Friday, October 25, 2013

The Joy of Galaxy Trucker

At my former workplace, where it often landed on the table at lunchtime, the boardgame Galaxy Trucker had a nickname: "Tucker Fucker." Okay, so it's not the cleverest of nicknames, but there's a good reason why the moment the name was coined, it stuck.

The Joy of Galaxy Trucker is...

Punishment


Galaxy Trucker is a game about building a spaceship and then putting it to the test. It's one part pipe game and one part racing through random encounters. What both parts share, though, is the quality of never making things easy on you. So, yeah: Trucker Fucker.

The charmingly cynical theme of the game (sprinkled throughout the rulebook in a way that makes it delightful to read the first time and frustrating to sift through for clarifications later) is that you're a pilot for a corporate entity doing the necessary job of transporting sewer systems to the galaxy's various settled systems. For efficiency's sake, rather than packing the sewer lines in a cargo hold of a standard hauler, the ships are built out of those very sewer lines--with useful accessories like guns and shields bolted on to them. This is Galaxy Trucker kindly establishing from the start that no matter what you do, your ship is going to be a shitheap.

Building a ship requires sifting through a bunch of randomized tiles laid face-down on the table in front of the players. You can pick one up at a time, and then you have to connect it to your ship or return it to the table face-up. The key is learning to work with what you get, not what you want, because that laser you really need may end up only fitting when pointed off to the side (halving its combat value). Or that engine fits perfectly... except there's another piece directly behind it, which--so sorry!--is illegal placement. And, oh, did you just finish your ship only to realize you never added any shields? That's okay because you don't have the batteries to power them anyway. Good luck! (Tucker Fucker.)

Building isn't just a competition between players for the pieces they need. It's also timed. Well, it's supposed to be, anyway, but my group never plays with the timer. For one thing, teaching new players the game with the pressure of time is cruel even for Trucker Fucker. For another, we had too many players who obsessed over building the best ship they could and would have up-ended the table if they were forced to quit part way through. There's still a reward for being done quickly and a penalty for being last: the first player to declare their ship finished gets "pole position" for the race through space, and that leading player always gets first pick of any goodies and first shot at any enemies and their loot. (Players with more working engines on their ship can eventually overtake those ahead of them... or make their lead that much more insurmountable.)


A quick catalog of the components available in the sea of tiles on the table might help to convey the dizzying number concerns you have to balance while scraping your ship together: 

  • engines for speeding past opponents
  • laser guns for blasting asteroids and enemies
  • crew modules (they salvage goods from derelicts, and also, you know, keeping the ship flying)
  • storage for carrying precious goods
  • batteries for powering certain components
  • shields that cover half the ship (you need two, properly oriented, to protect the whole ship)
  • alien life support (when next to a habitation module for an alien that gives useful bonuses)
  • also super lasers and super engines--twice as effective but they consume battery power
  • oh and connectors, which do nothing but fill holes when you're really desperate
(The gratuitous expansion adds, among many other variants and features, more components: hibernation modules to hold extra crew, a furnace that burns goods for battery power, indestructible armor plating, luxury quarters for tourists who bring extra income if they survive the trip, and a modules that lets you super-charge an adjacent module for super-effect... which then melts that module in the process.)

The key to doing well is building smart: watch out for modules that leave dead ends, check periodically for critical modules you're short on, don't stress about open connections on the edge of your ship (although these make you vulnerable to otherwise harmless small asteroids).
You also have to make sure all your connections are legal. What this ultimately requires is a practiced eye--or at least a more practiced eye than your opponents, who are encouraged to scour your ship once you're done, looking for illegal connections. If they find one, not only do any offending modules get tossed in the trash heap (along with anything that thereby ends up unconnected to the rest of the ship), but you lose any pole position you earned by finishing early. So to be clear: you've got a whole table of Trucker Fuckers trying to take your ship apart before the trip even starts.


Now this ship of yours--awkward, but lovely in your eyes after the harrowing experience of creating it--is ready. Ready to be carved up piece by piece by the perils of the galaxy. Trucker Fucker!


The journey takes the form of a stack of random event cards. There are worlds that dispense goods, derelicts to be looted, and open space where you can open up the engines and try to overtake your opponents on the player order "racetrack." But just as commonly there are asteroid fields, pirates, slavers, and other baddies whose job it is to slice your beloved bird into floating scrap. Damage typically comes at you in a sequence of rocks and/or laser blasts, each approaching from one of four directions. Dice are rolled to determine the precise row or column that the shot comes in at. As the current player shakes the dice, you look at all those weak spots on your starship's left side and, like a desperate prayer, ask that it be anything but a 4. I've seen a ship lose fully half of its components from an unlucky shot to one critical piece. Trucker. Fucker.

And yet what's beautiful about the game is precisely that these things are possible. Your ship doesn't have that most vulgar of game abstractions, the hit point pool. It's a big, sloppy conglomeration of inadequate technology, and Trucker Fucker--God bless it--treats it as such. The fun that's here requires you to buy into this punishment. If you expect to see your ship 
fighting its way through swarms of pirates, gathering valuable goods as rewards, you're playing the wrong game. Your ship will suffer. Your cute little plastic astronauts will be lucky if they're not sucking vacuum before the journey is over. Yes, you get paid when your ship makes it to port--you get money for goods collected, for being the among the first to arrive, and you bank any loose cash you harvested in space. But don't focus on that part; you'll only get your expectations up. After all, you also get penalized for each piece that's blown off your ship. And, yes, in the next round, you'll get to build a bigger ship, with more guns, more engines, more cargo space. Sounds great! But really this just means more competition over the same number of modules while building, and more charred sewer pipe ship chunks that you have to pay for at the end of the round.

What makes Galaxy Trucker my favorite game about starships is how the component-based ship construction pays off in both the major sections of the game. In building, it makes for a frenzied, confused scramble of a puzzle game. In flying, it makes for the most delightful kind of punishment, like a gambling game where the only open question is just how badly you're going to lose. Achiever-style players will hate its deflating power arc. Competitive players will chafe at how the game screws with you more than you can screw with others. Artistes will get nauseated watching their creations' agonizing demise. I've also found that some people are just much better at building ships efficiently than others, so there's not always a level playing field. But if you're worrying about who is winning, you're probably playing it wrong. The biggest pile of space bucks is the least interesting story that emerges when you subject yourself to that son-of-a-bitch we lovingly call Trucker Fucker.

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