The Galaxy Awaits

I received a few new board games for my birthday and Christmas this year. One has now been "in the fold" for less than two weeks. And yet, in that time, I've managed to play it a total of nine times. (Rooney: "Niiine times.") This is pretty staggering for both me and my most regular gaming group -- we don't tend to stick with the same games too often.

The game is Race for the Galaxy, a card game that's very similar to San Juan (the Puerto Rico spin-off card game), but in my view more sophisticated. Each round, all players secretly choose one of several roles. When the roles are all revealed, all players participate in the roles chosen by everyone, though each receives a special bonus in the role particularly chosen by him.

So far, I've seen several different strategies lead to victory. I've seen luck of the draw maybe decide a game or two, but strategy does win out most of the time, in which roles to choose and when, and in the picking of which cards to play and which to discard (as payment for the others).

So well liked was the game overall that a copy of its first expansion set ended up in the group's annual "white elephant" gift exchange barely a week later. (An aside here: we don't do the "white elephant" event in the most traditional sense of bringing stupid mystery gifts that no one would want; we strive to actually put cool swag in the mix.) I ended up with the expansion, and the new cards and rules have already found their way into the mix.

So, is the game really all that good as this meteoric rise to popularity in my circle of friends would indicate? Well... maybe not quite. It does have a bit of a flaw in its very low degree of interaction between the players. One person who tried it out likened it to a "multi-player solitaire," not in a necessarily disparaging way, but in a largely accurate one.

The simultaneous picking of jobs -- and allowing more than one player to choose the same job -- removes an element that some players find frustrating in Puerto Rico and San Juan. But it also removes the major element of interaction between the players that is enjoyed in those games. All that remains is a much smaller amount of trying to look in the minds of your fellow players to try and guess what jobs they'll pick (so that you won't have to, and can pick something else you also want to do). But this element is somewhat minimal in my experience. Oftentimes during play, you need the "bonus" of a specific role so much that you would pick it even if you knew for an absolute certainly that someone else will too.

The expansion I mentioned, The Gathering Storm, does assist with this in a small measure, by adding a number of tiles to the game that award bonus points to the first player to achieve a given set of conditions during the game. They put you in a bit more competition with your opponents, trying to claim the extra points first.

Some of these tiles work rather like the "Longest Road" and "Largest Army" of The Settlers of Catan, in that they can pass between players during the game. At least, in theory they do. In practice (in my games so far), I've found that the game's differing paths to victory, which are a plus in every other respect, hurt the possible interaction here. When someone claims one of these "contested" tiles, it's not all that likely that an opponent is on a similar enough route to his own victory to actually compete with that first player for the tile.

Despite the drawbacks, the game is very satisfying even if you do fully subscribe to the belief that it's "multiple solitaire." (And I don't, not completely.) It has very satisfying depth for a game that can easily be played in 30-45 minutes, and so far appears to have a high replay value even once you're familiar with all the cards.

Actually, the only truly bad thing I can say about the game, without reservation, is that I don't care for the elaborate set of symbols used on the cards. In an effort to get the "word count" down on cards (perhaps for fear of being likened to a complex trading card game), someone decided to use extensive iconography to explain what a card does. This made sense to no one I've played with during their first game, and for many it only really started to click near the conclusion of the second game.

Get over that hurdle, though, and Race to the Galaxy is a fun game I can recommend. I rate it an A-.