2025-11-27T19:49:44Z
I’m outside this because I already suffer from abstraction gap, which Matt gets to from a different angle here: if I have a game about X, I want to be making the decisions that the person doing X would make (running a pub, fighting a battle, whatever), and the more slick the mechanics get, the less I can develop that feeling. This is why my favourite space game is still Leaving Earth.
I’m definitely seeing a trend of “big aspirational game” intersecting with “heavy Euro” (and people who like heavy Euros more can see more clearly than I how the game design suffers; I think this is at the far end of the scale from Food Chain Magnate in terms of how much you can mess yourself up by poor decisions).
But I saw this being demonstrated pre-release by someone whom I think was one of the UK game explainers, at Full Board Gaming in Torquay early in 2024. And I felt physically repulsed as he was unpacking it. So I was never in the target market.
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Yeah, I don’t know what it is about Galactic Cruise, but despite this being ostensibly “my wheelhouse,” I have never felt the slightest draw towards owning or playing it.
I love the aesthetic! I love the retro-futurism! I love the idea of building rockets and launching them! I especially love the idea of doing this for silly tourists rather than for super-serial-I’m-so-serial-right-now-guys science!
And yet. When Efka first talked about it I was like “mmm, maybe no?” and then I saw the box with that massive price tag and that firmly put it in the “Yeah, no,” category.
Weird. But here we are.
2 Likes