Designed by: Tom Lehmann
Publisher: Rio Grande Games

Players: 2-4 (1-5 with expansion)

Play time: 30 minutes

Style: Card game, Civilization Building.

Race for the Galaxy is a card game really.

Outside of the over sized box and a fancy insert all you get is a set of cards and a couple cardboard counters to track points.So, no, it isn’t much of a board game as there is no board (unless you count the quick reference cards). So why have we been raving about this game? Easy, it’s the cheapest collectible card game (CCG) to get into.

Admittedly, I spent some portion of my misguided youth away from the Genesis and 64 fruitlessly playing such nerdery as AD&D and Magic: The Gathering. And part of me still loves the CCG style game, but no part of me fondly remembers the cost of collecting thousands of cards. Race for the Galaxy perfectly, and cost effectively, fills that void.

The number one reason it fills the void so well is the short play time. 30 minutes is not a huge time commitment. Waiting for friends to show up? Play a game of Race. Got time before the big game comes on? Play a game of Race. Podcasting? Play a game of Race…

…well, maybe not that last one.

Arrows? Numbers? Cryptic symbols?
It’s a nerd’s dream come true!!!

Partly to make the game concise and elegantly, but mostly to make translating it easy for the publisher, the abilities and actions of cards were condensed into a symbolic language unique to the game. At first it’s hard to understand what a card does, and that’s very intimidating. But ultimately the confusing symbols became clear cut, and one of my favorite aspects of the game.

About those symbols, they benefit you on one of six actions that can occur in a round. Each round every player secretly selects and action they want to happen and shows their selection at the same time. Only the actions chosen occur in that round. So if you have a sweet power in phase V (Production) you’d better select it yourself.

Actually, the real meat of the game comes once you understand the symbols and the basics of producing goods and burning them to make victory points. With that under your belt you can start determining what other people will choose and piggyback on their selections and hamper their growth by selecting phases that don’t help them. It still feels like solitaire-ish but there’s very deep interaction between players if you know where to look.

Remember this son: “Everyone from Alpha Centauri is a dick. Without exception”

So how does the game stay fresh? Randomness.

Usually random elements are the most frustrating elements of games (Settler’s of Catan) comes to mind. But with the exception of a few rare cases where someone drew the perfect cards to complement their strategy Race handles the randomness very well. In fact getting a random start world every game and drawing random cards is what has made putting in 20+ plays enjoyable, and will continue to make plays enjoyable for a long time to come.

If you are at all interested in getting into a complex CCG but don’t have the cash to drop on cards, consider getting Race for the Galaxy (and Dominion too, but I’ll talk about that some other time) to give yourself a fix. And don’t forget there’s an expansion out there to enhance the game and add a 5th player, with another expansion due out this year to add a 6th.Go ahead, put down the controller, and pick up some cards.

Photos from BoardGameGeek.com

We have become boardgamers.

Which is, like, at least a couplesteps above LARPers.

For me board games have been bred into me. I’m sure my DNA resembles Backgammon more than a helical. In fact, I recall fondly finding a stash of my families old dusty board games in the hallway closet as a kid. I remember my dad teaching me how to play Stratego, Backgammon and Risk. And the few memories of my grandfather that I have almost always involved teaching me Chess (which was more of a brutal beat down than “teaching”).

 Since board gaming has become all the rage again where I live I thought I’d take some time to present the cool finds that we’ve been making here in my blog. Maybe you’ll give them a chance if you’re so inclined.

Without further adieu:

Puerto Rico (2002, Andreas Seyfarth)

I picked up this game upon the recommendation of the site: BoardGameGeek (this site also had the pictures of the game I’m using here to illustrate what it looks like). Not that it’s the hot new title out there (it is almost 6 years old) but many on that site claimed that it stands the test of time. It also was very different from the other style of games that we had been playing so the combination of the two factors made it a very easy purchase.

I’ve only played one game so far but I liked what I saw in that game. After only a couple of rounds of play everyone at the table (Tony and Tom were playing) seemed to get the basic rules and we all developed our own simple strategies. Which is the sign of a deep game; our strategies were formed as very inexperienced players, yet none of them dominated and none floundered (except when Tom kept getting screwed early in the game). It seems that the game is setup up for many plays with varying strategies.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a plantation owner on the burgeoning island of Puerto Rico, you need to out ship or trade your rivals to get the most amount of goods back to the Old World. In gameplay elements: you need to collect and manage colonists, plantations, buildings to create goods (of five different types) to ship away for victory points. The total amount of victory points you have the game end is your score, and, clearly, the person with the most wins the game.

Here’s the basic setup of the game to give you an idea of the components you get:

The main feature of the game that (at the time it was released) was incredibly innovative was the turn selection mechanic. There are 8 roles (in a 5 player game) that players choose to take different actions, choosing starts with the player who has the governor card (determined by die roll at game start) and goes around the table, until all players have a role at which point the three leftover roles get a doubloon (the game’s currency) which the next player to choose them gets, the roles are returned to the central pot and the governor cards moves to the next player in clockwise order and the turn starts again. When a role is selected all players get to take the action associated with it, but the player that selected the role gets a bonus for doing so. In effect, each round lets you take 5 actions total, one of which has a bonus since you picked it.

The roles let you build buildings or expand your plantation or get more colonists and so on. Each round is a balance of guessing what your opponents will select and determining which role advances your position relative to your opponents. The best part of the game and the most strategic is that when you select a role you must consider that everyone benefits from the choice, everyone gets the action, you have to choose when to take roles that help you the most.

Here’s what your board will look like in the middle of the game:

So we all went about making our little empires of goods. And everyone had a different strategy going. Tom started the game and took a quarry; which provides discounts to building so he immediately set out to fill his city with buildings. Jard ended up with a hybrid strategy of building and trading the most expensive good: Coffee. Tony, as when we play Settlers of Catan, went for a monopoly. In this case a sugar monopoly, or sug-opoly. I set out to maximize the goods I could send back to the Old World, focusing on three goods (corn, sugar and tobacco) and producing them in bulk. My girlfriend tried to obtain a way to make one of each good providing variety for trading and shipping.

Each strategy had clear benefits but at least for me I noticed flaws. I felt cash starved through the early game, and in the late game both my girlfriend and Tony had a cash surplus. Ultimate my girlfriend tied in victory points with me but won based on the tiebreaker of cash and goods. But the best part of the game was the varied strategies and tactics made the game very close. The total point spread was 49 for last place and 53s for first and second. A tight game indeed.

Based on the fact that I can’t wait to play again (maybe I can con people into it tonight) in the face of an overwhelming amount of video games I want to get to makes me assuredly recommend this game to anyone interested in getting a board game. If you don’t think board games are your cup of tea, then I’d recommend lighter fair. My only pre-game recommendation is to read the rulebook’s description of each building, the tiles that you get don’t have a full enough description to go by. In fact, this fact made Tom’s buy buildings till you drop strategy very difficult and confusing.

Otherwise:

I give Puerto Rico a 5-full-trading-ships out of 5…uh…not full trading ships?

 Oh, just get the game already!