Galaxy Glitch 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.

Galaxy Glitch is the sort of game that becomes more interesting the more people you put around the table. At its core, this is a competitive space combat game about upgrading your ship, surviving an increasingly dangerous galaxy and eventually taking shots at the Desolation Sun. But there is a wonderfully awkward problem sitting underneath all of that. You need the other players to help keep things under control, yet only one of you can win. There is no second place. No point scoring at all. Just one winner. Everyone else loses.

That tension runs through the whole game. Ignore too many sectors and enemies start piling up, while allowing five cards to build in one location can trigger an Overload that punishes everyone still fighting for the good of the galaxy. So you are encouraged to deal with problems that are not necessarily the most profitable choice for you personally. Of course, everyone else is making exactly the same calculation, and that is where Galaxy Glitch starts becoming much more than a straightforward dice-chucking space battle. Although the dice-chucking part is unbelievably fun!

SETTING OFF

The game progresses through three stages, beginning with Flight School before moving into Deep Space and eventually Event Horizon. This is controlled by a deck of cards for each. Run out of the deck, you move on. But you could move on early if you clear all enemies in all five areas in any round. Players secretly choose where they are traveling using Wayfinder cards, reveal simultaneously, and then deal with whatever is waiting in those sectors. That simultaneous choice immediately gives the game some personality because you are constantly trying to work out what everyone else might do, whether a dangerous area will be covered and where your own ship can get the most value.

Players must then fight whatever enemies lie in wait for them in the area they chose to fly to. In the final Event Horizon round, any unspent critical hits will be dealt to the Desolation Sun. Strike the final blow there, and win! Combat is based around dice, with normal hits, critical hits, and misses determining how effectively you deal with enemies. Your ship has primary and secondary weapons alongside a generator, shield, and armour, all of which can be improved as the game develops. You start throwing just three dice, but this very quickly ramps up. And ramps up big! Damage is not entirely negative either, because taking hits to certain parts of your ship can generate shards, giving you resources to spend on making yourself considerably more dangerous later.

A mid-game roll!

There is plenty to buy and discover along the way. After each player has fought in their area, you can then fly to one of five areas to buy upgrades, exchange goods, bet on resources, ship, or gain other upgrades. New ships, weapons, Augments (upgrades/[powers) and other fun things to discover, gradually transform what you can do, while defeated enemies can leave behind Husks and different locations give you opportunities to spend the resources you have earned. There is also a push-your-luck element to how long you keep going, because sometimes the sensible choice is simply to stop, secure an advantage of first player for the next round, and prepare yourself properly for what is coming next.

BUILDING THE RIGHT SHIP

One thing became apparent quite quickly in my games. Upgrading everything whenever the opportunity appears is not necessarily the best strategy. There is a real temptation to progress neatly from one improvement to the next, but doing that can leave you spending a lot of resources on things you are eventually going to replace anyway.

I had much more success strengthening the weapons on my starting ship, saving heavily and then skipping some of those incremental upgrades altogether. Make a bigger jump into one of the stronger ships, then start investing seriously in that. It creates an interesting economy because the shiny new thing sitting in front of you is not always the thing you should buy.

That becomes particularly noticeable at two players. Galaxy Glitch works very well at this count because it starts feeling like a proper race. Both players are trying to become powerful enough to begin damaging the Desolation Sun first, and if both understand that saving for those larger upgrades can be important, it becomes a tight contest over who can accelerate their engine fastest.

There is perhaps a balance consideration hidden inside that, though. If one player upgrades steadily while the other saves and leaps straight towards the better ships, the more conservative upgrader can fall behind surprisingly quickly. That may change as strategies develop further, but from my early games it certainly feels like Galaxy Glitch rewards patience with your resources more than constantly chasing the next small improvement.

GALAZY GLITCH?

Then there are the Traitors, and this is where the game takes a particularly entertaining turn. Losing your ship during Flight School is recoverable, but once you reach Deep Space, destruction can change your allegiance completely. Instead of continuing to fight alongside the other players, you become a Traitor for the remainder of the game.

Suddenly someone who was helping control the board is actively trying to make everybody else's lives more difficult. It is a clever way of dealing with player elimination because being destroyed does not mean sitting around watching everyone else finish. Instead, you effectively switch sides and become part of the problem.

The possibility alone changes how a larger game feels. More players means more ships taking damage, more potential mistakes and consequently a greater chance that somebody eventually turns. You may spend the early game reluctantly cooperating with someone only to find that same person gleefully trying to ruin you half an hour later.

