Published by Kinson Key and Dranda Games, Galactic Cruise has the look and feel of a game by designer Vital Lacerda. And it's not just the large format box and the artwork of Ian O'Toole. Galactic Cruise is a heavyweight eurogame built around a core worker placement mechanic. It can seem forebodingly complex at the outset but everything is logical and makes sense, and, about an hour into the game, as all the pieces fall into place you begin to appreciate the underlying elegance of the design. It comes as a surprise then to find that Galactic Cruise isn't one of Vital Lacerda's designs; the game is designed by T K King, Dennis Northcott and Koltin Thompson.
In Galactic Cruise, the 1-4 players are running companies to build and operate cruise ships, but these aren't ships that will hop between Caribbean islands or skate the coasts of the Mediterranean; they are spaceships that will take holidaymakers to the stars. It's an exciting premise but you've a lot to do before you can blast off to see the sights of the Cosmos. You need to construct the ships, which will mean getting blueprints for the ship facilities you plan to build. You'll need to advertise to attract the right paying passengers, and you'll need sufficient oxygen, food and fuel for each trip. There are also Agenda cards to collect for their game-changing/point-scoring benefits, and/or as a way of securing and storing extra resources.
Players start off with just two workers. Most turns you'll be placing one of your workers out at a location to take the two actions at that location or at adjacent locations where you've placed a development token. Placing these tokens is yet another task to juggle but it's a worthwhile investment because it gives you greater choice and flexibility over your worker placement actions while freeing up space on your player board so that you can store more oxygen, food and fuel. Getting your development tokens out will also earn you end-game points. There's no location blocking in this game; if you have worker at the location to which I want to go, I simply bump your worker back to you. When I do that I'm actually doing you a favour because if your workers are all placed out, it would cost you a turn to call them back. Although Galactic Cruise is a competitive game it's good to see it incorporating positive interaction.
Tho' there's a huge amount going on in Galactic Cruise, and you may well be playing for some time before anyone actually launches their first cruise ship, none of the actions are intrinsically complicated and there's no pre-set order dictating, for example, that you need to construct your ship before advertising for passengers. Ultimately, you'll need to have done everything but you have free reign over what to do when, so you'll always have an eye to the synergies that you can create from the points-scoring engine that you're building through your various actions.
Because of the positive interactions, Galactic Cruise is especially enjoyable with three or four players, but it's a long game: our plays at Board's Eye View have tended to run to 2-3 hours, and that's without any appreciable Analysis Paralysis (AP). It never drags, however, and it's a game with a clear arc: you may well be playing for an hour before any cruise liners head out into space but you will move to a point where things accelerate rapidly - so the end-game trigger can loom quite suddenly...
It's worth mentioning that the game comes with components for randomising the board layout so that the two actions at each location can be different every time you play.