Wouter & Ymke 
Apparently, regular holidays aren’t enough anymore. In Excursions, people have moved beyond beaches, city trips and arguing over who gets the hotel room with the better view. Now they want holidays in space. As cruise directors working for Galactic Cruise, we’re responsible for attracting guests, preparing ships and sending them off on holidays across the solar system. Naturally, we’re also trying to make ourselves look better than the other cruise directors while doing it. It is still a business, after all.
Excursions is a reimplementation of Galactic Cruise, set in the same universe but designed by Ben Rosset as a shorter and somewhat more approachable game. Ian O’Toole also returns with the artwork, so anyone familiar with Galactic Cruise will recognise quite a bit here. You don’t need to know that game, though. Excursions stands on its own as a game about building itineraries, filling ships with the right passengers and trying to make good use of actions chosen by everyone around the table.
Excursions is now live on Kickstarter. You can find the campaign here.
👥 1-6 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 60-90 minutes
📝 Designer: Ben Rosset
🎨 Artwork: Ian O’Toole
🏢 Publisher: Kinson Key Games (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Most of Excursions revolves around the rotating Preston Space Station. On each turn, one player is the active player and chooses one of the actions around the station. Everyone then gets to do something at the same time. Other players can follow the chosen action, or use one of their developments to access an action directly adjacent to it. If neither option helps, the central action is always available and lets you take one resource, ad, money or cruise card.
The available actions cover the different parts of running your company. You’ll collect money, food and fuel, advertise for guests, schedule cruise cards, build developments, unlock upgrades and launch ships. Removing a development from your player board increases how much food or fuel you can store. You then place it either in the station’s network, where it connects actions and may provide a bonus, or next to a technology that gives you an ongoing ability. The active player also gets a bonus associated with their chosen action, with developments sometimes giving them access to an adjacent bonus instead.
Eventually, all of this needs to result in an actual holiday. Cruise cards are scheduled beside one of your ships to create an itinerary containing Days in Space and Excursions. You’ll also need guests aboard the ship, and the particular guests matter because cards look for different passenger types. Launching costs food based on the number of passengers and fuel based on the length of the itinerary.
Ships don’t immediately complete their cruises. The rotating station periodically triggers ship movement, at which point every ship currently travelling advances to its next stop. Days in Space provide benefits depending on who is aboard, while Excursions score points if the ship contains the required types of guests. Ads can help when your passenger list isn’t quite right, allowing a guest to count temporarily as another type for an Excursion. When a ship eventually returns home, its pilot goes back to the break room, its guests return to the bag and you gain a funding bonus. The Return Home card is then tucked into the corresponding slot on your player board, making future funding bonuses of that type better.
There are also ways to get yourself out of trouble. Cruise cards can be discarded for supplies, supplies can be exchanged at a fairly unfriendly rate and ads can help you get more guests. Company goals give two funding bonuses when completed, with extra points available for being among the first players to meet their requirements. There are secret goals too, so not everything you’re working towards is visible across the table.
Reaching 50 victory points triggers the end of the game, but things don’t stop immediately. The current turn finishes normally and everyone then gets one final turn simultaneously, with each player acting as their own active player and choosing whichever action they want. Ships already on cruises also receive one final advance to any remaining stop before final scoring. Remaining supplies, upgrades, developments, completed company goals and fulfilled secret goals can all contribute additional points. Whoever finishes with the highest total wins.
Artwork & Components
Ian O’Toole’s artwork gives Excursions the same retro-futuristic space tourism look as Galactic Cruise. There are dark blue backgrounds mixed with orange, turquoise, purple, yellow and green, while the cruise cards look a little like travel advertisements from a future imagined several decades ago. I particularly like some of the destinations and activities. There’s something wonderfully ordinary about travelling across the solar system only to visit a sports arena or spend some time on a tanning deck.
The rotating space station dominates the table. It’s a large circular board filled with action tiles, developments, bonuses and the scoring track. During the game, more wooden gears appear around it as players build their networks. There’s quite a bit of information packed into this central area and it can look intimidating when you first sit down. After a few turns, we weren’t really thinking about that anymore.
The player boards are similarly substantial. Each has recessed areas for the ships and guests, resource tracks, upgrade spaces and slots where cards can be tucked. We found the recessed sections particularly useful because there are quite a few wooden pieces moving around. Guests come in different colours and shapes with printed details, while the developments are chunky wooden gears. The pilots are probably my favourite little touch because they physically travel along the row of cruise cards beside your board.
This is a prototype, so I’m reluctant to judge production quality as though everything we’re showing will appear exactly like this in the finished game. What we played already had plenty of physical pieces and a fairly large table footprint, especially once several players had cruises stretching away from their boards.
