Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei initially won me over as a breezy euro about astronomical observations in the age of the Inquisition. It has a nice pace, plays quickly, and does not need to lecture you to get its theme across. Its upgradeable rondel is the engine driving everything, a mechanism that apparently decided to be everywhere in 2025—hello, Daitoshi and Windmill Valley—but it remains satisfying to use here.

On my turn, I rotate and use that rondel, with its upgrades steadily improving what I can do. It feels like a clean engine-building euro: I develop my capabilities around observations and try to convert my decisions into efficiency and points, without the game becoming heavy or dragging its feet.

The Inquisition is where the game puts pressure on managing that system, while the asymmetric astronomers provide distinct directions. There are several paths to victory, which made the choices feel open and interesting in the first plays. The interaction is not especially biting, though: I wanted a little more player-to-player burn.

So, after the first two games, I considered it one of the stronger euro releases of the year. Its lack of aggression felt more like a small note than a real problem—perhaps a future expansion will address it. Then came the play that reminded me a euro does not need to be chaotic to throw the score out the window.

Updated session

We returned because the previous two sessions had left good impressions, but this time one asymmetric astronomer seemed to blatantly break the Inquisition mechanism and opened an irritatingly huge points gap, all the way to a double score. It may have been situational, but in a closed, tight euro I find that very hard to view positively; this is not the more lavish snowballing of something like Boonlake. I enjoyed it again myself, but if it leaves another player with the same sour taste that Woodcraft left me, I can no longer stand by that original thumbs up.