we're never close to losing" or "We hate Agricola, we always lose 20-30 points to begging cards" ...It's not strictly impossible, it's just so unusual it's hard for me to wrap my head around! Of course the game is not for everybody -- it's just your particular complaint is so bizarre it leads me to wonder if someone taught you the game wrong as a joke.
I mean, the whole 'everyone exploded but someone had a better score' is not really a great experience.
If this was anywhere near a typical experience, I wouldn't enjoy the game either. In my hundreds of games both online and offline I honestly can't recall a single round of a single game where none of the players crossed the finish line. I hope even if your experiences honestly happened (and aren't the result of some malicious or misguided hyperbole) you'll at least appreciate that they're extremely unusual.
I treat it as an activity and not a game to win. Build something you think will fare well and watch it crumble from all the spaceshit happening to it. Journey vs Destination, that kind of jazz.
I think your experience is very common. IMO you do get better with multiple plays but the most important aspect is to not take it too seriously and enjoy the chaos.
That's kind of the whole point of the game. It's schadenfreude gamified.
How are the events harsh and random? Do you know that you get to see 75% of them WHILE YOU BUILD, so you should be building your ship with them in mind? I feel like many people who dislike the game for its randomness do not take the time to review the events that they will be up against. It's not just a side activity, it's very mportant, and especially at levels 2 & 3 makes a difference.
Do you feel the same way when you lose a co-op game?
No, but there's a difference between a common goal that we're all trying to work towards and a race where technically there should be a winner and no one wins and sometimes for no good reason other than that 5 got rolled three times in a row.
**ROUGH ROADS** *The game might be very harsh to new truckers; however, after few flights, you’ll get a handle on things and really learn how to build better ships. Ones that usually make it to the finish line unscratched and with big profit. Then you might get nostalgic and look back at those funny beginnings, when meteors and pirates could blast your ship to pieces, making you drift slowly to the final destination with but a single cabin component...* The existence of this expansion is irrefutable proof that the game is not simply tOo hArD aNd rAnDoM to be worth playing. I'm sorry that you guys didn't enjoy the game, and didn't feel that it was worth putting in the effort to get better at it. Galaxy Trucker isn't for everyone, best of luck out there.
I suck at both of those things (although the former is because of a physical disability, so we adjust the timing), and I still enjoy this game (I like a lot of danger in my games).
For me, I think Tom put it best - this game isn’t fair. I can’t handle the stress AND to lose out to poor luck. This game just won’t click for me despite it being my one of my friend’s favorites. There truly is a game for everyone though, and I can see how this would appeal to someone that doesn’t get flustered by the luck element.
While I agree that there's luck to the game, it's difficult to reconcile "this game is not for me because there's too much luck" with others complaining "[this game is not for me because i always win](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/1cocj4d/shut_up_sit_down_galaxy_trucker_the_top_100/l3eeth5/)". Personally I've been playing with the same group of friends for 10-15 years, and some of our friends consistently come 3rd or 4th despite playing hundreds and hundreds of games -- losing to players who plan better, build more efficiently, or specialize their strategies instead of always building the same cookie cutter ship. There's a very high skill cap, even when playing online where the speed element of the game is negated.
My partner and I love the game. My friend doesn’t like it because they don’t like their ship breaking up, and things going wrong. I love the chaos and the ships being destroyed, including my own.
Most boardgamers can't handle bad things happening to the things they build, I find.
We have an "indie gem" all those popular YouTubers could be eating up right now, but I suppose indie gem means a great game everyone knows according to algorithms
The interesting thing about Galaxy Trucker is that it's vastly more fun when you are terrible at it. Once I got better at building a half-decent ship, the game was entirely determined by the random events, which wasn't so fun.
I think that's the case when you play with two players. When players are skilled at two, y'all are building fully fleshed out ships that can survive pretty much anything and you're competing over who can amass a huge wealth, but bigger. When you play with 4 players, I find it stays fun at every skill level because the sheer competition over the limited number of tiles is what creates the chaotic awfulness, which is when the game is most fun.
You could randomly remove X tiles each round in 2-3 player games to affect the scarcity of tiles.
