| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2-4 |
| ⏳ | Time: 30-60 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 12+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Action Selection, Tableau Building |
It’s a race…FOR THE GALAXY!
We’re still fairly new to modern gaming, having only started in the past six or so years. It means we’ve played plenty of great newer games, but every so often we find we’ve missed a classic.
Race for the Galaxy is one of those we’ve not played until recently. It’s a card game where you’re trying to build up a civilisation in space. You get to colonise worlds, produce and trade goods, and even hold a space disco!
It’s got a really clever way of working out what actions can be taken each turn. Each player has seven cards, each showing an action, and you secretly pick the one you want to take that round. Once revealed, every player gets to do their own action plus the ones selected by the other players, if they want.
While this means you can often do multiple things per turn, it doesn’t slow the game down as everyone can do an action at the same time. The game ends once someone adds a twelfth card to their tableau, or when all of the victory point chips are taken, and this can come about surprisingly quickly.
With such limited space and time to do things, you have to be clever about it. Some cards offer special abilities, but these only trigger in certain conditions so it makes sense to try and find synergies between the cards you play rather than just playing whatever you can afford.
In our last game I made the mistake of focusing on high value cards just because that’s what I’d picked up, and I thought it would be enough to get me the win. Instead, I ended up losing to Steph by a single point, because she’d made the smarter choices without me noticing!
While the game itself is quite easy once you’ve got the hang of it, it can be a bit tough to learn due to the amount of iconography involved. There are player aids that help, but we often found ourselves stopping to look things up, especially in early games.
We really enjoy Race for the Galaxy. It gives you lots of interesting choices, and no two games have played the same. There are lots of different paths you can take to victory and loads of replayability. It really is proof that older games are still worth taking a look at!
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Rio Grande Games website!
The copy of Race for the Galaxy used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by Rio Grande Games
The Boardgame Detective 