SOLO AND SMALLER GAMES

Galaxy Glitch works surprisingly well solo too. The basic systems still function, building your ship remains satisfying and working through the escalating threats gives you a proper puzzle to solve. I enjoyed playing it this way and would happily do so again.

My main concern is that the solo game currently feels slightly inevitable once you understand how to approach it. Playing cautiously during the opening stage, building up your ship and avoiding unnecessary risks meant I reached a point where I felt fairly certain I would eventually achieve the goal. The uncertainty was less about whether I could win and more about how long it would take.

That feels like something that could be tightened before the final game. A round limit, timer or some other escalating pressure could add considerably more jeopardy. The fear of losing your ship is there, but if taking things slowly and upgrading carefully removes too much of that danger, solo risks losing some of the tension that makes the multiplayer game interesting.

THE FINAL SHOT

And then we reach the part of Galaxy Glitch that people are either going to adore or absolutely hate. As we talked about, you do not win by contributing the most damage to the Desolation Sun. You win by delivering the final Critical Hit. Someone could potentially do nine points of damage, dominate the galaxy, build the strongest ship at the table and spend two hours looking like the obvious winner. Another player could have achieved very little, arrive at exactly the right moment, get a fortunate critical result and deliver number ten. Game over. That sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. It is also enormous fun if you go into Galaxy Glitch knowing that this is exactly what the game intends to do.

There is still plenty you can do to improve your chances. Before you can damage the Desolation Sun you need to survive the enemies in your sector, and only the Critical Hits left over after dealing with those enemies can hurt the boss. A powerful ship loaded with upgraded weapons is therefore far more likely to create the opportunity required to win.

But likely is not guaranteed. Technically, everybody remains dangerous right until that final point of damage disappears, regardless of what has happened during the previous couple of hours. That keeps the entire table engaged and means nobody can simply look at another player's engine and conclude the result is already decided.

It will frustrate some people enormously. If you want the player who performed best across the entire game to be rewarded with victory, Galaxy Glitch can absolutely pull the rug from underneath you. You need to know before sitting down that this is not necessarily a game about identifying the most efficient commander at the end. It is about who fires the killing shot.

THE MORE, THE MERRIER

For me, Galaxy Glitch is strongest with a larger group. The underlying mechanics do not suddenly change, but the atmosphere does. More players create more uncertainty around sector selection, more competing upgrade strategies, greater pressure across the galaxy and a much higher chance of the Traitor system entering the equation.

Most importantly, the ending becomes harder to predict. At two players you are largely watching one rival and judging how close they are to being able to hurt the boss. With several ships circling the board, suddenly there are multiple potential winners and considerably more opportunities for somebody to emerge from nowhere.

That suits Galaxy Glitch perfectly. This is not really a game that wants to produce a perfectly controlled ending. It wants somebody to roll the dice, spot a pile of Critical Hits and realise that against all expectations they may actually have just won.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Galaxy Glitch combines some familiar ideas in a way that produces a surprisingly distinctive multiplayer experience. Upgrading ships, rolling combat dice and fighting a giant end boss are hardly new concepts, but the shared galactic threat, simultaneous movement choices, Traitors and wonderfully brutal final-hit victory condition give the game its own personality.

There are areas I would like to see refined before release. Solo could use more pressure, and the upgrade economy may need watching if skipping straight towards the strongest ships consistently proves more efficient than progressing gradually. Neither issue stopped me enjoying what is already here, though, and both feel like the kind of thing that can be adjusted during development rather than fundamental problems with the design.

The most important thing is understanding what sort of game Galaxy Glitch wants to be. This is competitive, chaotic and occasionally deeply unfair. You might play brilliantly for two hours and lose because somebody else produced one ridiculous roll at precisely the right moment. And I think that is part of the fun.

With two players it becomes a tense race to build the better ship first. Solo offers an enjoyable development puzzle. But put a larger group around the table and Galaxy Glitch starts throwing betrayals, competing strategies, overloaded sectors and potential last-second victories everywhere.

That is where I think it really shines. Galaxy Glitch already feels like a game with a clear identity, plenty of personality and some genuinely fun ideas at its core. This is still a prototype, but I really hope it finds the right route to market, whether that is through a publisher who sees the potential, a successful crowdfunding campaign, or whatever path the designer ultimately chooses. There is enough here that deserves proper development, proper production and a wider audience. I hope Galaxy Glitch gets the chance to become a real game, because I think it deserves to.