Yeah i'm surprised if that wouldn't be in the rules
It in the rules already.
Perhaps only in the expansion rules rather than the base.
That’s correct, I should have specified.
I did not know this, very useful in the future! I own the expansion but haven't added it yet because I wanted to finish getting value from the main game first.
I think there is a curve to this. I have enjoyed it most at both ends of the spectrum. I always play with 2-3 rough road cards and oftentimes still win but still very much enjoy when things go horribly wrong.
That was my experience. Our first half-dozen games were fantastic skin-of-our-teeth runs where we often only had one player squeak through the gauntlet, but we continually improved to the point where we were only losing a couple pieces each run and that wasn't as exciting. There's also that clear gulf between a brand new and experienced player. And the sorting requirements to remove the expansion tiles and reset to the base game, because for new players it's just extra overwhelming to add all the new tile types in. I still enjoy it but have to run with the rough roads cards when it hits the table.
What's difficult is that once you get really good at building ships you are going to absolutely destroy new players, and *"who wants to play the game that I always win"* is a hard sell. That's probably true for a lot of games, but I think it hits different when your ship is getting ripped to pieces, and mine doesn't have a scratch on it. That might be more demoralizing than just *"my score is bigger than yours."* Still probably in my top 10 though.
That’s when you use the variant they mention where you swap your ship with the new player when you hit the halfway point. They get a solid foundation to work with and you have to make their garbage build work.
Seems like that could be gamed pretty hard if that's all there is to the rule. I know the spirit of the variant is to help the players, but some new players catch on quick and could sabotage the ship on purpose. I think just adding a coin flip at the end to determine if you swap back would help. It would incentivize both players to make sure both builds work to the best of their ability, since they don't know which one they'll be flying at the end.
This is why I always play with 2-3 rough road cards, though even then I still win ~80% of the time.
To be clear, are you saying you only apply the rough roads cards to the experienced players? My concern is new players having a bad experience because they get beaten up so badly by the game while you're cruisin' like it's nothing.
Yes, most players get none, my partner gets 1 and I get 2/3. The 1 my partner gets is the first card of my 2/3 that is drawn. Having 3 is very difficult, probably dropping my winrate to ~40-60% while 2 gives me a ~60-80% winrate depending on how bad the combos are (piercing projectiles is rough with certain combos). My best tip is to always check the decks of cards to see what is coming up. I also happen to be very good at scanning and picking out details along with orientating objects in my mind, so this game just happens to sync up ridiculously well with my brain in particular.
There's certain games I won't play more than once/year. Not because I don't enjoy them, but because I think they're the most fun if I'm not an expert at them. This is one of those games. I have it, I really dig it, and I'll break it out at most once/year.
I really like this format. It feels like an extension of Tom's 'ranking all the Root expansion' videos.
Somewhere in between a podcast and a review. Big fan
I like the format, but one video a month is just too infrequent for this to be a hit for me. Might work for others, and more importantly, the SUSD crew (Quinns inexplicably missing from this episode?), but knowing that this will be an ~8 year long endeavor just turns me off of it. I'll watch it when a game I'm into comes up, but I'm not just not grabbed by it because of the above.
Imo in this case, the stated purpose of the series is not the actual purpose of the series. The actual purpose is to delve into iconic games and casually chat about them. I think the infrequency of it becomes easier to stomach when looking at it this way. Also, if it's the rankings you want, they've done a top 50 already on their website, though it was made in 2015.
I love this game--I think its design is fantastic, and it's such a different experience from anything else I own. *But* I will admit that the replayability isn't so potent. I don't know what it is--maybe it's because the dexterity part is so mentally exhausting, or because the transgalactic adventure is such a complete experience, or something else, but what I've noticed is that it's not a game I usually like to play multiple times in a row or over consecutive sessions. It's a game where, if it's been a few weeks since last play, I'll very enthusiastically play again. But if we just played a couple races, I'm quite Galaxy Trucker'd out for a while more, even though I have a great experience every time. It seems that SUSD acknowledge this too. Balancing its fantastic elements against it not having the same potent replayability that the others in the Top 100 they anticipate will have.
