About the game

Galactic Scoundrels is a storytelling card game with a space-western theme. Players bid and bluff each other to win a job, and then tell the shared story of that job by playing cards. Each job is a mini-adventure lasting 15-20 minutes. with spaceships, crew, cargo, strange and wonderful characters, and exciting twists. The rules are simple, allowing players to emphasize storytelling, negotiation, and social interaction.

It’s a game for people who love Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek, Valerian, space western comics from the 50s, the RPG Traveller, Blade Runner, Alien, Rick and Morty, Cowboy Bebop, Heavy Metal (the film), The Fifth Element, and any number of sci-fi stories about morally questionable protagonists.

We love all that stuff, so we wanted to make a game for other people who do too. The game doesn’t include any of those exact stories, but it does allow you to draw on them and others, if that’s where your imagination takes you. We’ve also found that lots of players just make up their own stories entirely. The game includes…

• 20-minute scoundrel stories, sometimes going not too badly and sometimes going very, very wrong
• asteroid fields, hallucinogenic cargo, impossibly attractive crew, a ship named The Calamity, and 189 other story cards to play
• gambling
• scoundrel-y actions like bluff, fancy moves, wits, charms, and knowhow
• tricking your friends for a bit of extra profit
• loads and loads of cash you can use to impress other scoundrels

Galactic Scoundrels takes about 90 minutes to play. Unless you’re insatiable storytelling maniacs like we are. Then it takes a whole evening.

The game was funded on Kickstarter on July 25th, 2018. We raised $27,430 from 666 backers. The game is now published by Mercury Games, Inc, and is available starting on February 20, 2019 for purchase in North America.