Race for the galaxy was born during the development of the Puerto Rico card game (released a few years earlier, as San Juan). Tom Lehmann wanted to make something more complex out of the basic mechanisms of discarding cards for resources: a clever system that here is explored to its maximum consequences. It’s a board game that will sure leave all cardgame enthusiasts quite satisfied, specially the ones willing to spend time to understand a more complex board game.

First thing you’ll notice about Race for the Galaxy is… holy crap that’s a lot of icons. This board game is very intricate, with many variations upon the same basic actions, each one of them with its specific icon. Your first match or so will be spent just digesting the monstrous amount of information the board game throws at you. Many will be turned off by this high learning curve (you don’t even feel like you’re playing a game, at first, you’re 100% in learning mode), but you’ll be surprised at how intuitive it becomes after a small while. They’ve actually done a fine job in creating the iconography for this: the difficulty here really is the number of possibilities that you have.

Race for the Galaxy is a board gamer’s game, make no mistake. It takes about 15-20 minutes to explain the rules, the newcomer won’t be competitive and the whole match lasts about 30-40 minutes (experienced gamers may be able to take it down to 20 minutes, even). It takes effort to understand everything that’s going on, and since everything is always going on at the same time, everything’s quite a bit harder. It’s probably the most difficult-to-learn board game in my entire collection (though I have quite a few that are more brainburn than this one), so it’s definitely in last place as far as “what game should I show to this non board gamer?”.

What players do in this board game is quite simple: you make a point-machine out of the cards that you play in front of you. Points come from consuming goods and from the intrinsic value of the cards themselves (these values go from 0 to 7, with a few of them being variable, that is, depending on what other cards you have in front of you). To make this machine, what you do mostly is combo different special powers that these cards have: for an example, a card may give discounts for your next purchases, or let you draw a card every time a certain phase occurs, or make one of your abilities more powerful.

So knowledge of the deck, like in most other card games, is quite important for competent playing.. It’s definitely useful to know that the brown product is able to build a mean combo, and that the yellow product is usually very expensive. But the possible relationship between cards is quite clear, and with just a few games you’ll understand what’s going on (there aren’t any degenerate or unintuitive combinations to invent during the game)

Race for the galaxy scales wonderfully from 2 to 4, although with less opponents you’re probably more able to track down what’s going on in their games. This is probably the biggest problem of the game: lack of strong interaction. It’s an efficiency game of combo-building, and although you do take advantage of other people’s actions, this board game is essentially about what you have going on in your hand and in front of you. There’s no element that influences directly other people’s hands or what they’ve built (though the second expansion adds something like this) so what you really have to deal with is essentially what cards appear in your hand and choosing which ones you will build.

In a competitive environment, the small interaction in using the other players’ action is very important for maintaining small leads, but even so, the luck of the draw will sometimes influence the game more strongly. Like in all card games, you’re limited to what the deck gives you. In this case, the game minimizes this problem by giving a lot of options with the cards that you draw (you only need two or three useful cards per hand of ten, the rest is just what you spend to ) but still it’s clearly there, and specially painful when it happens in one of those close, nail-biting game. But, like my friend said, “the game is so fast that a rematch takes less time than your complaint”.

Production values are quite satisfactory. The theme is somewhat vague (though I hear the expansions build up on it) but apparently coherent, and the art is just fantastic. This board game is flat-out gorgeous, with unique art on almost every single one of the 100+ cards. The card stock is nice and resistant, but the card back being black and the title being prone to obsessive and continuous playing, one would be wise to buy cardsleeves to go along with this. The box is a bit too big for what is essentially a deck of cards (oversized player aid or no), but with the expansions that are coming out (two, so far), it’s probably safer to go for bigger rather than smaller.

This actually would be a second complaint of mine regarding this board game’s design, although I’m sure many fans won’t agree with me: it somehow bothers me to know that a board game was designed to have its expansions, to a point where the base game feels a little bit incomplete without them. Without the first expansion, yellow products are a bit too weak; without the second expansion, military strategy is a bit too weak. I don’t mean to say that this board game is insufficient on its own (like some Fantasy Flight Game titles explicitly are), but the overpriced expansions (20 bucks for just a few extra cards?) do improve the game’s balance a bit. In a game of combo-making, balance is essential, so it does bother me that the enthusiast is kind of forced (to the point where a willing customer can be forced) to pay again for the game..

Race for the Galaxy, in the end, is a solid design, one that clearly went through extensive playtesting and design calculations, and is worthy of all the success that it has achieved. Even though I’m not a cardgame enthusiast (take that Dominion away from my sight!) and I usually prefer games with more interaction, I appreciate the speed in which you can play this game (30 minutes tops, with experienced players) and the amount of information you have to process quickly throughout the game: it feels like you have to make more than three decisions every minute. It’s definitely not for the casual board gamer, not for kids (ages 12+, says the box, and seems correct) and not for the player that demands direct conflict in his board games. I’ve played it about 20 times, and the initial excitement (which was tremendous) has worn off already, but I still give it a solid 8/10, with a safe place in my collection.

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