Designer Diary: Galactic Cruise | BoardGameGeek News

by Koltin Thompson

Galactic Cruise is a heavy, strategic Eurostyle game featuring worker placement, tableau building, multi-use cards, and resource management. The game has stunning artwork from Ian O’Toole, it did quite well on Kickstarter, and by the end of 2025, it will be available in a total of nine languages.

But it wasn’t always this way.

The whole journey started with an international emergency. It was the spring of 2020, and the world was in turmoil. A pandemic was sweeping the world, and many aspects of daily life were shut down. At the time, I was an elementary school teacher, working from home during the seemingly endless quarantine period, and it was during this time of sheltering in place that my lifelong best friend, T.K. King, suggested that we start designing board games as a way to pass the time.

For the next year, we started (and ultimately abandoned) dozens of projects, ranging from mean little card games to big dice chuckers to games so complex that they might well be called “simulations”. At the same time, we were playing a wide range of new-to-us games. When this whole journey began, we had played only CATAN, Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and little else in the way of modern hobby games, and the more we played, the more our game designs got refined.

Fast-forward to May 2021: In the midst of the perhaps half-dozen projects we were currently working on, I received a text from T.K.:

Over the next few weeks, we chatted back and forth about how we thought the game could go. Eventually, T.K. got the first version of the game onto Tabletop Simulator, and we gave it a go. That first two-player game of Galactic Cruise was about four hours long. It was clunky. It was overthinky. It was, quite frankly, not very good — but there was something about the experience that felt different. We pushed forward, implementing change after change, imploring anyone and everyone to playtest it with us.

Rough edges got smoother. Convoluted rules became more streamlined. Our confidence grew. The game was good…but something was missing.

Enter Dennis Northcott.

We first met Dennis in 2022 at Proto ATL, where he was attending as just another designer shopping around his designs. He sat down for the first game of Galactic Cruise of the weekend, and he ended up playing it several times during the course of the event. He quickly became a frequent playtester of the game online, and he started sticking around longer and longer for the feedback sessions…and eventually for the post-feedback sessions, when T.K. and I would try to solve all the problems of the game.

It became quickly apparent that Dennis had a knack for game development – and a savant-like ability to break games – and by the end of 2022, we decided to make our partnership official. When we established Kinson Key Games, LLC, in January 2023, there were three owners.

We spent much of 2023 fine-tuning the game, carefully balancing values and streamlining the rules to the best of our ability. One hurdle that kept reoccurring had to do with how the guests in the game would function. We wanted them to feel thematic and interesting, but none of our systems felt quite right. In the first iteration of the game, the guests were dice that moved down a track. In other versions, they were meeples that moved like a conveyer belt; this version worked fine, but there wasn’t anything terribly interesting about it.

It wasn’t until we took a deep dive into the concept of destinations and guest preferences — thanks in no small part to our chats with the incomparable Ian O’Toole — that we determined the best way forward.

To check out progress photos and other details from this time, check out the forum post I wrote in January 2024. Here’s an excerpt:

[Our] smoothing-out/fat-trimming process touched every facet of the game, but a major change that made the game unbelievably better was the change that happened concerning destinations and guests.

The guests are now meeples (which makes so much sense — how did it take us so long to realize that meeples represent people surprisingly well…?) and they come in three varieties:

FAMILY

RELAXING

ADVENTUROUS

These three categories spread across the entire game, and we completely replaced the idea of durations with the idea of various cruise itineraries… This decision also allowed us to create some very cool in-universe destinations for the guest to travel to.

While you’re at it, you can check out the numerous other forums that I posted throughout the life of the game. (Alongside all the other forums, I have seventeen “Design Retrospectives” on the Galactic Cruise BGG page.)

When we brought the game to Kickstarter in March 2024, we didn’t know what to expect. We felt we had done our homework; we’d hired a well-known artist; we’d playtested the game hundreds of times; we had done everything right…or at least, we hoped we had. We hit that big, scary Launch button – and the rest was history. We funded in four minutes, and a month later, we ended our campaign with over 8,000 backers, multiple interested retailers and distributors, and some preliminary chats with localization partners.

But why us? Why did this happen? So many of our friends and colleagues design wonderful games and put them on a crowdfunding platform. Some of their games reach their goals and a modest print run follows; some are not as fortunate. What made Galactic Cruise different?

I think the theme did a lot of the work. The combination of space travel and sci-fi alongside leisurely vacations is very appealing — especially in a day and age when the likelihood of real space vacationing increases by the year. There is no doubt in my mind that Ian’s artistic rendering of our vision, which turned out even better than we imagined, helped a ton, too. I think I would assign the largest credit, though, to the community that we built over the three-year period that the game was in development. It was thanks to all of those folks that anything beyond those first few playtests happened. The importance of grassroots support cannot be overstated.

Okay, so this has veered away from being a designer diary and turned into something a bit more broad, but such is the way of things when you start talking about the object that has been a centerpiece of your life for nearly four years.

To all of you who take the time to play Galactic Cruise, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks, and I wish you a lifetime of happy cruising!

Koltin Thompson