Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Let’s just get right into it.
Wandering Galaxy: A Crossroads Game (2025, Plaid Hat) is a disappointment. It’s a minor disappointment, but still, it’s a disappointment. The latest in the line of games in Plaid Hat’s Crossroads series, Wandering Galaxy comes on the heels of Forgotten Waters, Freelancers, and Dead of Winter. Like Forgotten Waters and Freelancers, Wandering Galaxy is an app-driven adventure game that is approximately 75% storytelling experience and 25% game. In this way, you will absolutely spend more time enjoying the great script, setting up scenarios, organizing cards, and organizing the stations of the collective party’s Starship Enterprise-style bridge operations than you will making any game decisions.
For my family, that was totally fine, and that’s what drove us to enjoy the experience offered in Freelancers—which has one of the funniest scripts I’ve ever heard in a narrative tabletop game. Many of the scenes are very, very funny. I tried three of the campaigns in Freelancers and I can’t really complain about any of them, at least as stories go. Was downtime hefty? Absolutely. Did chucking dice always work? Of course not. But as an “on-rails” gaming experience, Freelancers was fantastic.
Wandering Galaxy tries its best to land somewhere between a lighter episode of Star Trek (or the film Galaxy Quest, a riff on the Star Trek formula), a normal episode of Firefly, or an offbeat episode of any sci-fi show or movie where everything is supposed to be ridiculous. Sometimes, it works. Often, the game’s app and overall production quality shine.
However, are you familiar with the phrase “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze?” That’s how I would frame our time with Wandering Galaxy. I’m surprised this isn’t a more interesting experience.
Even My Family Walked Away
To this day, my nine-year-old son still talks about the time their 11-year-old sibling decided to make a selfish choice in Freelancers, a bit tied to a vending machine, a benefit that only the 11-year-old would be able to enjoy, and the eventual defeat in that campaign as our party met its maker. Up to that point, the adventure was a blast, and the game had created so many funny moments that when I eventually gave my copy to another member of my review crew, the 11-year-old groused about it for weeks.
When I had the chance to grab Wandering Galaxy at Gen Con 2025, I didn’t hesitate. My kids would think I would be a hero! Another game in the Crossroads series! This time, it is a game in space! My kids love sci-fi books and movies! I could hear the chants of “DADDY! DADDY!” all the way home on my drive back from Indianapolis.
Then I got the game to the table and set it up. Character sheets were handed out, and we named our Central Casting sci-fi characters funny names. Expecting another Mad Libs-style questionnaire on the back of our character sheets, we instead were met with a simple five-question sequence that led to one of two specific backstories for each of our characters. OK, fine. Not as funny or as creative as the last two games, but no problem. We’ll get there!
On the front of each sheet, there were spaces for nicknames and catchphrases. Fantastic! More ways to personalize the experience. “Ahh, sorry kids…you have to earn those catchphrases and nicknames, so erase whatever you wrote in those spaces.” The kids were surprised, but we were still upbeat: it’s a Crossroads game! Life is still grand!
But it wasn’t grand. Wandering Galaxy is still an app-driven light RPG for 3-7 players; this time around, solo and two-player variants are included, but as I’ll discuss later, I don’t think that’s the right call. Players band together to take on a variety of odd jobs across the galaxy, adventuring in a ship called the Zephyr in one of the game’s three campaigns or in a “free play” mode that can be accessed right from the jump.
For this review, I attempted two campaigns: It All Started on Riva (what one assumes should be a tutorial) and The Space Tycoon. Each campaign is designed to be played over four sessions. As I quickly learned, each campaign might last up to four sessions, because you can definitely lose well before that, as I did in both campaigns. Each session is straightforward: run around the galaxy, complete jobs for profit, and make seven million bucks per session to help pay off the debt you owe to someone for your ship. (I’m not sure it is $7 million. It’s 7-something, though, because that is tracked on one of the six ship station boards managed by the collective players at the table.)
In It All Started on Riva, the kids and I made it to session two before dying. I did a solo play of The Space Tycoon, and after a reasonably successful first session, I was murdered out of the game so quickly during a space battle with marauding pirates that the session was over in less than 30 minutes. All in, that means I played Wandering Galaxy four times, with each session lasting at least an hour, sometimes two. (They should last longer, if you can keep your party alive.)
Here’s the thing: I didn’t mind the deaths, because even as a massive fan of Freelancers, I thought Freelancers was too easy. So, Wandering Galaxy is definitely a harder game. But I just wish more fun came from the exercise.
It’s a Campaign…Sort Of
Wandering Galaxy’s main mechanical change from Freelancers? Now, the system is constructed around a deckbuilding approach; dice have been almost completely removed from the equation.
Each character begins the game with a “skill deck” full of cards featuring four different symbols, which are used for skill checks throughout the game. Gone is the mechanic where a player had to roll a D20 to try and get a 12 or higher, or whatever threshold was tied to the current check, with upgraded dice used as player progression kicked in. Now, the active player draws three cards, counts the number of icons on those cards against the current skill check, and passes or fails based on a quick scan of the symbols.
I don’t mind deckbuilding mechanics in games. I DO mind that this process is now much slower than just rolling a die. (I’m also particular to just rolling a die, because, you know, dice.) Some of the cards that can be added into each deck are fun and create some interesting combos, but this mainly serves to slow an already tedious game.
