Galileo Galilei

In the setup for Galileo Galilei, players begin by selecting their astronomer characters, such as Giordano Bruno or Johannes Kepler, which grants them unique player boards and starting components. The central board is populated with discovery cards categorized by tiers, comet tokens, university scale tiles, and public objectives. Each player receives a set of dice starting at value one, quadrant tokens used for free actions, and wooden markers placed on their star-sky boards, library shelves, and the university and reputation tracks. The telescope is placed at the bottom starting position on each player's star-sky track, and the first player is determined randomly.

The main objective of Galileo Galilei is to earn the most victory points by acting as a 17th-century astronomer. Players achieve this by observing major cosmic objects and constellations, lecturing at the university, spotting comets, writing books to build their library, and carefully managing the watchful eye of the inquisitors. Success requires optimizing actions taken through telescope movement on your star-sky board while balancing public and private objectives to maximize end-game multipliers.

A player's turn begins by moving their telescope 1 to 3 spaces upward along their star-sky board. Each space on the board features a pair of actions consisting of a fixed action and a movable action tile. Players must resolve these actions, which can include observing major objects or constellations by spending dice, gaining new dice from the supply, increasing dice values, spotting comets for future discounts, lecturing at the university to gain multipliers and rewards, or writing books for library benefits. Players may also spend quadrant tokens to take free actions such as swapping dice values or colors. The turn concludes with a cleanup phase where the resolved action tile is moved to the bottom of the track and other tiles shift up, and comet tokens are flipped or managed according to rules.

Scoring happens continuously throughout the game. When players successfully observe major objects or constellations, they immediately gain the points indicated on the discovery cards. Publishing books by placing them in your library also yields immediate rewards and contributes to future book-writing actions. At the end of the game, players score points based on their final positions on the university scale tiles, which multiply criteria met during the game, and for the final positions of their inquisitors on their cellar and reputation tracks, where positive placements reward points and negative placements incur penalties.

The end game of Galileo Galilei is triggered as soon as the last discovery card from the deck is either placed onto the central board or taken by a player. Once this trigger occurs, the current round is finished so that all players have an equal number of turns, followed by one final turn for each player. After this final turn, the game proceeds immediately to final end-game scoring.