Is this the best game of 2025 so far? Galactic Cruise Review

Welcome to this week’s review! This week I’m discussing one of the hottest new games of 2025 and one I was personally incredibly excited to try. Also, if you’re interested in seeing what’s in the giant box, you can check out an unboxing for the game here. So without further ado, let’s jump into my thoughts.

Galactic Cruise was one of my most anticipated games going into 2025. With first-time designers and publisher, I was excited with a hint of cautiousness. The theme of building spaceships to launch cruises through space sounded appealing at first glance, but I questioned how successful they would be with integrating that theme into a heavy and complex game.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the primary goal in Galactic Cruise is to build a fleet of spaceships and launch cruises throughout the galaxy, piloting passengers while stopping at destinations. Each player starts the game with two workers, but can unlock two additional workers throughout the game. The majority of player turns involve the player placing one of their workers into one of six different sections of the board, and each section has two available actions. Each section is also connected to another set of two actions to the left and right, and if that player has a development token between them, that player can also take actions from that section as well. However, even if that player does not have a development token there, they can still pay to use other player’s development tokens to take actions from that connected section of the board.

These development tokens create an interesting puzzle, as well as promote player interaction. Also, since the location of actions is randomized at the beginning of each game, it helps to shake up which development tokens to prioritize in each game, encouraging different strategies.

Another interesting mechanism is through worker bumping. A player can always place one of their available workers in any location, except locations with their own worker. However, if there is already another player’s worker in that section, that worker gets bumped and returns to that player’s pool of available workers. Worker bumping is a mechanism that has been used in plenty of games, but one example that comes to mind is The Gallerist. In that game, the player whose worker is bumped can take a bonus action or spend reputation to take an action where their worker was bumped. I found that mechanism to be very interesting, but it did have the tendency of slowing the game down. In Galactic Cruise, when a worker gets bumped, that player gets to take a Funding Bonus, which allows the player to gain a small benefit, such as money or resource.

The implementation of worker bumping in Galactic Cruise makes the game feel less restrictive since players can more easily access the actions they need while still creating player interaction. As a player, I’m incentivized to avoid bumping other player’s workers; I don’t want to allow them to take free resources. However, if I really need to take a certain action and doing so will bump another player’s worker, sometimes that’s a fair tradeoff in order to take the action I need.

I mentioned that I wondered how successful the designers would be in integrating the space cruising theme, and I’m happy to report that the innovative theme shines through. Each ship segment has a title with illustrations of the activity ones – some fun ones are a roller coaster park and a tea room. There’s even a segment for a board game convention.

I recently read a designer diary about the game a few weeks back, and one interesting tidbit was how the development of cruise passengers came to be. In the game, there are three different types of meeples, each representing a different category of guests, which you will load onto your spaceships when launching a cruise. I think this implementation brilliantly captures the feeling of marketing to passengers, entertaining them on board with the different types of ship segments, and finally taking them to destinations in space that match their desired preferences.

There are even tiebacks to how thematically the larger the ship built, the more passengers on board, the longer the cruise itinerary, and the more resources you’ll need to launch. Additionally, when you launch, one of your workers becomes the pilot, which will keep them occupied until the cruise returns. These are all well-thought out implementations which overall contribute to a very thematic but still crunchy euro game.

I’ve already played the game a handful of times and yet each game continues to feel fresh. I mentioned the randomization of the actions during setup, but in each game there will also be a different set of available technologies, company goals, cruise itineraries, ship segments, cockpits, and agenda cards. For example, in one game I might choose to focus on building one large ship that is only targeted towards a certain type of passenger or I could choose to diversify. Even without the expansions, there’s still plenty of replayability to be found in the game.

Finally, rounding out the positives, the production quality and attention to detail is outstanding. There’s even a welcome pack when you open the box with an introductory note and instructions on how to organize and store the components. Also, the rulebook and player aids are the best I’ve seen in any game. The rulebook does an excellent job of organizing and distilling the rules down into manageable bites, and there are a ton of pictorial examples. There’s even an index at the back of the rulebook that makes it easy to reference.

The icing on the cake has to be the individual player aids. They do an excellent job of explaining the structure of a turn with detail on each of the actions, as well clarifying each of the available upgrades and how cockpits are scored. It even goes as far as detailing how to score points, as well as how to get more money, reputation, ads, and resources. One amazing detail is that there are page references in the player aid to where that specific rule is mentioned in the rulebook if you ever need more information. The player aids makes it easy to teach the game to new players, while also containing all of the important information needed to play the game, which means that I rarely have to reference the main rulebook once the game is underway.

I honestly don’t have that many negatives to mention about the game. If I were to nitpick, I did find that the agenda card display could get a little stale if someone didn’t grab from them often enough, which can be an issue at lower player counts. It might have been nice to see some sort of rule where at two players, every so often (maybe at the end of each interim scoring) card(s) are removed and/or replaced.

Finally, while the rulebook does an excellent job of simplifying the game down, the game is still in the medium-heavy weight in terms of complexity. The most complex part is understanding how the cruise ships launch and move through the destinations. I do think that this is one of the easiest heavy games to get into because of its theme, but the game may still be too complex for some types of gamers.

To answer the question in the title, this is by far my favorite new game of 2025 so far. This game reminds me of the best of Vital Lacerda games, while also delivering a refreshing new theme. And I applaud the care and attention to detail that went into the overall production of the game. Galactic Cruise is not only the best game of 2025 so far, but also easily among my all-time favorites.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s review! What’s your favorite game of 2025 so far? I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned or future content suggestions in the comments below. Happy gaming!

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