Race for the Galaxy is Going Good

The first time I played Race for the Galaxy, it was at a friend's house. He completely sideswiped us with it, we had no idea what was happening, and, IIRC, we all lost. I tried to do a military build because those are usually the simplest.

Poor, silly VanVelding.

Since that night, I was intrigued; had we been hustled? Was this game as terrible as it seemed? I wasn't intrigued enough to actually buy the fucking thing. Gods no. I was just curious.

Until I saw it on Steam. I finally got to play it and I kinda didn't like it. It didn't "taste good"? It just felt bad. I like my games simple and elegant with 'vanilla' game pieces that can have additional complexity later. 

Race for the Galaxy is elegant in that it only consists of cards and a set number of victory points. It is otherwise inelegant, with icons that don't inform, but remind. About half of the icons in the deck inform you of something on their own. The rest you have to read in the manual and then use the card to remind you. 

What does that ability do?

And yet, I'm playing the hell out of it. You can't enter a game with a strategy; you pick one of two cards to start with and chose four cards to keep from your starting hand. You pull a set of cards you start with and improvise the rest. 

After a few games, you know what's in the deck and what's already passed, but you never know what's coming. Seeing as how you share a deck with your enemy, they have cards in their hand you simply can't account for. 

But you don't get to keep those cards in your hand. Not all of them, anyway, playing cards requires you to pitch cards. It's an elegant system I took to after getting over my inability to let certain cards go. The payment system makes you evaluate card worth.

The core of play is selecting which of the game's five (well four and two halves) phases you're going to play. Not every turn has every phase. You can choose to draw and if your opponent chooses to play planets, you can draw and play a planet that turn. If you wanted to play a development, you're SOL. 

So you have to choose which one action is most important to you and anticipate the action your opponent(s) will take. If your opponent is going deep in the production/consumption cycle, you may not need to worry about making sure you have a production phase. Playing a productive world into an opponent's production phase feels good every time.

Some of that is inside baseball, but bear with me.

Phase I is draw. Phase II is development placement. Phase III is planet placement. Phase IV-A is Consumption-Selling, Phase IV-B is Consumption-Victory Points and Phase VI is production. There are official names for these, but I'm not using them. 

When you choose a phase, everyone gets that phase, but you get a little bonus. For example, in the draw phase, each player draws 2 and keeps 1. If you chose the draw phase, you can opt to draw 3 and keep 2 (you can also draw 6 and keep 1).

The development and planet placement phases let you play cards of that type. They do subtly different things. Developments generally help you play planets or other developments and the high-level developments often give you victory points for each of a certain type of card you have. Those endgame development cards can be de facto victory conditions you have to pay for. The bonus for choosing the development phase is that your developments are one point cheaper.

Planet placement phase is probably the most important. Almost any play style is valid with the right cards, but most revolve around planets. Or should I say "orbit"? 

Planets produce resources and usually have abilities which let you use resources to draw cards or score victory points. Planets and developments both have point values which means that you can win just by playing more points worth of cards quicker than everyone else.

Let me put an exploration of the phases in hold while I talk about winning. It's a point-based game and most points are gained either by having cards in play that are worth victory points or by generating victory points. But the game doesn't end until someone has 12 permanents or when all 24 victory points are removed from the victory pool (if more than 24 are generated, players will still get their VP, but it's tallied without using the VP).

The Consumption phase has two different versions. The one you choose is related to the bonus you get. If you chose Selling (again, it has an official name, but I don't care), you remove a resource card from one of your planets and draw cards depending on its type (2-5 cards). If you chose Victory Points, you score double VP for the last part of the Consumption phase.

Everyone in the consumption phase then checks for consumption abilities of planets they own. They then have to use all of their consumption abilities to consume resources until they run out of resources or have used all of their consumption abilities once. Consumption abilities can turn resources into cards or victory points. If you chose to score double victory points as your turn action, you double those victory points. This can be very powerful.

Finally, there the production phase, where a resource is placed on each production world (worlds can't have more than one resource on them), and players who chose to produced get to put a resource card on any windfall worlds they own with no resource on them.

Windfall worlds are worlds which give you one resource when they enter play, but don't usually produce a resource on the production phase.

The first strategy is to draw cards, play production worlds, produce resources, sell resources to play more worlds, then produce and consume double VP until you win from a combination of card VP and generated VP.

In reality, you get to the "and" of that sentence before your opponent wins. The strategies are diverse. With the right opening hand, you can drop cheap planets, draw cards off of them, play additional cheap planets, do a produce/sell cycle, drop an endgame development, then squeeze out a consume-VP or hefty planet to end the game before your opponent can close the gap. 

Every game is different, based on the opportunities you get from your cards and how rapidly your opponent is developing. 

That's before you get into the military style, which uses a military score that allows you to buy planets for free provided they're military worlds with a cost of less than your military score. They're rarer, but with a few good plays, you can really lay down planets every turn until you close a game out quickly.

This chat doesn't really do justice to Race for the Galaxy. It is a bad taste, but it's definitely an acquired one.