Race for the Galaxy Review

Race for the Galaxy - Player of Game Review
Innovation: 9/10
Mastery: 9/10
Overall 9/10

I was up at a friend's house for the 4th and we played one of my favorite games, Race for the Galaxy, which reminded me that I haven't written a review for this game yet for this blog. As you can tell by the above scores, I think of this game quite highly.

Race for the Galaxy, or "Race" as we call it, is an outstanding economic development game which is dripping with complex mechanics and heavily codified. There are few to no words on most cards besides the title. Yet all of them are fairly easy to parse once you begin to understand the symbols used on the cards. This is one thing that I really like (although when I played this game with my parents, they couldn't understand anything).

The game mechanics are fairly complex, but the simple overarching theme is that the cards in your hand are game resources in two senses of the word: they can be played from your hand to the table but they can also be used to pay the costs of playing other cards which are more relevant to your current strategy.

The other key mechanic is the turn structure system. Turns in Race are shared, meaning that no one person is the "active" player at any one time. I strongly prefer these sorts of games as it means that everyone is pretty much in the action at all times unless the group is waiting for one or two people to make their decisions for the turn. What occurs in the turn, however, is not always (and actually is quite rarely) the same. At the beginning of each turn, all players may select one phase that they wish to occur in the turn. There are five phases, with one additional subphase which occurs only for the players that take the particular subphase, meaning that in a standard three or four player game, not all of the phases will occur. Even in five player games, usually only three or four occur, and I've played quite a few games where all players take the same phase.

In addition, players who take each phase receive an advantage when that phase occurs, which incentivizes the players to think about what bonuses they need the most and not always care about the actions other players will take. Still, there are plenty of opportunities for gamesmanship, as I often rely on another player to take the settle action so I can settle a windfall world and trade away the free good.

In addition, the game is reasonably well balanced; although not every strategy is as powerful as every other, all of them are good enough to win with if you draw enough of the cards that you need to pull it off.

Race is definitely a game that makes you think on your feet. While you may have one plan at the beginning of the game, all too often you don't draw the cards you need and need to modify or even completely scrap your old strategy. While I think some people find this annoying, and think of it as being too luck based, to me it is a point of excitement.

Race for the Galaxy, in my opinion, is one of the most unique and interesting boardgames (can I call it that) out on the market today. It is a must-own for anyone that is interested in trying many different types of games, as there is very little on the market like it.

----End of Review---

One of the interesting things that has come out of my games of Race for the Galaxy with my friends is that there are some people who can't stand this game because it is entirely too luck-based. While I see some merit in their arguments, I can't help but wonder if they are simply approaching the problem in the wrong way. In my opinion, to win Race, you need to constantly re-evaluate your strategy whenever you draw new cards, as they often don't quite mesh with the plan that you had before.

One of the things that I've noticed about a few of these players is that they are for the most part Magic: the Gathering and Poker players, two games with an "out" as a central concept. In Poker or Magic, an "out" is a card that wins you the game if you can draw it, or at least keeps you in. Given their background, and although I will be the first to admit I've never actually watched them play a hand, I think that they may be overcommitting to a strategy, and not realizing opportunities which arise in the first few trades or explores in the game.

Of course, I could be totally wrong about this. Since they didn't really like the game, my experiences of playing the game with them are rather limited. Still, it is an interesting theory, and something to keep in mind in the future.

-Jon