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.][1] 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 ("Abhyankar's conjecture for Galois groups over curves.") **Update**: As a commenter pointed out, Harbater proved this fact for an arbitrary affine curve; the statement for the affine line was an earlier theorem of Raynaud. [1]: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~pries/Preprints/06genus1_05.pdf