Rio Grande Games Race for the Galaxy

Don't get me started... this game is a masterpiece of engineering (probably the best game of it's kind for guys), but it's hard to get enough people that know how to play it (or are ambitious enough to learn it) in the same room. It is probably the hardest game to teach but it really depends on who you are teaching... the 2 extremes in teachability are as follows: one of my buddies learned it in about 5-10 minutes (and actually beat me his first time playing!), but my sister still didn't really get it after 2 hours because she only learns by doing which proved to be pretty tricky with this game. 45 minutes to an hour of teaching are an approximate baseline before your average Joe should be able to play this game without you around. The 30-minute tutorial online is decent, but in my opinion it misses some important details that are necessary to understand in order to play, but the instructions I thought were above average so the game at least has that going for it. The problem with trying to learn or teach this game is you can't really understand the game cards until you understand the phases, and you can't really understand the phases until you understand the cards so it requires either intelligence and/or ambition or a monitored practice game, and some beginners simply don't make it past trying to learn the game... to make the situation worse, you can't understand the strategy of it until you understand all the mechanics of it, and the mechanics are pretty extensive. With all that out of the way, Kudo's to the creator of this game! Again I'd like to reiterate that this game is an absolute masterpiece that has virtually no luck involved because the endless strategies are all so balanced, and the effectiveness of your strategy is based on how well you improvise and sacrifice based on the cards you draw There are probably a dozen different strategies just in the base game that can all be combined and adapted and improvised at will and cards are played by discarding other cards so you are constantly sacrificing decent cards and passing on development opportunities to make the most of what you have and sometimes it is painful to discard good cards for the sake of others, but it is a very fun dynamic and an extreme exercise in logic to play this game. This game is also a balance of trying to maximize your advantage and predict what others will do on a turn by turn basis, and since all players play at the same time, game play has little down time which I always appreciate in a game. My only complaint with this game apart from its difficulty to learn/teach is that I do wish this game was a little longer... "RACE" for the Galaxy really is an appropriate name. This game plays in about 30 minutes, and if you have 1/2 way intelligent friends (or at least friends that are ambitious enough to learn the game), this is probably the game for you because it is extremely replayable and diverse in result even with zero expansions. This game is a unique exercise of the brain... it is not the player that is reasoning the most that wins, but the player that is reasoning in the most sound way that generally wins, and I think this is the defining mark of any truly great strategy game. One thing that is pretty noteworthy about this game is that I don't know a single girl that enjoys this game but I'm sure they are out there... just be aware that this is just about the least co-ed friendly game on the market 2nd maybe to Girl Talk. For whatever reason girls don't seem to like this one. For co-ed, consider games like Dominion (extremely good), 7-Wonders, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, and I'll begrudgingly put Settlers of Catan on the list based more on popularity than merit.

Got this as a present for a friend, and I haven't opened it yet. I sincerily hope the language is not in German, like it was with pocket hive. Will get back to you once we have tested it. EDIT ok thank god everything was in english. So we tried to play it, together with the expansion of the 5th player. Setup was a bit of a mystery, but after round 3 or so it clicked with everybody and we got an idea how to play the basic stuff. A bit before the end all cards were clear. We think it's awesome, and we have the strong suspicion we will enjoy this the coming 20 years. It's difficult to write a good manual for this game, because it's a lot of facets, and the videos on youtube are pretty worthless in this regard. I watched them doubting whether or not my friend would like it. He totally loved it, because you can tweak this use that card in such a fashion to give a bonus on that action etc. In essence it's a gamers' game, not your gateway game to introduce to non gaming friends/family. It's said that it is derived from Puerto Rico, but in a sense that the automobile is derived from horse and cart. I'll try to explain it: It has 5 fixed phases round after round after round. Players choose in secret a phase 1 to 5. Someone calls "1" if anyone has chosen phase 1 he says "yes!" and flicks his action 1 card open. If nobody says anything, someone says "2", and phase 1 does NOT happen. This in some way is vaguely reminiscent of PR but works much differently. If 2+ players chose the same phase, they all get the bonus that is written on their action card. Play ends if 12th "thing" is bought by any player. For replayability each player has an imaginary tableau of 6x2 card spaces in front of him, and is randomly dealt 1 of 9 starting world cards that counts as a card in your tableau (so you need 11 more). So every time you start differently. Every time a phase "happens", you look all your cards on your tableau, look at that phase on them. Some have a bonus, like extra card, more resources extra victory point etc. Your cards in your hand consist of planets (circle) or units (square/diamond). if phase 2 happens, you can pay for building a unit, if phase 3 happens you can pay for building a planet. Planets generate stuff. it is represented by 1 card hidden side up placed on the planet. the color of the planet determines the good, like 2 for blue 3 for brown planets etc. In phase 4 you remove these and get the amount in the form of cards you can put in your hand. Perhaps some cards already laid in front of you give extras. In phase 5 planets produce goods again. That's it, basically. There were some things not so clear to us: do you get to reuse your chosen actions freely each round, or do you have to give them up in some way? If reuse, why are there then duplicate action cards. Anyway for gamers I can really recommend it. Especially women like it, because the conflict is very low and indirect, and you have to keep an eye on everything and female gamers tend to totally want to optimize order of cards played and stuff. Also I highly recommend playing the gathering storm from the start. The whole game took us 3 hours at most to completion, but that was the first time. It should go faster because we had to look up everything. With the gathering storm you can play on your own, and if you own an ipad you can play online and vs computer AI. Cards are very beautiful, but flimsy. It is of course a very old game, but it should be in any gamer's collection. Gamers anno 2017 don't play this anymore (they likely played it 100+ times) but that shouldn't deter you. Do steer clear from roll for the galaxy, it's bad twin game, for the reason of the silly dice beakers and the silly fact that phases are blocked if 2+ players choose the same action. Highly recommend.

Juego tremendo, con el que siempre quieres superarte, muy muy recomendable, por ponerle un pero tiene una curva de aprendizaje un poco alta, pero se encuentran manuales para ir poco a poco por internet. De nuevo, MUY MUY RECOMENDABLE.

Pagato 34 euro. Scatola un po' rovinata, ma per il resto ok. Ludicamente parlando, grande giocone! Penso mi procurerò anche l'espansione per giocare in solitario

Very interesting game, deep, strategic. The strategy is always changing based on the cards you draw. Extremely interesting turn system and money system. Only down side is the instructions are not very, well.... instructive. I had to watch a YouTube video to really be able to play. All in all, I highly recommend.