Race for the Galaxy (hereafter referred to as Galaxy) is a science fiction themed empire building card game, and it makes my head hurt. Given its very simple premise it is terribly complex, and comes in a box big enough to provide each player with a cheat sheet showing all of the symbols that you need to understand to play the game. It is all very well organised and set out, and after a handful of games I am slowly beginning to decipher the symbols and what they mean.

It ought to be really straightforward, and I know gamers who took to this game like a duck to water so to speak. These same gamers have struggled with similarly involved games that have less symbols and a lot less interactivity between different cards. I don’t quite understand why, but I guess that some players just take to certain concepts easily. Given how quickly my brain incorporated the symbols in Ghost Stories for example, the same principle should apply with Galaxy.

Your objective is to score victory points by laying cards in front of you in a ‘tableau’, but in order to lay cards you have to discard a number of cards from your hand equal to the cost of the card that you play. I like using the cards as a resource, and in this game you have to make a lot of difficult decisions as to what cards to play or discard, especially as you ideally need to lay cards of a particular type to get accumulative victory points towards the end of the game.

Galaxy comes with a bunch of little victory point tokens valued in ones, fives and tens. Depending on the number of players you create a pool of victory points that you play for, and when the last victory point is taken you refill the pool with ten more, you complete the current turn and the game ends. The game can also end if any player has twelve cards in his tableau, so the game is designed to keep the playing time limited, and is only exacerbated sometimes by lots of head scratching on the players’ part.

The head scratching is largely due to the order cards that each player has. You choose one of them to play, that might let you Explore (pick up cards), Develop (lay a development card), Settle (lay a planet card), Produce (place a face down card under a planet that can produce goods) or Consume (sell a face down card under a planet and or use bonus effects that some developments and planets have on the Consume order). The Produce order comes after the Consume order in the turn sequence, so you have to plan ahead, in fact Galaxy involves a lot of planning ahead.

Developments and Planets in your tableau are generally worth victory points, and you can sell face down cards under your Planets for victory points and/or to draw cards into your hand. Some cards give you bonus victory points if you have cards of a particular type, or specific named cards, or large sets of cards, while one of the order cards can double the victory points that you gain in that particular turn. As a relative novice it can be disheartening to see other players racing ahead with twenty or more points when you can only just muster ten points.

Galaxy is incredibly well structured though, and very well balanced. If you play a Settle card for example everyone has the opportunity to lay a planet in their tableau, but as you played that particular order you also get to draw a card into your hand. All of the order cards work in this fashion, so that everything that you do has the potential to benefit the other players, but if you pick your orders in the right order you can create your empire of planets and developments much more efficiently.

There is a quick and easy way to success in Galaxy and that is to play the military strategy. A lot of the cards have red symbols, which means they either give you a military bonus or require you to already have a military bonus in order to play the card. All you have to do is start small and grow big creating a military empire, but I don’t see the point of just playing the easy strategy. I need to understand how to get my tableau producing and consuming and scoring victory points; I need to work out how to build up sets of particular cards to get the big points at the end of the game.

That is part of why I would refuse to play Galaxy at one point, it just frustrated me and not in a good way. Galaxy can be very off putting to casual gamers, but it is ideal for gamers who like puzzles, because lots of the cards in Galaxy have great synergy with each other, allowing for impressive combinations and progressive bonuses during the game. Its only real drawback is that Galaxy can feel too quick. Unless you get all of the right cards in the right order, you might still only have five cards in your tableau, and it doesn’t look like much of an empire. 

The base game doesn’t have any interaction other than you draw from a collective deck, so it is pretty much a game of speed and efficiency. The lack of conflict to a degree is a good thing for someone learning Galaxy, because you can easily show your opponents individual cards and ask them what they do and what their value is. There are a couple of expansions, one of which introduces direct conflict. Adding direct conflict would certainly be good for hindering a player that is in the lead, although in a two player game it might simply turn a loss into a thrashing.

I am slowly warming to Race for Galaxy, which is well themed with a very classic science fiction graphic style on the card art. The order cards certainly add a layer of strategy to the turn sequence, and every game is a challenge in hand management of your cards. It isn’t exactly fun or entertaining, but it is a very good game.