Indeed, you can get whatever genus you want even with a fixed Galois group G, so long as its order is divisible by p: this is a result of Pries: .pdf here.
In fact, Pries has lots of papers about exactly what can happen; looking at her papers and the ones cited therein should give you a pretty thorough picture.
We don't know the Galois group of the affine line, but we do know which finite groups occur as its quotients; this is a result of Harbater from 1994 ("Abhyaankar's conjecture for Galois groups over curves.")