Episode 293: Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was designed by Tomas Holek and published by Capstone Games

In Galileo Galilei you play 16th and 17th century astronomers gazing toward the heavens through telescopes or your heretics doing the devils work. The is game end is triggered when the last discovery card is played and who ever has the most points wins, but I guess I am putting the tail in front of the comet.

At game set up in Galileo Galilei is a deck of discovery cards whose size depends on the number of players. There are some end game scoring tracks and during the game scoring sections that are set up as well.

Galileo Galilei’s basic mechanic is a telescope found on your player board that can move up 3 spaces staring at different parts of your night sky. Those parts contain various actions that you can do on your turn. Some of those actions, let you acquire or increase the value of three different colored dice on your board. There is an action (Observe) that let you use those dice in two different ways. You can either observe a Major Object or you can observe a constellation. Observing a Major object gets you big points and places the card onto your player board which in turn begin to create a different track you can interact with. Observing a constellation gets you minor points. There is an action move you up those end game scoring tracks that also give you an immediate reward. There is an action that lets you place out a comet, that will give you a reduction when observing. There is an action (the library) where you can move through a track that you have created using Discovery cards that give you all kinds things. Finally there is an action that let you upgrade actions. There is a fun mechanic in the game when you chose a section of the sky (ie the actions) where it shifts the order of the actions around.

As you are doing these actions, you will begin accumulating inquisitors. It is imperative that these inquisitors be managed, as there is a mechanic at the end of the turn that will make you lose points if these little guys haven’t been moved down a track. They can also lead to some big points to if certain conditions are in the game.

All of these actions and things that you are doing might be end game scoring or if you are the first to accomplish X get points. These scoring opportunities are variable.

Once end game is triggered, there is one more full round played and whoever has the most victory points is the winner of Galileo Galilei.

Now lets get back to the table and see if the Pegs thought Galileo Galilei if the game was out of this world.