I’m not going to bury the lede here – I’m enjoying the heck out of playing Galactic Cruise as a solo game. And since I started with a sly newspaper/journalism reference in the first sentence of this post, I’ll keep it going with the classic “five W” questions.

Star Lord: Where is Gamora?

Iron Man: Yeah, I’ll do you one better. Who is Gamora? 

Drax: I’ll do *you* one better. Why is Gamora?

Avengers: Infinity War

WHAT is Galactic Cruise?

In Galactic Cruise, you’re helping run an interstellar travel company who provides customers with experiences in outer space. 

Structurally, it’s a worker placement game with a plethora of plates to keep spinning:

• Collecting and managing a variety of resources (food, oxygen, fuel, cash, ads, and reputation)
• Building spaceships
• Scheduling space cruises and attracting passengers
• Developing technologies
• Acquiring Agenda cards
• Hiring expert workers
• Actually launching the aforementioned cruises 

There are a lot of moving parts & interactions between various game systems – for example, one of the ways to get certain resources is to refill the Agenda card row. Additionally, with only six worker placement spaces, there are clever mechanics for bumping other workers (which gives them a funding bonus) and using the developments you create to connect worker placement spaces.

The game has what I lovingly call “the Tom Lehmann curve”. Those of you who’ve played some of Tom’s designs (particularly Res Arcana or New Frontiers) have experienced it – where the pace of the game accelerates dramatically as we approach the end of the game. I’m not complaining – I actually like this arc in games instead of the tendency of some Euros to get slower and slower as the number of decisions required make each turn longer & longer. (I still have PTSD from my last game of Tikal where I spent the final 30 minutes watching other players attempt to min-max their action points for the final turn.)

An aside: min-maxing when you’re playing solo is not a problem unless you’re boring yourself. (Yes, that can happen.) This is a possible reason I enjoy playing some of these meatier Euros (SETI, Great Western Trail: New Zealand, Skymines, etc.) solo or two-player rather than with a full table.

WHO designed/published Galactic Cruise?

Galactic Cruise is the second published game from Kinson Key Games and the design is credited to T.K. King, Dennis Northcott, and Koltin Thompson. (Mr. King & Mr. Thompson are credited on their previous design, Delivirus, which has only 13 owners and 3 ratings on BoardGameGeek. This explains why I was mistakenly sure that Galactic Cruise was their first game.) This is Mr. Northcott’s first design.

I told my adult sons (whom I have brainwashed into being rabid board gamers) that Kinson Key reminded me of Paverson Games – small companies with new designers who knocked it out of the park with their first big game. (Paverson is the company behind Distilled, my favorite “new to me” game of 2024.) Both games sport excellent rulebooks, splendid quality production, smart use of GameTrayz storage to make the game easier to set up & tear down, and really enjoyable game systems. Both used Kickstarter wisely to fund their big games – and, honestly, these kinds of games from small companies is a best use case scenario for crowdfunding.

WHY do I like Galactic Cruise so much?

Galactic Cruise isn’t a huge step forward in gaming innovation – it’s a worker placement game with a variety of ways to score in-game and end game points. But the design accomplishes that with such style and thematic integration that I was instantly won over. 

I’ve already mentioned how much I like the way the rulebook and the game components are organized. That admiration extends to the helpful double-layer player boards and the nifty “employee manuals” that each player is given to allow them access to key rules and iconography without having to constantly refer to the rulebook. (Hey, I know that the player board pictured above looks like a ridiculous level of gobbledygook – but it’s actually very helpful once you’ve learned the basics of the game.) 

The solo mode is – despite multiple pages of rules – actually pretty easy to administer. The automa works much like World Wonders or Lost Ruins of Arnak or GWT: New Zealand – flip a card from the solo deck and do what it says. (No, it’s not quite that simple – some of the actions are a bit tricky – but it doesn’t require extensive lookup tables or protocols.)

The automa has six levels of difficulty, which means those of us who play a good bit of solo games can find the best level to make for an enjoyable experience. There is a great two-page “solo employee manual” available from Kinson Key Games (I found a copy on BGG) that helps make solo play even cleaner.

Warning: it will take one game of “button mashing” and trying different things to get a feel for the variety of strategies, tactics, and options in the system. That’s the price you pay for a game with this much going on – and it’s well worth it.

Final note: I’m gushing about the retail base game of Galactic Cruise – I don’t have any of the expansions or the fancy neoprene mat or deluxe bits (yet! – see below). The base production is just that solid. (I love that they included a “welcome packet” with a brochure on how to put the game into the various organizational elements as well as first player “employee” badge/lanyard and a totally unnecessary letter from the founder of the fictitious company we all work for. Well done, Kinson Key!)

WHERE and WHEN can I get a copy of Galactic Cruise?

[Editor update: Currently, you can now get it on Amazon – https://amzn.to/3MKOz0b ]

Thoughts From Other Opinionated Gamers

We haven’t written a full review of the game here at the OG – and my solo “preview/review” certainly doesn’t count – but we have talked a good bit about the game amongst ourselves. 

Alan H: First off – Galactic Cruise is brilliant. It has such a smooth system which makes it a pleasure to play. The variety is amazing and although the game has several sequences that you have to do, this variety means there are plenty of decent decisions along the way. 

The fancy bits are also a help as is the game mat as it has cutouts for the elements that can be changed each game.  

The solo version is equally satisfying. And the recent addition of the game on BGA makes the game even more accessible. It’s an excellent implementation and a great way to learn how to play, possibly correcting mistakes you might make in the physical version. I like the way you can just click on a button and it highlights the options. And will save you a good button mashing session, unless you really enjoy that learning experience.

Larry:  It’s still quite early, but so far, Galactic Cruise is my favorite game from 2025.  I was hugely impressed by both the mechanics and production values for first time designers and publishers; they really did their homework and just did things right, including an excellent rule book.  It’s a fun theme and reasonably thematic.  I definitely preferred the base game, as the advanced rules, where position of the cabins mattered, seemed to ramp up the luck factor and just felt frustrating to me.  It’s quite a long game, but worth the time required to play.  I love it!

Oh, and Mark, if you need to ask who is Gamora, there can only be one answer–”Gamera is really neat, he is full of turtle meat, we all love him, Ga-me-ra!”.  :-)

[Note from Mark: Larry is going for a deep cut here – but it’s a rabbit hole worth falling into.]

Reminder: I received a discounted review copy (yes, that means I paid for shipping and some part of the cost of the game). All pictures here were taken of my retail base game – the base game bits are just that nice.