Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is a card game in the top fifteen on boardgamegeek.com. What is board game geek, you may ask? It is a website that people, such as myself, who play large amounts of board games, visit. We aren’t talking about D&D or role-playing games, just board games like “Settlers of Catan” and “Monopoly”. Anyway, board game geek is a site where people such as myself rate the board games we play. This means that board games are criticized by thousands of people leading to the result of its score, thus determining its overall rating in the world. It is currently number 13, which is an amazing spot out of the thousands of games rated on board game geek.
Why do I like Race for the Galaxy so much? It can easily be played by two to four people, or one to six people with one of the two expansion packs. It provides a good minimum number of players, resulting in there not being so many people that it gets confusing. Another reason why it is rated so highly is because the game only takes a half hour–if you don’t have to teach someone the game–which means it’s the perfect game to play at lunch. Once everyone gets how the game play mechanics work, it gets rather competitive. In the group I play with, we have a high point’s champion, which is the person that has gotten the most victory points in a single game. The title is currently being held by Reed Charlop with 53 victory points. As the name of the game implies, it is in fact a race. You cannot affect what your neighbor is doing, there is no trading, there is no pillaging. You build and trade within your own galaxy as fast as you can possibly do that. The more you build, the more goods you produce, the more victory points you collect.
Game play: you start the game with one of five starting planets, each having different components, thus altering the way you’ve played thus far. So if you start out with the military planet you should probably play military, if you start with old earth you should play a windfall world. Right off the bat you should be playing differently from the last time you played. Along with your starting planet you get a hand of seven cards, there are two types of cards developments and planets. Now you are probably wondering, if this is a card game and there are only two types of cards how would I possibly pay to play these goods in my hand, in order to win. Well let me tell you, you pay with cards, that’s right, to pay to play things you simply discard the amount of cards the particular card you want to play is worth from your hand. So there’s no money, the only thing you have to deal with is your hand. This leads to much simpler game play, and no banker. There are six job cards which you cannot discard; the point of them is to chose an action for you to do for the round. You do everyone else’s actions, but each job card gives you a specific thing you can do during that phase that no one else can. For example, you might draw one more card and keep one more card, or get card for goods instead of victory points.
Overall this game deserves to be in the top fifteen of all board games out there, and after you get tired of playing it, you can start buying the expansion packs and playing with more people, leading to interesting topics of conversation: like, what’s up with the intergalactic lizards on some of the cards?
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