Wandering Galaxy Designer Diary
Fifth Entry
Flying Around Space Doing Stuff
Wandering Galaxy is a game all about making an adventurous living by flying around space and doing stuff. When you’re out there among the stars, the choices are yours. You can pursue jobs, or just explore the galaxy, getting by on opportunity and good looks… well, maybe just opportunity.
First, you need to know about ‘The Bag’. Throughout the game, you will be putting tokens into the bag or pulling them out. Some tokens are benign, but many are harmful, representing damage to the ship, the life support drain, injury to crew, or an increase in the existential threat your ship faces.
Traveling the space lanes will bring you to locations where you’ll enter a code into the app and follow its instructions. This almost always instructs you to draw one or more tokens from the bag and resolve their effects. Then you’ll experience an interactive story that may be resolved quickly through choices and skill checks, or it might instruct you to turn your focus to a page in the location book.
Pages in the location book come in several forms. They can represent a location to explore, a battle to fight, or even another part of the galaxy to continue your travels in. Each location has art on the left side and actions and instructions on the right. It’s like a book and a game had a baby!
Planning Phase
Just like our previous Crossroads games, Freelancers and Forgotten Waters, when you turn to a location or a battle page, you will begin the Planning Phase. The Operations player will immediately start the timer using the app. This will initiate a 45 second countdown!
Beginning with the first player and going clockwise, each player must choose an action and place their standee on it.
Some actions only allow one standee.
Others allow multiple standees to be placed on them.
Sometimes there will be required actions that a player must place their standee on.
Some actions might be locked. No standee can be placed on a locked action.
Why a timer? Wandering Galaxy is all about the thrill of exploration and impacting the narrative through your choices. Rather than read in detail what each action does, players should choose the actions that sound most exciting to them. But that doesn’t mean they’re making uninformed choices! Players should use the title and guide symbols on each action to help them decide where to place their standee. If an action has an associated skill check, it will show the skill icons that will be tested. Some guide symbols will indicate the action will involve an interactive story bit.
Tick Tock Spacer
If the timer runs out before all players have placed their standee, you must place a risk token in the bag, which is never good as risk tokens add threat when they are drawn from the bag!
Now It’s Time To Resolve Your Chosen Actions with the Action Phase
Starting at the top of the page with Action 1, all players that chose that action will resolve its effects and retrieve their standee. Then all the players at Action 2 and then the other actions, do the same, going down the page until all actions that were chosen have been resolved.
On actions that allow multiple players, the players will resolve their actions in turn order unless it calls for a group skill check, in which case all the players at that action will participate simultaneously!
The End of Round Phase
Once all players have resolved their actions, you’ll enter the Round End code listed at the bottom of the page. This will provide narrative and instruction that will either guide you to a new round, or finish the page and send you back into space to continue your adventure.
Pew Pew Pew
What’s an adventure in space without some space battles? When trouble comes your way, you will be instructed to turn to one of the battle pages in the location book where you will have a space battle. A space battle functions a little different than a normal location book page.
On the left page of a battle location, the art will include the Zephyr in the center and a grid that divides the scene into sectors numbered 1-6. You will be instructed to place various radar blips in these sectors to represent the enemies you face. The blips are lettered A-E and match the enemy dials A-E on the Security station.
During a space battle, you’ll be choosing actions that allow you to maneuver to better position the enemies, fire ship weapons, launch torpedos, use comms to negotiate, gain target locks, and try not to get blown up.
To fire a ship weapon, choose a ship weapon on the Security station, then target an enemy blip in its field of fire. Damaged ship weapons cannot be chosen. A successful attack will lower the targeted enemy’s dial, and if it’s lowered to 0, the enemy is destroyed.
During the Round End Phase of a space battle, the enemy ships will unleash their attacks on the Zephyr. Damage inflicted from an enemy blip, will affect the station number that matches the number on the sector the attacking enemy blip is in. Then the enemies will move to get a better shot at you next round.
Once all the enemies have been defeated, or have fled, or if you decide to flee, the battle ends. If you didn’t flee, there will often be sweet salvage to be scooped up using the ship’s handy magnabeam. Then you can continue your adventures flying around in space doing stuff and looking for your next score!
Stay tuned for our next diary entry going into more detail of space combat!
