We’ve got a special shipping opportunity for you. See this crate? Yeah, the one wrapped in tin foil, well, I need you to get this to Star Base 12 by Saturday night without anything exploding. Why would it explode? Erm… no particular reason. Just, uh, don’t bump it, okay? And I wouldn’t store anything too fragile next to it. Oh, did I mention I’ll pay you in advance!?
Galaxy Trucker: Do What?! is an expansion for those who crave more from their trucking experience—more challenge, more chaos, more glamor—and, most importantly, more explosions. The Galaxy Trucker base game is required to play. A shiny space helmet is optional (but really, why not?).
Expansion Overview:
Do What?! adds two new elements to the Galaxy Trucker experience: VIP Astronauts and Missions. Players can add one or both of these features to enhance their game experience.
VIPs are passengers with specific requirements. When playing with this module, a random card in each of the three colors is drawn from the VIP deck to determine the passenger types available for this game. If players position a cabin in such a way as to meet the requirements on a card, they may add a VIP to that cabin. These passengers will earn you extra credits, and some even have special abilities that can be used during the flight.
Missions make for an added challenge but offer a huge payout. They add special cargo types and extra difficult supercards to the game. The expansion includes a booklet with 16 different mission types to choose from. Most missions use at least one of the new types of cargo (payload) tiles. These types are:
- Heavy cargo – not easily destroyed, but it slows your ship down.
- Explosive cargo – if it explodes, all of the tiles next to it explode too!
- Radioactive cargo – Cannot be next to battery tokens, crew figures, or other radioactive cargo.
- Fragile cargo – if a neighboring tile is destroyed, the fragile cargo is destroyed as well.
Many missions also add supercards, which are added to the flight forecast cards. These cards are more difficult than the standard cards as they can include things like extra heavy attacks, or asteroids that hit the same side of the ship twice!
The manual also includes optional rules for turn-based ship building, which uses an action points system for players who want a more strategic experience.
Game Experience With the Expansion:
There are different kinds of games out there in the cosmos. Some will have your head bent over the board as you carefully grok out the perfect strategies, some are best enjoyed during a quiet evening along with a glass of wine, and some retrace the footprints of our ancient forbears, allowing us to relive history and contemplate our place in the greater scheme. Other games are about hauling fifteen tons of Molotov cocktails through a phantom meteor shower while being chased by space pirates in a ship with twelve battery-powered engines and only two batteries because you were so busy trying to make sure your VIP passenger had access to a laser cannon that you forgot to add more power sources!
Galaxy Trucker was already chaotic, but I admit I was always kind of … let down when the game ended, and my ship was fully intact, or I’d just lost one or two tiles. I rarely truly felt like my ship was in peril. This expansion changes that, and I’m 100% here for it. What’s really nice, though, is that you can decide how difficult you want the games to be; the missions offer tons of variety, and you can even mix and match to your liking.
The VIPs add a nice additional puzzle element to the ship-building process. For example, the Feng Shui Master wants all of the pipe fittings to match up exactly in the cabin he’s in, and the Cautious Rich Widow wants a cabin with a joined shield, cannon, and engine. If you want to satisfy all three VIP types, then you’ll have your work cut out for you, and it’s exactly the sort of spatial problem my brain loves to solve.
My only complaint here is that certain VIP types will be impossible to please if specific cards are in the flight forecast. For example, some passenger types want to be joined to a cabin with someone else in it, but if you get an epidemic card, then your VIP will die (because you can only have one VIP in a cabin, not two like the standard astronauts). This wasn’t a huge problem, and sometimes I would just draw a new VIP type to make the game more fun if this were the case.
Even with all that this adds to the game, it doesn’t feel like too much rules-wise, and it doesn’t make the game or setup cumbersome. The payload tiles have red backs, which make them easy to sort out from the main tiles. Everything was thoughtfully designed to work seamlessly into the main game. It’s also compatible with the Keep on Trucking expansion (which, for some absurd reason, I don’t own).
Final Thoughts:
Do you love the chaos and madness of Galaxy Trucker? Do you want more chaos and madness? If yes, then fly yourself to the nearest space-hub shopping center and get yourself the Galaxy Trucker: Do What?! expansion! It is absolutely—pun intended—loads of fun. It adds a lot of variety and new challenges for the disaster-loving masochists among us.
Hits:
• Easy to add/remove from base game
• More variety and challenge
• VIPs make shipbuilding a more intriguing puzzleMisses:
• Potential for incompatible conditions
• People who don’t like fun might not like it
