Excursions
We featured Dranda & Kinson Key's Galactic Cruise on Board's Eye View early last year. It's an epic heavyweight eurogame themed around luxury tourism to the stars. Now the galactic cruise ships are back but they are looking to bring a wider range of passengers on board. Designed by Ben Rosset, and with more Ian O'Toole art, Excursions is a lighter version of Galactic Cruise that plays much more quickly, even with a full complement of six players.
Players are managing their individual galactic excursions - building itineraries, recruiting passengers, stocking up on food and fuel, and launching space ships. They'll score points by developing and upgrading their cruise company but mostly from meeting their passengers' specific interests and needs (ie: sending passengers out on cruises whose itineraries appeal to them).
As with Galactic Cruise, Excursions can be played with an unpopulated board to add to the game's replayability but whether you play with the modular locations or pre-printed side of the board, each turn you'll be choosing one of seven locations on a central, circular board to take the action at that location. The USP here tho' is that the action you choose will be available to all the other players, and all players take that action simultaneously. It's not quite so simple because the active player (ie: the player who chose the action) gets an additional action, points or resources, subject to a multiplier on an inner dial that moves at the end of every turn and which also indicates when cruise ships 'move'. And, as in Galactic Cruise, if you have one of your cogs between the active location and a neighbouring location, you can choose to take that action instead.
It's not just the cogs; there's much in Excursions that veterans of Galactic Cruise will recognise but here it's all a tad more accessible. There's still some fiddly detail to assimilate before you get going but once games are underway Excursions plays remarkably briskly. It's competitive but there's no 'take that': you're never blocking other players; you just might deliberately not help them. For example, you might try to time your selection of a launch action when other players don't have a ship that's ready to go - so they can't actually benefit from the action. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found this was a rare occurrence tho' because the game provides ample opportunities for mitigation; so, for example, if you don't have sufficient food to send your passengers off on their space excursion, you may be able, as a free action, to trade cards in for that resource. Even in the very rare eventuality that another player chooses an action of which you can make no use, the game proffers a small consolation, so there's never ever a completely wasted turn.
You play until a player amasses 50 points, and at the start of the game that can seem like an impossibly distant target. As players upgrade and improve their cruise company operations, the initially slow trickle of points soon accelerates...
Tho' there's a shared theme and some shared mechanics, Excursions doesn't replace Galactic Cruise: we still expect to return to the original game, and we reckon there will be players who get introduced to Excursions and who will then want to go on to play Galactic Cruise. Excursions is a standalone game that complements the original game, and because it's more accessible and plays more quickly, it's a game that you're bound to be able to get to the table more frequently. The key point is that Excursions is a game where every player is fully involved on everyone's turn. That's a huge plus and a striking contrast with all those eurogames where there's downtime while players wait for their next turn.
Excursions launched on Kickstarter on 6 October. Click here to get on board.
