Race for the Galaxy is a beautifully elegant resource management game set in space. Players become the governor of one of the four former colonies of Earth, with the goal of building the colony into a sucessful space empire.
Most resource management games, like Caylus or Puerto Rico, have lots of bits: In Puerto Rico you have five different colors of wooden cylinders representing different goods, brown wooden discs representing colonists, victory point chips, chips for buildings, and chips for the different farms and quarries you have in your colony. Race for the Galaxy is streamlined by comparison: You have a deck of cards and a set of victory point chips.
Here’s how the game is played: Each player has a set of seven action cards. At the start of each turn, at the same time, everyone plays one of their action cards. These action cards determine what phases will occur this turn.
There are five possible phases in a turn: Explore, Develop, Colonize, Consume, and Produce. Each player does each of the phases revealed by the action cards, but the player who played the action card for that phase gets a special bonus. So, for example, if I played an Explore card, everyone around the table gets to draw two cards from the deck and keep one, but I would get to draw three cards from the deck and keep two.
In the Develop and Colonize phases, players get to play development cards (ranging from new technologies to banking interests) and world cards respectively. These cards modify what you can do in the different phases. For example, the Research Station development card lets you keep an extra card during the Explore phase, among other things.
Each of these cards has a cost in the top-left corner; a weak card might have a one, while a strong card might have a five. To play that card, you must also discard that number of cards out of your hand. In essence, your cards are both your range of options for developments and worlds and your currency to pay for those options.
In phase four, Consume, you sell the goods that your worlds produce for either card draws or victory points, depending on the planets and developments you have in play. In phase 5, Produce, the planets that can produce new goods do so by taking the top card from the draw deck and placing it facedown on the corner of the planet card, marking its coffers as full.
That’s what I mean by elegant: The cards are used as currency, as tokens for goods, and as building options. Instead of a bunch of complex parts, you have one simple, multi-use part.
The cards are beautifully designed: The artwork is fantastic, and there is a well-developed system of symbols that make it perfectly clear what each card does, how much it costs, and how many victory points you get for playing it.
Not only is the game beautiful in both form and mechanics, it’s also fun and quick. There are lots of meaningful, difficult decisions to make throughout the game, largely as a result of using cards as currency. You find yourself having to throw away powerful cards that are too expensive and hoping that they’ll come back later when you can afford them. And since everyone gets to do all of the actions that are chosen, you can, for example, play the Develop action and hope that an opponent will play Explore so that you can afford to play your development card.
I am definitely buying this game the first chance I get.