Reputation (“rep”) is still a thing in the Crossroads system, and getting it is a little easier than it was in the last couple of games. I was able to develop my characters quickly, although they still met their demise quickly in my games. But the unlocks tied to the rep tracks aren’t as sexy as I remember them being in the other Crossroads games.
Items and sidekicks here are mainly used to offer more symbols that can be added to skill checks, so that’s fine. There’s still a lot to manage in terms of side boards, but with a larger group, that’s an issue that goes away. Also, the initiative tracking required in Freelancers is gone in Wandering Galaxy; one player has the first player token, and that moves often between actions and rounds, so everyone will get their chance to shine.
So, Wandering Galaxy gets a lot of the basics right. But as a combined package, it pales in comparison to both Forgotten Waters and Freelancers.
That starts with the overall tone. Simply put, Wandering Galaxy just isn’t as funny as the last two games. I was really struck by how often jokes are clearly intended to land and just didn’t, not with my kids, not with me. “Cookie [a character name featured in Freelancers, known here as Cook-E] just isn’t as funny in this game as he was in Freelancers,” said my 11-year-old at one point. The narrator and the ship AI do most of the chatting, but the pacing and the tone just don’t work as well.
The Crossroads games are generally going for the snark of what it might sound like if the Clank! games were narrated by an app. The Clank! people clearly think they are the funniest people who ever lived. They aren’t, but I commend them for going for it at almost every opportunity. With Wandering Galaxy, sometimes the game is going for semi-serious (at least, serious for a Crossroads game), and sometimes they are going for the laugh track jugular, but it’s inconsistent to say the least.
As a role-playing game, character development just isn’t that much fun in Wandering Galaxy. In part, that’s because I’m building up my deck with cards that might not surface for a while. Gaining sidekicks or new weapons isn’t as exciting as it was in the last two titles. Combat is an almost complete fail compared to the last two games; ship-to-ship battles are so boring here that my nine-year-old—who only signed on for the combat!!—was frustrated as turns went around and around, with the ability to only use the front-facing cannon of the Zephyr in some combat rounds.
“Gunfights” in Wandering Galaxy are long, and sometimes painful. Worse, it never really feels like one is actually in a Star Wars-style shootout with stormtroopers, or aliens, or cops, or anyone, really. In part, that’s because deckbuilding mechanics just don’t work for me when it comes to quickly resolving a laser gun fight. The app doesn’t do the game any favors here; in combat scenes of better games like Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan, there’s background music and random sounds of people shouting playing as cool things are happening and dice are being chucked and bad guys are getting killed by your clever maneuvers.
There Are Better Galaxies
At the end of the day, Wandering Galaxy isn’t a bad game, it’s just not as good as the other Crossroads games. The app does a good job, but it doesn’t do as funny of a job as Freelancers did. The theme and some of the over-the-top voice work from Forgotten Waters would be welcome here, because Wandering Galaxy just doesn’t have enough memorable characters in its stable of characters who populate its game world.
As a production, I don’t have any issues with Wandering Galaxy. The standees, the scenario book, the character sheets, the ship station boards, the in-game tutorial, the sticker sheets, they’re all fine and dandy. Its MSRP fits for the amount of game you will get out of the three robust scenarios, especially because there are so many different jobs that can be accomplished in each session. If you really want to dive into its world, Wandering Galaxy has a lot of things one can chase down and accomplish.
My issue is that I don’t have anyone at home who wants to dive any deeper. The kids actually seemed happy when our campaign ended. When I asked if they would play the intro scenario a second time, one of the kids ran upstairs to take their bath before answering my question. (I tracked them down later; the answer was a flat “no.”) While Freelancers was great with more players, it turns a single session into a three-hour affair; it’s clear that the game slows down substantially with more players, and Wandering Galaxy has plenty of group skill checks that must be completed by all players. If you do decide to dive in with a larger group, know that it will be a long session.
Solo was not a good idea. In solo play, you have to manage your own character plus two apprentice characters that act like normal players. You’ll also have to manage six ship station boards, a scenario book, the app, a galactic star map, a draw bag full of risk and damage tokens, a card catalog, and a skill card market of four cards. It was a comedy worth watching, as I tried to manage all of this by myself on a large table. The entire activity brought me shivers as I remembered how hard it was to manage games like The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era all by myself.
Turns are definitely faster when playing alone. But the upkeep is a nightmare. Tread lightly!
All this makes Wandering Galaxy a difficult recommendation. If you are not OK with an app driving essentially your entire gaming experience, do not apply. I’m a month removed from playing the best narrative adventure game of not only the year, but maybe the last few years, in Vantage. Particularly for solo play, Vantage has a sizable advantage over Wandering Galaxy, and it can be played to completion in less time.
Here’s what I will say: I’m still a big fan of the Crossroads system, but I will push you towards either Forgotten Waters or Freelancers, depending on your thematic preferences (pirates for Forgotten Waters, fantasy RPG players for Freelancers). If sci-fi is your thing and you have a small group of 3-4 players looking for a deep, app-driven RPG experience and you are fine with a more traditional storytelling approach, give Wandering Galaxy a look.
Wandering Galaxy: A Crossroads Game details
- Designer: Jerry Hawthorne
- Artists: Elias Stern
- Publishers: Plaid Hat Games
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 6
- Age range : 14+
- Time range : 60 - 180 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Campaign / Battle Card Driven, Cooperative Game, Hand Management, Narrative Choice / Paragraph, Worker Placement
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.71571 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.0.
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