Galaxy Trucker

Very cool and fun puzzle-ish game where you have to build your space ship, and then go out and try to make money while not getting blasted to pieces. It has cool little space dude pieces, nice looking cards, and a cool theme. It's great fun going out and exploring deep space, finding planets with goods on them or possibly pirates that will attack you and destroy sections of your ship. You have to try to take home the most valuable cargo while fighting off pirates, slavers, and asteroids, and get back before the other players. Watching your hastily constructed ship be ripped in half by an asteroid is pretty cool and exciting for some reason.

This is a simple, innovative and fun game. Definitely the best game of last year's Essen (barring Napoleon's Triumph maybe) and at least in my eyes this should have won the "Spiel des Jahres" award since it fits all its criteria. Must have been the SdJ jury's bias towards German games, or maybe their bias towards boredom as was displayed in the 2007 nominations. Who knows ...

I don't want to drop many words on the game play, since everyone should experience this for themselves. I hope North America will have this game easily available soon. Have fun!

Nevertheless judging from game play alone, I shouldn't even title this as an euro. It's definitely Ameritrash, if not Czechtrash (of course meant in the absolutely best way).