Race for the Galaxy
This is a card based game, where you are trying to settle or conquer planets before the other players do. At the start of the game you have your deck of role cards, a hand of 6 cards, that you have to choose 2 to discard, and a starting planet.
I do like that you start with more cards than you keep, allowing you to better control the starting cards you have to be useful rather than just getting 4 and being stuck with them. There is still the possibility that in those 6 cards there is nothing useful for you, but it's less likely.
There really isn't a turn order in the game either, which is interesting. At the start of each round, all the players select one of their role cards and place it face down in front of them. When everyone has done this, they are all revealed. You then resolve them all in the order of the role numbers (I through V).
For each role, there is a benefit for being the player that chose it, and if multiple players chose a role (often Explore in the first round), the role is only executed once, but all those that played it get their benefit of playing the role.
The Roles
source - Each of the 7 role cards you have access to throughout the game
- Explore - draw 2, keep 1. Has 2 different benefits depending on the card played. You can either get draw 1 more and keep 1 more, or draw 5 more, but still only keep 1.
- Develop - play a development card. The benefit is to reduce the cost by 1.
- Settle - play a planet card. The benefit is that you get to draw a new card after you settle.
- Consume - There are 2 different consume cards, 2VP (Victory Points), and trade. The benefit of the 2VP is that you get to double your VP you get from consume powers. The benefit from trade is you (and only you) can sell a resource for cards, depending on it's type. This role also enforces all resources that are able to be spent through consume actions are spent.
- Produce - all the production planets produce a resource (if they don't already have one on them). The benefit is that you can also produce a resource on a ringworld, which otherwise wouldn't produce a resource.
Probably the heart of the game is to build an engine that will produce resources that you can sell for VP, but getting to that point without getting to 12 cards in play can be difficult and it might just be easier to get 12 cards down before anyone else gets a VP engine working. The game ends either when the VP supply is empty, or someone has 12 cards in play.
Once the game ends, add up all the points from your cards in play, including any bonuses that some cards give, and the total of your VP chips. Highest score wins.
source - An unlikely set that you'd have, but an example of 8 of the different planets in the game, each showing that planet's additional powers on the card, and which role it relates to
Some of the interesting things in the game are the hand management, because cards are not just useful things to put into your tableau, but they are also your 'money', and are used as resources, so while you might know of a card you want, it could have slipped through into the discard pile when someone spent it to settle a planet, and then vanished from the new deck as a resource onto someone else's (or your...) planet. It's one of the few games I know where the discard pile is also face down, so that you don't know what's been spent or consumed.
The variable roles are good, and the idea of everyone getting to do an action, and only the person that chose that action getting a bonus from it was relatively new (or just not in many popular games) when the game was released (2007).
I tend to find that there is some balance issues between different strategies, with it being relatively easy to play a card when there is a develop/build, but it may not actually be a useful one for what you wanted to do. And then there is the player that starts with a military world, but may or may not get military cards, so is often running the Explore +5 card to churn through the deck hoping to find them. If military works, it's very good, but it is often just luck of getting the cards, while building a VP producing engine can be a lot safer method with many viable variations.
Overall, I'm not a fan of the game, but I will still play it from time to time as it has some good things in it, and it was one of the first I knew of to bring in what we now see as 'follow' actions, where one player gets a better version of the action because they chose it, but everyone else gets to still do the basic action.
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