Galileo Galilei

• Designer: Tomas Holek
• Publisher: Pink Troubador
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 13+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4oOPwDd
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

“And yet it moves”, he said.

Galileo Galilei is a Euro-style game in which you take on the role of an astronomer who will discover new planets, find unknown star systems, develop their telescope, and make a scientific breakthrough in the difficult ages of obscurantism.

Use your telescope to select one of the five actions available, with you being able to evolve these actions into better ones. Collect cards of different planets and star systems. Collect lenses of the three main colors to make a discovery. Be wary of inquisitors as they might arrive unwelcomed and ruin your fame in no time. Better find a way to profit from their visit instead.

The board is placed on the table, the university goals are selected and each player places one of their tokens at the bottom of each of the four university tracks.  The deck of Discovery cards is created (based on player count) and then the top 6 cards are placed on the board spaces for the Market. Players place their Reputation marker on the -3 space on the Reputation track found under the university

Each player gets their own player board, dominated by the Telescope which is really an action rondel.  There are six spaces on this track, and players can place the six tiles in their set of action tiles in whatever order they like (or random in your first game).  This forms a combination of a fixed upper action and a lower seen on the tile.  The board spaces for the comets and constellations are all filled with chits.   Each player also gets one die of each of the three colors, all starting with the 1 face showing.

On a turn, the active player first moves his telescope 1 to 3 spaces. If you reach the end of the track, you can continue moving by going back to the start of the track, but you ignore the crossed out spaces.

Then, depending on where you stop, you take both the fixed and tile action of where you stop.  Examples of the options are:

• Obtaining/upgrading dice: When you get a die, they always start at value 1. If you upgrade dice, you usually can upgrade all of the dice of a single color.
• Obtaining quadrant tokens. These can be spent to do free actions, such as manipulating dice.
• Observe. You can either observe up to two constellations or do one major observation. This requires spending the corresponding “observation dice”   Constellations require a single matching die while Major Observations are secondary colors and require you to combine two dice of different color.

• Comet. You place a comet on the main board, and these can be used in future observation actions for some discounts on the values required. They also give you a bonus if you use them.

• Moving on a university track or on a library track. University tracks give you scoring multipliers for achieving certain things in the game (e.g. per constellations observed). Observation cards create your library tracks, and you get bonuses when moving on them.

• Upgrading one of the actions. This action is at the end of the rondel, and enables better actions in the future.

During your turn, you can also spend Quadrant pieces to take free actions; the list of these is seen in the upper left of each player board.  Also, as you take actions, you may gain Inquisitor tokens – these are placed on the track at the bottom of your player board.  If you have persuaded an Inquisitor this turn, you must undergo an Inquisition – where you tally up the values of all your Inquisitors and then move your Reputation marker on the main board.

After you have completed all of your actions, take the action tile which you used this turn and place it at the start of the tile track, pushing all intervening tiles forward a space to fill in the gap.  Score any university objectives that you have accomplished as well as taking Comet bonuses if you used your tokens this turn.

The game continues until the Discovery card deck is exhausted (the final card is placed on the board).  Whenever this is triggered, the current round is finished and then all players get one more turn.

At the end of the game, each player scores their progress on the university tracks as well as their current position on the Reputation track.  The player with the most points wins; ties broken in favor of the player with the highest sum of dice left on their board.

My thoughts on the game

Tomas Holek is one of the new design stars of our hobby.  This release as well as SETI and Tea Garden have quickly put this Czech designer in the spotlight.  Galileo Galilei feels a bit more like SETI – in that it is a point-salad-ish game; there are many different ways to score points, and players will find themselves pulled in many different directions given all the different options they have in front of them.

The rondel mechanism is well done, and interesting in the sense that each player has their own personal rondel; as such, you don’t have to worry about blocking opponents (or being blocked).  I like the way that I have my own personal puzzle here to work with.  The action combinations change each turn as you continually cycle your used action tiles to the back of the line; so the order in which they line up with the fixed actions always changes.

For me, the bulk of the game is spent working with the dice; you have to collect them and then upgrade them to make your observations.  That being said, as this is a point salad game, there are always lots of things to consider when you make your observations – they may manipulate your inquisitors (and depending on where you are – an Inquisition can be both good or bad for you).   There is a neat mini-game here with your Inquisitors; initially they are mostly bad as their starting location is a huge -4 spot; but as you gain more Inquisitors and are able to move them to your way of thinking, you’ll actually want to trigger the Inquisition as they will become quite beneficial to you.  I feel like it is difficult to succeed in this game without figuring out your Inquisition situation as early as possible.  Your action might be able to generate more quadrant tokens which can lead to many beneficial free actions.  Many of the best turns in this game will come when you are able to devise a great combination of actions.

If observations aren’t possible (or rewarding enough), there are also plenty of tracks for you to progress upon to gain other benefits – both the university tracks as well as the library tracks.  There will definitely be plenty of things for you to consider on each turn.  Once you’re familiar enough with the base game, you can even play with asymmetric player powers to give you even more things to consider!

Surprisingly, despite the plethora of options, Galileo Galilei has played fairly quickly in our group.  A few of us are prone to AP at times, but this game hasn’t really triggered those issues.  While it is impossible to fully plan your turn until you know what observation cards are in the market – the fact that each player has their own rondel means that the bulk of the downtime between turns can be used to explore the possible actions to be generated by the action pairings available to you.

Galileo Galilei is a solid moderately complex Euro.  There are plenty of different strategies to take, and I love the way that the different options all interact with each other.  For games that take around an hour, there is a lot to consider on each turn.  It’s an interesting puzzle, and one I think I will continue to tackle this year.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4oOPwDd