A Dice Improvement

The board game Race for the Galaxy has spawned plenty of expansions and spin-off (including one I wrote about not so long ago). This is fairly common for any hit game. But it's not so common for one of the follow-ups to improve upon the original. Yet that's just what I think happened with the dice off-shoot, Roll for the Galaxy.

Like Race for the Galaxy, Roll for the Galaxy sees each player managing an interplanetary empire: adding planets and technology to expand it, producing goods then converting them to money or victory points, and looking for potent combos along the way. Both games make reading your opponents and anticipating their choices an important element of the gameplay. But I think Roll for the Galaxy makes all of these elements more satisfying in every way.

Each round is divided into five phases -- but some of these phases get skipped over. Each player secretly chooses the one phase they want to make happen, and then everybody acts in it. By looking over at what your opponents' empires look like, you can anticipate what they might pick. If you know someone else is going to trigger a phase, then it's not on you to pick it -- it'll happen either way. Meanwhile, if you plan for the coming round knowing you're going to trigger a phase no one else is planning for, that's a big advantage for you.

Race for the Galaxy does all that with card selection: select the card for the phase you want, and you also get a bonus for yourself when acting in that phase. Roll for the Galaxy is more mysterious. You first roll your pool of dice behind a secret screen, with the various symbols that come up identifying the number of times you can take an action in each of the round's five phases. One of those dice, you select to activate one phase; and there's no inherent advantage in being the player to choose it. As long as someone picks a phase, every symbol you rolled for it can be used.

But the array of possibilities is so much more dynamic this way. You might be able to intuit what an opponent wants to do this round... but did they roll the symbols that will let them do that? You rolled a bunch of a symbol you weren't quite planning on... so do you use some of the game's costly mechanisms to convert those rolls, or do you go with the flow and get more bang for your buck? You rolled a diverse spread of symbols, and you'll get to do it all as long as somebody out there activates every phase... so which one phase do you pick, and which others do you count on your opponents to pick?

Race for the Galaxy had its appeal, but it also always felt to me a bit like tandem solitaire, with each player not too deeply invested in what the others were doing. (I also wasn't the biggest fan of its "currency" system, paying the cost to play a card by discarding other cards from your hand.) Roll for the Galaxy feels more interactive to me. And even though you're at the whim of dice, I feel like the it's rarely the game's systems that give you a "feel-bad" moment -- it's your own mistaken guesswork about what your opponents would do.

There are arguably more different planets and developments (tiles in this game, rather than cards as in the original) than are absolutely necessary. The diversity is great for replayability, no doubt, though it can still sometimes give you that feeling of not quite understanding what your opponents are doing, nudging you slightly back toward that multiple solitaire. The game also plays much better digitally than in person; I've had the chance to do both in the Age of COVID, and the automation of Board Game Arena makes playing a breeze, where dealing with the quite-tiny dice of the physical edition is a little tedious at times. Still, I find it all a big improvement on the original Race for the Galaxy.

I haven't yet played Roll for the Galaxy as much as I played Race for the Galaxy back in the day -- I mean, that game was everywhere for a while. And yet I already feel like I'd never likely want to play Race for the Galaxy again if a copy of Roll for the Galaxy is available instead. It's a very clever distillation of the first game's ideas into a more concentrated experience. I give it a B+.