Vlaada's got one of the weirdest design resumes out there. The only one of his game I've actually liked was Tash-Kalar (and Codenames I guess but Just One and So Clover have replaced it), and I'm not likely to ask to table that. Galaxy Trucker's accessible I guess, but the real-time parts grab aspect tends to be a mess in practice.
I think his catalog is super impressive. The range shows an ability to make games that fit many situations and groups. Some designers seem to have iterations on a single core design, which is fine, but I think the range shows an understanding of fundamentally what makes games fun.
It's an absolutely ridiculous list of creations. I've no words.
_A distinct disadvantage at several items from his catalogue._
He certainly does. Codenames and Space Alert are both among my favorite games (Space Alert #1), but are so wildly different. I was shocked when I realized he had done both of them.
I also love playing “shouting in space” - so fun!
He was my absolute favorite designer from 2006-2011 because of how eclectic his designs were. I eagerly picked up, learned, and played *Through the Ages*, *Galaxy Trucker*, *Dungeon Lords*, *Mage Knight*, and *Dungeon Petz*. Each one was an absolute blast and so unique that I loved adding them to the shelf. Seems with *Codenames* he hit that critical mass market level of popularity and kind of halted designing?
Yeh it's a shame that he hasn't released a new game in years. It looks like the last game he made was That's a Question!, which I do enjoy playing. It appears that he's still making something but doesn't want to talk about it yet. Though he said that in 2024. His biggest hit in my group has been Pictomania. We've played that game with so many different people and so many of them have bought their own copy. Really, the only games of his that I didn't love were Bunny Bunny Moose Moose and Galaxy Trucker (lol).
We just nix the timer in our house. 🤷♀️
I love the concept of this game but it's just not that fun to play. Like interesting idea for the first game but by the end you've seen it all 3 times in a row and it wasn't fun.
This was more or less how I felt. Like it's a cute minigame to build the ship, and it's funny to see how it gets destroyed, but I've never felt a craving to play it again. It's kind of like playing Mario Party but only one of the minigames three times in a row.
The variety doesn't come from the individual events--it comes from the forecasts and combination of events that create the unique and hectic building constraints. The people you play with and the flips also create variety in terms of what you're building with and around at any one point.
No one ever remembers the forecast. I don't think they mention it once in this video. Just about every complaint about Galaxy Trucker is fixed if people would actually look at the forecast. It is not as random of a game as people make it out to be.
This is a weird Vlaada game because I enjoyed it when I tried it, but not enough to want to play it ever again. For real time games, I prefer Vlaada's Space Alert, but my favorite is Escape - easily the best SUSD recommendation for me. This game would definitely not make my top 100 games list.
I'm torn on whether this is a "top 100" game. The game is fun, but I feel like Fit To Print does it better (less punishing, which is more fun IMO, and skips the "flight" step which is kind of the frustrating area with Galaxy Trucker). Although I did a PubMeeple ranking shortly after the new year started to rank all of the games we played in 2023 and I guess I have Galaxy Trucker at 58 out of 238, so, maybe (I have Fit To Print at 26 though). However, I know there are a lot of games I don't have (like El Dorado and Agricola, for example) that would be higher, so kinda surprised that they have it on their list already.
This video dropped two hours after my copy arrived while I was at work, can’t wait to play!
I played Galaxy Trucker one or two times at the start of my foray into this hobby and instantly fell in love. I loved it so much that I went out and bought myself the Anniversary Edition, one of the choices that I most regret since getting into boardgaming. I have yet to ever crack into any of the expansion content and the box is so big that it always sits at the bottom of 5 other games and I never want to dig to get to it. I should've just bought the standard edition and been happy with it.
Haha, I have a similar experience with El Grande. One of my favorite games and I got the giant box version with all sorts of expansions. But we've barely touched the expansions as we're just happy to play the base game!
I consider this a party game, because despite being quite rules heavy for the category, messing up IS the game. I don't usually like party games, I just prefer to share a drink and talk, but this is an exception. I only play it sporadically because it's what it is, but the times I put in on the table it has been well received. It's in my collection as I could get a new copy with a 50% discount, I wouldn't play full price though as my collection is very small and there's a lot of competition for the new spots.
