Galactic!

Played our first “real” installment of Doyce’s Galactic gamma-test on Sunday.  Jay and Randy were out, so it was Chris and Tim and myself.

Galactic has an interesting mechanic.  It’s a limited-session game — three “quests” then the finale — and your main character is a starship captain trying to gather information about the mysterious “Scourge” that destroyed the human empire thousands of years ago, and from which now your people are only beginning to recover.   I say “main” character because while each player runs a starship captain, they also get to run a crew member on each other player’s crew.

Thus, while I play Allysande Daen, the young overly-serious former naval officer now searching for my father captain, Chris played the slacker/druggy engineer Smoke and Tim played my valet, Bosley.  When it was Tim’s turn to run things with his luxury liner / survivalist captain, Chris was playing a fighting-priest security officer and I was the callow purser/intern.  While Chris was playing his techno-archaeologist captain, Tim had the Jayne-esque button man and I played the captain’s ex-wife and ship’s negotiator.

It keeps things interesting, so that even while the “focus” is on other players, you always have something to do.  The game, mechanics, too, promote lots of involvement in collaborative story-telling and some good (non-sim) dice tactics.

I’m really pleased with how the system is working at the moment, and am looking forward to the next game.