Keep On Trucking: More Galaxy Trucker

Corporation Incorporated is expanding! You now have even more ways to jury-rig build ships and journey safely across the galaxy.

Galaxy Trucker: Keep on Trucking is an expansion to the 2021 version of Galaxy Trucker (which we reviewed last year). It won’t work with the old 2007 edition, since the new edition dramatically shrunk the tiles.

What’s New?

Keep on Trucking adds five different new options to Vlaada Chvátil’s Galaxy Trucker. Start with just one or two… or add them all for true zaniness.

Technology

Let’s start with the most obvious: Keep on Trucking offers 52 new component tiles you might add to your ship. That’s a lot of tiles, so once you mix them with the rest of the game, you’ll remove a lot of the tiles before playing. Tile scarcity is part of what makes Galaxy Trucker frantic and fun, after all.

Some new technology extends the components we already know.

Boosters for cannons, engines, and shields let you spend batteries for even more strength – but only if they’re directly connected to what they’re boosting.

Combo tiles put together multiple kinds of cargo space or multiple components (engine + cannon, for example).

Indestructible plating covers one or more sides of some new components. No worries about meteors and cannon fire with this technology!

Cyan aliens (with their own life support) look like the purple and brown aliens from the original game, but players can draft an ability card for their cyan alien to use.

Other components are completely new.

Catapults give you a cheap blue goods block at the beginning of your trek. More importantly, you can fire any block to boost your cannon strength or defend your ship from meteors.

A reactor furnace lets you “burn” a newly-obtained goods block to recharge batteries.

Stasis chambers let you keep 4 astronaut crew members in reserve; use this to replace crew that’s lost along your flight!

Adventure Cards

Keep on Trucking includes new adventure cards to shuffle in to the existing decks. All of these are more intense variations on existing cards, such as “Meteor Vortex”, which works like a more intense Meteor Swarm where players get to ignore one direction.

Ships

New three-sided boards hold three new ship designs. Although they offer interesting layout options, all of these designs are more vulnerable to cannon fire and meteor strikes.

With the smallest ship, EVERY number now hits somewhere. And there’s no specified “front” or “back” to the design; instead, you’ll roll dice to determine the board orientation before everyone begins building.

With the level two ship, shots from the front and rear are mirrored and hit you twice! And the level three ship, although a classically sci-fi design, increases the odds you’ll get hit on the sides, even by shots coming from the front or back.

Transgalactic Trek

This multi-level game, introduced in the web app and brought forward to the 2021 Galaxy Trucker, gets a few new twists. (We mention this mode in our review of the 2021 title). There’s a “title dock” which makes the titles worth more points. There’s also a new variant for two players that lets each player keep and defend two titles instead of just one.

Rough Roads

Rough Roads is an expansion that already existed in digital form, but is included in this box as a deck of cards. It’s only recommended for players who think Galaxy Trucker isn’t punishing enough. Indeed, the easiest mode here is “Hard”. This collection really ratchets up the nastiness.

Shuffle the deck of Rough Roads cards then draw up to three (draw new cards every round if playing the Transgalactic Trek). Each card gives a new (temporary) rule for the game.

Impressions

If you ever played the 2007 Galaxy Trucker with “The Big Expansion”, some of the content in Keep on Trucking will look familiar, but much of it has been completely reworked and streamlined.

Every piece here is designed to make Galaxy Trucker more challenging and offer more strategy options for the players.

These ship layouts are very attractive, but pretty much guarantee your ship will take fire. There are no longer any “safe” numbers to roll.

We loved the new components, but found that we rarely remembered to use them. Even with boosters or catapults, you still have to remember that they’re an option when pirates or meteors show up in the adventure deck.

Speaking of the Adventure cards – as far as I’m concerned, the new Adventure cards feel punishing.

And that’s the theme that runs through this whole expansion. For me, Galaxy Trucker already toes the line between fun and frustration. The expansion adds some fun but a lot more frustration. So it’s not a good fit for me.

Thankfully, Czech Games marked all the expansion content with a star, so it’s easy to remove when you want to play with newbies (or a grouch like me).

But if you are becoming an expert trucker, Keep on Trucking offers new options and more ways to ramp up the difficulty. That’s exactly what it set out to do, so we can definitely say: Mission Accomplished.

Find Galaxy Trucker: Keep on Trucking at Amazon or your friendly local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Galaxy Trucker: Keep on Trucking from Czech Games Edition for this review.

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