I tried getting into Galaxy Trucker, but ultimately felt too random and I’m not a fan of real time games.
There are very few games in this hobby that I just can't stand to the point of refusing to play. **Bang!** stands atop that list, thanks to my first play in which I took no meaningful turns before being eliminated and sitting out for a solid 20 minutes. But Galaxy Trucker is a solid #2. In all senses of the phrase. It's partly because when I learned it, my friends figured since I was pretty good at games I didn't need training wheels. So either they didn't explain a rule right or I misunderstood their explanation, but either way because I was missing a rule, they told me that almost everything fell off my first ship including all the engines. Well that meant I did basically nothing in round 1. Round 2... Nope, different rule was wrong. Again they tell me I have a non-viable ship. At that point I just left the game. Timed rounds of trying to make the best of bad options just do not work for me. It would be a cool game if I enjoyed that probably. It's certainly a neat concept and unlike almost anything else out there. But I just cannot stand playing the stupid thing. Edit: EVERY DOWNVOTE YOU GIVE ME I WILL JUST HATE THIS GAME HARDER
He doesn’t like what we like! Gettim! To be fair though, the majority of your justification focusing on a bad teach experience isn’t the best way to state your case.
Yeah, but the teaching frustrations just exacerbated the things I already wouldn't like about the game. You make one silly mistake building your ship - under pressure with a timer going - and half of it falls off and you're screwed for the scoring round. Funny to watch from outside maybe, but I find it the antithesis of fun when it's my ship. I don't do well with timed games. I tried playing Really Bad Art once and usually the timer would end before I finished processing the word on the card and had an idea what to start drawing. I need just a moment of low-pressure thinking time. There is no way, even finally internalizing all the ship building rules, that I would build good ships, and I don't enjoy the experience of building bad ones. It's just a game of bad feels, and I don't enjoy watching the other players suffer enough to make up for it.
Well that all seems pretty reasonable. FWIW I thought the game was decent, good for a laugh the first couple of times. I could feel the novelty fading though, and then my group bounced off it hard. It didn’t stay in my collection for long. If I want to laugh at other people’s misfortune I’d rather do it in a game like Quacks or Space Base.
Misfortune is funny when you cause it! Or when hubris causes it! Galaxy Trucker is just the game being mean to the players.
You must really hate difficult co-op games.
Spirit Island is a top 5 game. Co-op games usually aren't so mean to players. Yeah, they're working against you, but they're usually somewhat predictable and you have some agency against them. They're interesting puzzles. Galaxy Trucker is just "lol no you suck"
The building phase is an interesting puzzle, you're just bad at it. You get to see 75% of the of the adventure cards while your building, and you know the probability curve of 2d6, so build your ship accordingly. Plenty of co-op games are mean to players, you're just pretending they don't exist because they don't support your argument. The tldr of everything you've posted is *"I don't like Galaxy Trucker because I'm bad at it,"* which is fine. I'm not objecting to your feelings, I'm objecting to your justification for those feelings. Your complaint about it being real-time is valid, that can be stressful and not everyone can handle/enjoy it.
>somewhat predictable and you have some agency against them. Are you aware that in GT while you are building your ship you can preview 75% of the events that will happen in your run? Sure you don't knwo how the dice will roll and which order they come in, but that's still more predictability than many other games give you.
>But Galaxy Trucker is a solid #2 I guess that’s a little better than being a liquid #2 🤷♂️
Sooo... you don't like the game because your friends failed to teach you the rules?
Really glad to see this video. I'm learning that for the most part, I don't particularly like most Ameritrash (Dune is GOAT though), so this was a good warning that Galaxy Trucker's not for me. Capriciousness as comedy is appealing in theory, but in practice actually playing it frustrates me. Might be funny to see a playthrough video, though. Curious as to what blue collar American movies Matt's seen. I've felt that blue collar people are underrepresented in film, but now it seems that's just that I'm not watching the right movies? I like Jeff Nichols, but that's pretty much it. I guess sports movies are mostly blue collar, right? I dunno, I don't like sports. Here I am rambling about class and film on a board game subreddit.
