Race for the Galaxy

I don't play many pure card games. The couple I've played can be counted on fingers of one hand. It's because I didn't see much originality in their core systems - you have cards in your hand, you use them and draw new ones. The games I own usually have cards as a side system - they either give you some kind of ability to work with the pieces on the board, work as items or actions in RPGs or add an extra layer of strategy (Loyang, LNoE, Agricola) but on their own, cards don't go further that a game of Crazy 8s, as in reacting to cards in a certain pattern, or Poker, as in working on your strategy while deceiving your opponents.

And then one day I played Dominion which did something original with the concept of cards - you were building your own deck of cards with cards that were immediately useful and cards that were useless but counted as points at the end. It was like the pre-game part of Magic: the Gathering you do at home being a part of the game itself. No wonder Dominion became such a hit. It did something, as far as I know, different with the whole deck-hand concept. Race for the Galaxy, while not turning the whole deck-hand thing upside down, achieves something similar. Something refreshing that makes it a very enjoyable game.

The player plays for a faction in the galaxy that colonizes planets, develops technologies and trades goods at the pangalactic market. Each player owns two sets of cards - cards with planets and technologies that can be laid on the table, and cards with round phases. There are five phases to a round: Explore, Develop, Settle, Trade and Produce. The second set of cards is used at the start of each turn to choose which phase the player wants to go through. In the Explore phase, players collect cards from the deck, in Develop they play a technology cards from their hand, in Settle they colonize a planet (from their hand). Then in Trade phase they exchange goods from their planets for either victory points or more cards from the deck according to some rules I shall explain later, and finally in the Produce phase, planets produce new goods on them.

However, when a player chooses a phase card, he or she has an advantage in that phase but other player go through it as well. For example, if I choose to settle in a round, I can settle a planet AND then draw one card from the deck while other players can settle too but they don't get the extra card. Playing a Produce phase card will allow me not only to produce goods on all my production worlds (like everyone else) but also on one windfall, non-production world (unlike everyone else). This leads to some scheming and guessing when e.g. you want to settle a planet but you could use exchanging goods for victory points at a better rate - should you play Settle phase and be able to settle for sure or it is probable that someone else plays it, so that you can play Trade phase and both settle and get a lot of victory points? Also, this means that not all phases have to be played each turn. If nobody chooses the exploration card, nobody explores that turn.

Developing technologies and settling planets comes at a cost. There is no currency in the game, everything is handled by the cards you have in your hand. So while you draw cards to have a larger choice in planets and things to develop, you also must use them to pay (by discarding them) for the chosen items. That is the concept I find so interesting and refreshing. A planet may cost anything from 1 to 5 cards, some developments cost 6 (that's a lot). The "paying for items" thing could be done with tokens symbolizing currency but since it is streamlined like this, you hold both your finance and your future progress in your hand. And sometimes you just have to pay with that planet you have been saving for rounds to get this other technology that will help your immediate strategy. Both planets and technologies usually give you bonuses in certain phases so choosing right cards to play can help you a lot in progressing in a strategy you choose. And since you cannot discard cards you have already laid out (safe for some special cards like Drop ship that let's you settle without paying the cost by discarding it), adapting your gameplay to what cards come in your hand is crucial.

The game ends once one of the players lays out a 12th card or victory points run out. So, while it means that there are more or less 10 turns to a game, you have to watch your opponents closely. The final points are a sum of VPs and the points that your planets and development give you. Some developments give you points for different conditions met (like having specific technologies developed or a certain number or planets) so there is a lot of different approaches to winning, different strategies to focus on according to what cards you're getting.

One thing that I didn't like is that the base game lacks any sort of combat and minimizes the inter-player contact. This is somewhat fixed in later expansions but I haven't played those much yet so I'll express my opinion on them once they get under my skin a bit more.