Wandering Galaxy Designer Diary

Using Your Skills To Avoid An Embarrassing Early Retirement

As mentioned in the previous article, each character in Wandering Galaxy starts with a unique deck of ten skill cards. This is a light deck-building game where you will be adding to, and removing cards from your deck as you play. This will make your deck stronger or weaker, depending on what kind of cards are added. This is a quick and simple way to reflect your character’s growth and development over the course of the four-game campaign. 

The Card Catalog

The Wandering Galaxy uses a card catalog to organize all of the various cards used in the game. This makes setting up and putting away your game, a total breeze. At the start of each game session, you’ll retrieve your character’s skill deck from its slot in the card catalog, and at the end of each session, you put your deck back in your slot so it’s ready for the next game. It’s really that easy! 

Skill Card Icons

Skill cards each have one or more skill icons. There are four primary skill icons:

Body

Mind

Spirit

Focus

Each character skill deck is made up of cards with different numbers and combinations of icons, reflecting each character's strengths and weaknesses.

Skill Checks

Most of the challenges facing your character will be resolved by using your skill cards to perform skill checks. Passing will often result in reward effects, and failure will often lead to a penalty of some kind.

A skill check will always list which skill icons can be used to perform that check. To perform a skill check, simply reveal the top three cards from your skill deck, placing them in front of you. 

When this card is played, players get to draw another card into this skill check.

Next, resolve any ‘Play’ effects listed on the cards played. These usually have an accompanying effect icon. Then total up all the icons that match the skill check’s requirements. All other skill icons are ignored. Consult the text associated with the skill check and resolve the option corresponding to your total.  

When you start out, your skill cards will be pretty basic, but as you play, you’ll add more complex cards that will increase your chances of doing well on skill checks, and also trigger other beneficial effects. 

Prompts

All skill checks have a highlighted single word prompt that further defines the check. When making a skill check, if your character has that matching prompt on its sheet, or on any of its readied items and sidekicks, you gain the associated effect.

Leveling Up

As you play the game, your character will earn reputation or ‘Rep’. Each time you earn Rep, you’ll check a box on the Reputation Track on your character sheet. When you check the last box in a row, you’ll gain rank along with the rewards that come with it. This usually allows you to gain a new card or banish an underperforming card from your deck.

The Improvement Row

During setup, you will place a deck of Improve cards near the play area, then reveal four of those cards to create the Improvement Row. When you are directed to Improve your character, you may choose a card from the Improvement Row and add it to your discard pile where it will now cycle through, lending its skill icons and effects to your skill checks. 

Status Effects

Sometimes, you will be directed to add a status card to your deck. Most status cards are suboptimal and make your deck weaker, thus threatening your chances of overcoming challenges. There are also some that improve your deck, but these are more rare. Some status cards are discarded into another player’s deck, and will be passed around until removed, thus affecting the entire crew!

Sidekicks And Space Gear

One of the best ways to make your character more powerful is by acquiring sidekicks and useful weapons and gear. These cards have skill icons and function just like skill cards, but instead of discarding it after you play it, you can ‘ready’ an item or sidekick by placing it on one of your character’s three ‘ready slots’ where its icons and effects will add to your skill check totals. 

Working Together 

Most of the time you’ll be resolving skill checks on your own, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a little help. When making a skill check, your fellow players can stress out to help you score better. To do this, the helping player adds a Stress status card to their discard pile, and then rolls the Chance Die, adding the result (0,1,1,1,1,2) to your total. 

Stress cards are not terrible cards, but if you ever play more than two in a single skill check, they’re immediately returned to the card catalog, and you must add an Injured status card to your discard pile. As you might guess, this isn’t good as injuries can lead to scars! Too many scars will lead to an embarrassing early retirement for your character. 

In the next article, we will talk about how to put these skills to use, running your ship, The Zephyr!

Jerry Hawthorne

Designer of Wandering Galaxy, Stuffed Fables, Mice & Mystics and more!