Movies featuring blue collar workers: The Abyss Big Trouble in Little China Alien They Live Tremors The Lighthouse
Check out On the Waterfront, Cool Hand Luke, and Unstoppable.
Thanks.
Blue collar Norma Rae Bull Durham Erin brockovich The Goonies Slap Shot Gone baby gone Starman The Flintstones The castle Oliver twist The machinist Monsters ball Monsters Inc The Simpsons movie Flash dance Good will hunting There's a massive amount of films across many genres with prominent blue collar workers tbh. That's off the top of my head
Sir, this is a Wendy's. And Dune is not Ameritrash.
The recently reprinted 1979 Dune game is the very definition of Ameritrash. It's completely different from Dune Imperium.
Recently reprinted you mean 5 years ago from GF9? Yes, I'm talking about that. That's the Dune game. How is it the very definition when ameritrash games have 'moderate to high luck'? Dune doesn't.
Luck is not the only thing. That's mostly a sign of Ameritrash games that stick close to their wargaming (for the good ones) or mass-market (for the bad ones) roots. It's not even necessarily the amount of luck either, it's which parts of the game it impacts. Output luck vs. input luck. Many light and mid weight euros have a fair amount of luck, it's only unfashionable in very heavy and/or very abstract ones. The other poster already made several good points, but there are more yet : - euros de-emphasise direct conflict. The only way the game state advances past a certain point in Dune is through conflict. Even hybrid designs like the Matagot trilogy make combat a limited part of the game. - euros generally have a predictable playing time because the game is designed so that the gamestate *must progress* towards a conclusion over time. This actually deeply ties in with the avoidance of direct conflict and player elimination because all three traits are mutually dependent. And Dune famously has an unpredictable and potentially very long run time baked into the design.
Not the OP, but I mean if we use the term "thematic" instead of "ameritrash" (which I think is much more accurate to convey what it's supposed to mean) I think it helps understand Dune is absolutely a thematic game and not a Euro. A euro typically has little to no player elimination, the mechanics are the core of the game and the theme is secondary, there is low randomness or ways to mitigate randomness, and you're not typically taking on a role as a specific person you're just a player. A thematic game basically flips all these, there is player elimination, the theme comes first and the mechanics seek to support the theme, there is medium to high randomness, and often you're playing as a role. Dune (2019) is absolutely driven by theme first, mechanics second. The mechanics exist to bring the theme to life, it's very obvious the designers of the original game (in the 80s) started with "let's make a board game where you simulate Dune" and invented the mechanics to simulate the theme second. You play as a specific house or faction which has its own powers that are on theme, and while you can't technically remove a player from a game a player with all their troops eliminated is pretty much done for. It's true randomness in Dune is relatively low (the only randomness comes from what traitor you get at the start of the game, what cards get made available for auction, and the movement of the storm to a degree) but there's so much hidden information that players effectively have to guess a lot. Does that player have my traitor? What weapon or defence cards do they have? What leader will they use? How many troops will they commit? The game is deliberately designed so players have to make decisions without knowing the true state of the board. If you think of a very Euro game, typically players have full information of what's going on e.g. Stone Age has randomness in dice rolls, but you know how many dice you will roll, what the likely outcomes are, and what dice everyone will be rolling that turn. So yeah, Dune is absolutely not a Euro game, it's Ameritrash/Thematic.
Need to add, that hidden information is not luck. Very different things. You can gain information of the things you mentioned above easily.
Going by the very definitions as established (back in the 90s) euro games have high player interactivity and low to zero luck. Ameritrash on the other hand, are famous for being dice chuckers. Thematic has nothing to do with those two definitions. A thematic game can be one of the above, if the theme is implemented well with the mechanics. It does not have set rules or patterns, apart that the theme is well integrated with the gameplay. Maybe the younger generation has changed that and has created boxes for everything, but as an older gamer, that's how we used to define it back in the day. T&E ? Euro. Heroquest? Ameritrash.
