Defeated by Space Dragons

The lovely Susan sent me Galactic Strike Force, which was amazing of her.

I’ve been super excited to try this since then, and I thankfully have a friend experienced with Deck building games, as I’ve never played one before.

I say just with deck building, but Stewart is the friend I go to with most games related issues. He actually figured out how to play Ancient, Terrible Things which I reviewed a few months ago. We played a game on Sunday and other than a couple of slip ups on the rules, we had a great game (I won!).

Essentially, we deduced, it is a mathematical, logic based, strategy game, with a really funky design which makes you think it’s a lot easier than it is. And lots of laughs! I defeated a lot of monsters…Stewart sadly just had a lot of rumours.

Right, so back to Galactic Strike Force. 

Once I decided to review this game, I started looking into it. Wow. This isn’t really a game to just pick up casually and play one afternoon. They have this whole Galaxy of races, with ships and pilots, and systems, and planets, and, oh my gosh, just lots of things.

First of all the game itself is very well made. The cards representing things like characters, missions, and purchasable equipment, come in their own protective, plastic sleeve, which is awesome.

So the first problem we encountered, is that we couldn’t quite make out the rules. It would almost make sense, then another aspect of the game would come up and we would be lost again.

Finally after mulling it over for a few days, then setting up the game, Stewart thought he had it.

We set up the cards, and character place sets. But already, knowing so little about the world, it was proving quite difficult to keep track of.

This is a co-operative deck building game. It’s us against the bad guys, the bad guys being the character cards provided by the game. I went for a character with good defense, Stewart took attack, and we work together to defeat the enemies.
My second issue is again with the rulebook. The very rulebook that I got from the box, that came with the game, not an internet version. There are key game aspects completely missing from the text! Even the glossary! So before we had even started we found game components totally now lost to us because there was no explanation as to how they work. And this is multiple cases, it’s like a section of the rule book is missing!

Each turn is in seven steps. The first, Travel, is okay, I mean the rules are really convoluted, but we got where we were meant to be; then we corrected some tokens on the board after checking the rulebook again. Acquisition was fine, we bought some cool tech to help us fight the bad guys.
The next phase is the battle, and unfortunately this is where we hit a brick wall. Trying to figure out exactly how the battle sequence went was hard enough! We figured out that your attack markers reduce the enemies defences first, by subtracting the difference between your attack power and their defence power. But then what?
If you can’t kill them straight away, then what? There is no instruction as to whether I then attack, or the enemy attacks, or how that is executed.

Honestly, by this point, we had spent hours trying to figure this out, so we gave up.

Stewart has took the game with him and is going to spend some time trying to figure it out, so I’ll do an update if we manage it.
But really, what is with the rulebook? We are putting these issues specifically down to the rulebook rather than the

game itself, which looks really cool, and the world is so complex; but if we can’t play it, that’s not much good.

Until next time,

Auburn xx