Galaxy Defenders is a game which is heavily inspired by science fiction movies of the 1980s and 90s and sets up to five players together in a cooperative battle against alien invaders. The game is tactical in nature and each player controls one of the special agents recruited for the mission. The missions themselves will be story based and contain various major and minor events as determined by the event deck.
Biotech – Sort of the medic of the team as they can use nanotechnology to heal characters as well as control war drones on the battlefield. A nice character overall.
Hulk – I look at this agent as the “tank” as he can suck up a lot of damage and deal quite a bit in return but is rather slow moving across the landscape.
Infiltrator – A pretty standard stealth sort of agent as she can move quickly without being detected. While close up the infiltrator is solid she is pretty weak with ranged attacks.
Marine – The “jack of all trades” who is pretty average in all things but highly adaptable to nearly any given situation. Plus, he has some nifty grenades to utilize.
Sniper – Excellent long range damage output but at the mercy of aliens who get close in. Thankfully, his camouflage makes him less likely to be spotted.
Each turn of GD is broken into Phases:
Refresh – Items and Powers which can only be used per turn are once again available if used in the previous turn.
Strategy – Players chat a bit over what their gameplan is for the turn and how they’ll look to kick alien butt. Then they determine who the Alpha Agent (first player) will be for the turn as all subsequent player actions resolve clockwise from the Alpha. Next they can roll to see if each character who iced an alien in the previous turn can receive GD-Wings. This is almost along the lines of a power-up as, if they succeed on the roll, they’ll receive a new Power to use. Along these lines, if four pieces of alien technology have been retrieved (every four aliens you kill) during the mission the Alpha can trade those in for a new equipment item. Last, the players check to see if they’ve met either the victory or defeat conditions to end the mission.
There’s a lot going on during combat and players roll the custom dice to determine hits while the defender gets to roll to negate those hits. You run across energy shields, line of sight, weapons jamming, special dice results, friendly fire, smashing open doors, and so forth. In other words, this is a tactical game and the level of detail found in the combat adds to the excitement and randomness but doesn’t get overly bogged down in minutia.
As far as the Actions each of the players can use an Ability, a Skill, a tactic or a Device. Once again lots to choose from here and depending on the load out chosen to begin the game (or GD-Wing improvements as an example) you’ll no doubt have more options than you can shake a stick at in deciding what action to take.
Events – An Event card is drawn and the events depicted on the card are resolved in the order presented. Some events are simply Standard which can take place in any mission while others are Special and specific to the mission being played. A third type of Event is weather as the conditions on the battlefield may change. Once nice touch to the Events cards are some of what happens is based on the number of players so this prevents the game balance suddenly shifting toward being too easy or difficult.
When I first opened the package Ares has sent along and I began to sift through all the various cards, tokens, maps and so forth the first thing to put into my head was, “Is this from Fantasy Flight Games?” because there’s a lot of components. Keep in mind, I received a preview so there was only a single figure and the makings for two missions included which leads me to only imagine what you’ll find in the finished product but I’ll gather we’ll be pleased!
The beta edition of the rules clocks in at over forty pages (not even including the missions) and I’ll take a stab that will stay close to the same at publication. For the most part, the rules are well put together although I think a touch of editing will go a long way toward making them easier to follow; presenting everything which has to do with a particular phase should be presented within that section of the rulebook, in my opinion, for a better flow but it isn’t as if the layout is horrible – just a touch less intuitive than I’d like to see. These aren’t the competed rules obviously enough though.
I will mention Galaxy Defenders is an epic sized game as even the starting missions took well over two hours to play with a full complement of gamers. GS might not appeal to players with exceptionally short attention spans as there’s a lot going on but for a vast majority of gamers out there, especially those who dig science fiction action, I can say their bases will be covered. While GD missions are touted as story driven I think that’s the weakest aspect of the design from my experience. That’s not saying the Event cards don’t add some additional flavor just that I found the narrative to be created more from the action unfolding on the battlefield as opposed to what was revealed through Events.
Now I’ll keep my fingers crossed I get a chance to see the finished product so I can put together an actual review for the game!
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