Excursions Board Game Preview

This is a preview copy sent to us for our early opinions. No money exchanged hands. Some art, rules or components will change in the final game. Find out more here.

There is something immediately appealing about the idea behind Excursions. Take the systems and iconography of Galactic Cruise, streamline them, make turns simultaneous, and aim for a game that still feels meaty but plays in a fraction of the time. That is very much what Excursions is trying to do, and from my plays so far, it largely succeeds.

This is a preview rather than a full review, as the game is still pre-release and the final components and presentation are not yet locked. I am therefore judging the gameplay, flow and current prototype experience rather than the finished production. That distinction matters, especially because some of my reservations are around the current visual presentation rather than the underlying design.

Setup and First Impressions

Excursions is a medium-weight game built around a rotating central station, seven action spaces and individual player boards. Each player starts with ships, upgrade potential, developments, resource tracks and secret goals, while the central board handles action selection, technologies and company goals. The game ends once somebody reaches 50 points, at which point everyone gets a final opportunity to act before final scoring.

The rulebook currently makes the game look more complicated than I think it really is. It covers everything thoroughly, and there is plenty of useful iconography support, but the actual flow becomes intuitive very quickly once you start playing. If you already know Galactic Cruise, much of the language and symbology will feel familiar, but even without that background, I found the game settled into place during the first few turns.

I am less sold on the current main board visually. The layout is clear, the rotating middle is a clever and practical feature, and the whole thing functions well, but the current light blue presentation feels more abstract than thematic to me. The space-cruise setting never really came through strongly during play, and I wonder whether a little more visual space for artwork with a larger board might help sell that theme more effectively in the finished version.

How the Action System Works

The centrepiece is the simultaneous action system. On your turn, you choose one of seven actions around the station, and every player gets to perform that action. The active player also receives an additional bonus, with the strength of that bonus changing according to the position of the rotating station.

That immediately keeps everyone involved. There is very little sitting around waiting for your turn because somebody else choosing an action is still relevant to you, and often useful. The rotating bonuses also mean timing matters, because the same action might be merely decent now but considerably stronger a few turns later.

The clever part is how your flexibility develops. By placing developments between action spaces, you can eventually gain access to neighbouring actions when another player chooses something that does not quite suit you. That means the system begins relatively restrictive, then gradually opens up as your own network improves, which is a really nice bit of mechanical progression.

Planning Your Excursions

The main engine of the game revolves around preparing and launching trips, the excursions in the game. You collect guests, play excursion and days-in-space cards next to your ships, gather the required resources of food and fuel, upgrade your capabilities, and then eventually launch when you have everything lined up. Excursion cards have guest requirements to fulfil and can even be stacked to reduce fuel costs, so you can do two at one stop. However, that may increase the guest requirements you need to fulfil, as each guest can only do one excursion per stop. There are only so many hours in the day, after all!

Launching is deliberately demanding. You need the right guests, enough food, enough fuel, the cards you want in place and a return-home card ready to go. Food is based on the number of guests, while fuel is based on the number of stops, including the trip home.

That creates the kind of frustration I often get from efficiency Euros. Sometimes an opponent picks Launch and you realise you are one resource short to do so yourself, and it can feel like a wasted opportunity. But that is also the point, because when you have planned ahead properly and everything clicks at exactly the right moment, it feels great.

You therefore need to keep one eye on your own engine and one eye on everyone else. If you can see another player getting close to launching, you want to be ready to take advantage too. That makes the simultaneous system more interactive than it first appears, because the value of other players' choices depends heavily on how well prepared you are to follow them, and do what they do at the same time. Can you be ready?

Guests, Cards and Upgrades

Guests come in three types, and once placed into a ship they are committed to that trip. The active player gets greater control over which guests they take, picking openly from the bag. While others draw randomly. But ad tokens can later be spent to temporarily convert guests into another type for scoring purposes if you are forced to board the wrong guest.

There is a nice amount of control here without the game becoming overwhelming. You are constantly making little choices about which guests to recruit, which cards to play, which upgrades to prioritise and when to commit resources to a launch. None of those decisions are individually difficult, but together they create a satisfying puzzle. This is an efficiency puzzle. What do you do first. What do you prioritise. What route to the many scoring options do you take.

The upgrades are also important because they gradually make your player board more capable. And there is a fair bit of choice. You probably wont upgrade it all, and the order you do this is also crucial. You can increase ship capacity, improve trading, expand your hand limit, create a lounge for holding guests and enhance various funding bonuses. The dual-layer player boards keep all of this tidy, with everything slotting neatly into place instead of sliding around as the game progresses.

Scoring and the Endgame

Scoring is one of my favourite parts of Excursions. Early in the game, the end game trigger target of 50 points feels a long way away because you are scraping together small amounts here and there. Then the engine starts to build, your launches improve, your bonuses compound, and suddenly the scoring accelerates much faster than you expected.

Once somebody hits 50, the game does not simply stop. Everyone gets a final action, ships still in space get one last chance to advance, and then final scoring adds points for leftover resources, upgrades, developments, company goals and secret goals.

That final scoring can be enormous. It is entirely possible to go around the scoring track again, which makes the endgame genuinely exciting because the player who triggered the finish is not necessarily safe just because they were ahead at that point. Secret objectives are particularly important because they can deliver significant points that the other players cannot fully account for, so there is always some uncertainty going into the final tally.

Simultaneous Play

The simultaneous structure is mostly a big positive for me. It keeps the game moving, keeps everyone engaged, and makes even other players' turns relevant. That helps Excursions feel much quicker than something with this amount of planning and scoring might otherwise feel. You are always making some progression. Some steps forward just feel a lot bigger than others.

There is a trade-off, though. At higher player counts, the table does become harder to follow, especially if everyone is resolving bonuses and side effects at once. If you are the sort of gamer who likes to track other players turns, then it can become a little chaotic.

For me, the main benefit outweighs that concern. I would rather have the constant involvement and occasional need to check what somebody else is doing than spend long periods waiting for my turn.

Presentation and Table Presence

The player boards are excellent in their current form. They are dual-layered, everything fits exactly where it should, and components stay put even as you manipulate ships, upgrades and resources. It is one of those practical design choices that makes the game noticeably nicer to play.

The game does take up more table space than the central board initially suggests. Your cards spread out above and to the right of your player area as you build itineraries, so each player needs a decent footprint. That may explain why the main board itself is relatively compact, and mechanically the overall layout works very well.

The main board art is where I am less convinced at the moment. It is functional, readable and intelligently laid out, but it feels a little too clean and abstract for a game about luxury cruises through space. Since this is still a preview build, I am interested to see whether the finished production pushes the theme harder.

Final Thoughts

Excursions is a streamlined game, not a simplistic one. There is still plenty to think about, but the simultaneous action system and more focused structure keep it moving at a much better pace. You are constantly making decisions, constantly reacting to other players and constantly trying to prepare for the moment when the right action appears.

The scoring curve is especially satisfying. What begins as a slow crawl towards 50 points gradually turns into something much more explosive, and the final scoring gives everyone a real reason to stay invested until the end. Add in the excellent player boards, strong action flexibility and rewarding cruise-planning puzzle, and there is a lot here that already works.

The current rulebook feels more complicated than the game itself, and the visual presentation does not yet fully sell the theme to me, but both of those things can still evolve before release. As a gameplay experience, though, Excursions is already fun, clever and impressively efficient, and I am very interested to see where the final version lands. Find out more here.