I like Galaxy Trucker quite a bit. It has two very different halves:

1. Everyone grabs tiles and builds a spaceship. Not turn-based, just taking tiles and placing them as fast as you can.

2. We fly our ships through space, with cards telling us what happens. Things like, a meteor storm comes from the left, where a better-built (or luckier) ship is better able to resist them.

The first half is silly and fun, and pretty different from other games I've played. The second half takes too long and isn't very interesting, even with the "rough roads" cards. There's an expansion that just came out (rules) but it doesn't look like it fixes this.

Instead, I want a completely new second half. Either something with good momentum that adds depth to the first half, or something simple and short that gets out of the way so you can play more first half.

Here's a non-playtested version of the latter:

• There are five categories: ship speed, open connectors, crew size, laser count, shield coverage.

• You get one point for coming in first in a category, two for second, etc.

• Category order is randomized and you each decide independently whether to use batteries.

• Fewest points wins.

I think this is probably not the right direction to take the game: there are lots of things you could do with these ships. Searching "galaxy trucker alternate ending" doesn't turn anything up, but if someone wanted to put something together I'd be very excited to try it. In the meantime, I think I probably would prefer my boring-but-quick counting version of the second half to the real one.