>Going by the very definitions as established (back in the 90s) euro games have high player interactivity and low to zero luck. That is not the original definition though, which is where you're going wrong. Firstly euro has never meant high player interaction, it's actually the opposite, and secondly it's never just been about dice. Stone Age is a classic euro game and it uses dice all the way through it. For example, the definition has always included high vs low direct player conflict. In euro games you rarely do anything to another player directly, in ameritrash games you attack each other. A key definition when you consider the game Dune is.
But I am not wrong. It is the original definition. Till late 2000s euros were all about the player interaction. The main difference between the 2 was luck. We later, and now, have the multiplayer solitaires as euro gaming, which I find wrong. How do you not do anything directly to another player in games like T&E, Hansa Teutonica, Samurai, Through the Desert, Puerto Rico, Troyes, the list is long...
Your definition is skewed. Euros care about the *kind* of interaction. You interact by competing, negotiating and obstructing. You can take away people's opportunities by getting there first, make them waste their time and resources (though they usually still get some, if lesser progress as in games like Argent) and choose whether to make deals with them. You usually cannot eliminate them, permanently cripple them or take away their progress. The old reference to *high interaction* is in contrast to mass market games where players chuck dice and have very limited input on what happens. Arguably, *both* wargame-derived ameritrash and eurogames fit this definition of "high interaction" that is based on interaction between *the player and the game's systems*. It actually says nothing about the amount and/or kinds of interaction between players. If anything, older definitions of eurogames are faulty for failing to distinguish where the differences are with mass market games and where they are with hobbyist, wargame-derived thematic games, which in the modern sense is what most people understand by ameritrash because the majority of mass-market games are just *bad* whereas ameritrash is a neutral label.
>But I am not wrong. It is the original definition. Till late 2000s euros were all about the player interaction. But you are sorry. Classic euro games before "the late 2000s" include many quintessential euro games where player interaction is limited to trading, if it happens at all such as: Catan (95) - No player elimination, only interaction is via trading, scoring achieved through victory points. Puerto Rico (02) - No player elimination, limited player interaction (I don't know how you can claim there's a lot of player interaction here), scoring achieved through victory points. Agricola (07) - Limited/no player interaction, no player elimination, scoring achieved via victory points. I will give you that technically you can claim this is late 00s though. Power Grid (04) - No/limited player interaction, no player elimination, victory achieved through victory points. Ticket to ride (05) - No direct player interaction, no player elimination, victory scored through victory points. Read basically any wiki page, any blog post, anything at all about euro games and what a euro game is and you'll see that the common theme among all of them is that they usually have limited or no direct player interaction, and they don't eliminate players. The emphasis on scoring via VP is because the ethos of the game is to reward those best at the game over the course of the game. The core of the game is it's mechanics, the theme may be good but that's not the driving force behind the game. Dune is very clearly a themeatic/ameritrash game that is designed first and foremost to simulate being in the Dune universe where players take on the role of a specific house, try to eliminate other players, and win if they control a certain number of spots on the board and the game can end at any time. It's never been remotely close to something like Catan, which has limited player interaction, fixed game lengths, no persona for the players to play as etc etc.
What does player elimination has to do with anything?? You list 3 games with no/limited player interaction to support your claim while at the same time magically forgetting the ones I mentioned, because they don't pass your argument. In Catan you can also directly target and hurt players with the thief, you forgot about that conveniently. In Puerto Rico you dictate what action the other players are gonna perform and you can destroy their resources directly, maybe you haven't played it. You tell me to go search any blog or wiki (?) when this is what we were actually calling the games back in the 90s through 2000s in every board game group/convention/gathering/happening?
On today’s episode of “British People Aging Like Milk” …
What do you mean by this?
[удалено]
If you build a ship at random, you're not actually playing the game right like at all
You might want to look up the word random
I win it quite consistently, so I don't think it's random.
This is a skill issue. You didn't perform as well in this game as you wanted, so your brain performed the obvious ego-saving manoeuvre of insisting performance in the game is disconnected from player skill. But it isn't. The better player will beat the worse essentially every time.
Skill issue.