Our Experience
Our first game started with everyone staring at Preston Space Station and trying to work out which part of it we were supposed to care about. We understood the actions, but we weren’t really looking beyond our own boards yet. We collected resources, built developments and prepared cruises because those were obviously things we needed to do. Someone else choosing an action we happened to need was mostly a nice coincidence.
A few turns later, we were looking across the table to see who needed to advertise, who looked ready to schedule and whether somebody was likely to develop. We didn’t always get those predictions right. Somebody would occasionally pick something completely different and leave the rest of us staring across the table after several minutes of silent planning.
We made plenty of mistakes too. More than once, somebody prepared what looked like a lovely cruise and then discovered they didn’t have the fuel or passengers to make it work properly. I had one itinerary I was particularly pleased with until I actually tried to launch it. Suddenly cruise cards were being discarded for supplies, resources exchanged at terrible rates and ads spent much more freely than originally intended. We got the ship moving eventually.
Later games were less wasteful. Developments around the station meant we didn’t always need somebody else to choose exactly the action we wanted, and we got better at spotting problems before we’d already filled a ship. We still made bad calls, of course, just fewer expensive ones.
Once both ships were involved, our boards got much busier. One ship could be halfway through a cruise while we were already filling the other with guests and arranging its itinerary. A returning ship might improve the funding bonus we wanted for whatever we were preparing next. Sometimes another cruise was almost ready to go by the time the first came home. There were also occasions when one ship sat at Preston Space Station full of passengers because we’d forgotten the fuel again.
The last part of the game caught us out in a different way. Another upgrade or development almost always sounded useful during the first half. Once somebody started getting close to 50 points, we were looking at those same improvements and wondering whether we’d actually use them enough before the game ended. There was usually one more thing we wanted to improve and another cruise we were preparing.
Our games generally came in around ninety minutes. Adding players made them somewhat longer, but we weren’t sitting around waiting for everyone to finish a complete turn before doing anything ourselves. We did occasionally look across the table and realise a ship had moved or somebody had completed something without us really noticing. With several people resolving actions at once, that happened more than once.
Our Thoughts
I wouldn’t call Excursions a light game, even though the individual actions aren’t particularly difficult to understand. Most of the work comes from keeping several things moving without spending more than you need to. Food sitting on your board might be needed for a launch, while the amount of fuel you need depends on how ambitious you’ve been with the itinerary. The guests you’ve attracted can also leave you searching for a card that actually wants them. You can usually make a less-than-ideal plan work, but doing that repeatedly gets expensive.
That’s probably what I like most about it. Excursions doesn’t need every action choice to be difficult because the consequences often turn up later. A slightly inefficient launch might be better than waiting for everything to be perfect. An upgrade can be affordable and still not be worth buying. Eventually you also need to stop improving the company you’ve spent the whole game improving and start taking points before somebody else ends it.
Some turns are still too obvious for my liking. Once your company is heading in a particular direction, there are moments when one action is useful and the alternatives really aren’t. If you want every turn to leave you stuck between several equally difficult choices, Excursions doesn’t consistently do that. We were more likely to think about when to launch or when to stop investing than which action to take right now.
I’m also less sure about variety over many plays. Technologies, upgrades and cruise cards change what you have available, and the players around the table won’t always choose the same actions. I can imagine reaching a point where certain conversions and combinations become familiar and you already know roughly how you prefer to build your company. We aren’t there yet. Our later games were more enjoyable because we stopped wasting quite so much effort on things we didn’t really need, but I’d want more plays before saying how far that continues.
The simultaneous play won’t work equally well for everyone. We liked not having to wait for everyone to take a complete turn, and the other boards still mattered because their choices could affect what we were able to do. Excursions isn’t particularly confrontational, though. Most of the time you’re trying to benefit from somebody else’s choice rather than actively interfering with them. It’s also easy to miss a small part of what somebody else does when everyone is resolving things at once. If you like monitoring every move your opponents make, that can be frustrating.
For us, those drawbacks haven’t outweighed what we enjoy. I like getting both ships moving and reaching the point where a returning cruise helps prepare the next one. Looking at another player’s board and being fairly certain they’re about to advertise, then being completely wrong, is part of it too. Even the occasional itinerary that leaves us desperately trading resources because somebody forgot one fuel has become a familiar sight.
There’s still a question about how familiar the game might become after many more plays, but right now we’re happy to keep finding out. There’s a satisfying point in Excursions where your funding bonuses have improved, your options around the station have grown and the company you’ve been building finally starts working the way you hoped. Those were the moments that made us want to play again.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Excursions from Kinson Key Games. Components, artwork and rules shown or discussed in this article may differ from the final version.
