Race for the Galaxy Review

In Race for the Galaxy players simultaneously choose from the available actions each turn: Explore, Develop, Settle, Consume, and Produce. I’ll oversimplify each below:

Explore: Players draw cards, keeping at least one, discarding others.

Develop: Players develop a technology by playing a development card from their hand.

​Settle: Players settle a new world card from their hand.

Consume: Players consume their goods to gain cards or VPs.

Produce: Players produce goods on their worlds.​

Each action that is chosen on a given turn is available to every player. The player who chose the action gains an added bonus on that action, such as being able to keep an additional card during Explore or paying less to play a development card during Develop. If multiple players select the same action, the action only occurs once but all players who chose it get the bonus. Much of the risk/reward of Race for the Galaxy is considering which actions your opponents might take so you don’t have to. It is never smart to assume they will take a specific action, if you need one, take it, but if choosing between two needed actions, it is a minor thrill to see that an opponent picked the one you didn’t.

Like many card games, and often board games in general, this one is fairly easy to explain but almost overwhelmingly complex in practice to a new player. Race for the Galaxy is extremely open-ended as to how a player can earn VPs which means it comes with a steep strategic learning curve for new players. The decisions are numerous. There are worlds you can pay for by discarding cards from your hand and military worlds that you pay for only using existing Military power from your empire, but don’t cost any cards. Neither is the “right” answer, both being practical paths to VPs, but it is an example of a decision players are forced to make every game. You get to play twelve cards total, at most, over the course of a game, so choose wisely. Or maybe you want to play them as quick as possible to trigger the game ending before your opponent can get a strong engine going? The possibilities are vast.

Having skimmed over the complexity of the strategic decision making, I should point out that this is clearly a big reason for the game’s popularity. There is a ton of depth when there are so many paths to victory. Add in five quality expansions and there is potential for this Race for the Galaxy app to turn into one of the best out there.

Barrier to Entry

Race for the Galaxy app includes a rules section and a series of tutorials. Advice up front from somebody coming into this game having never played: read the rules section first. It is well laid out with enough text to get the point across, but not be overbearing, and visuals from the game to illustrate the rules. It’s exactly what you’d want, it does a good job of setting up the basics of the game and will only take a few minutes to read.

If you jump straight into the tutorials, as I did, you will likely leave confused. There are three tutorials, each roughly ten minutes in length if you are new and reading everything three times trying to understand like I did. The first tutorial gives you a very basic overview of how to perform some game actions, but doesn’t explain any of the reason you might want to perform them. The second is along the same lines. The third is more general and closer to a real game, but still won’t leave you totally sure of what you’re supposed to do. I finished the tutorials knowing how to do everything, but not why I would want to do anything.

It took a few games vs the AI to start to understand what an actual strategy in this game might look like. A few more after that and I was comfortable enough to think I knew what I was doing. I didn’t, of course, but the illusion was there.  Part of the learning curve here is that RFTG is heavily reliant on iconography. The app does a good job of providing text explanations for the iconography which is very necessary for new players.

Overall, I feel like the tutorials could have been a little more in depth, I felt completely lost starting a new game after going through all three tutorials. Reading the rules later helped, but I feel the tutorials should have offered a little more direction.

Look and Feel

The game looks great. Temple Gate Games did a fantastic job creating a good looking, usable version of this game that can be played on a cell phone. There is a lot going on at any given moment in a game of Race for the Galaxy. The app makes all of this information easy to find. They add minor visual flairs such as glowing cards which are available to choose, a small thing that makes the visuals stand out.  The game offers the option to speed up, or eliminate the card animations.  Experienced players will appreciate this as it can vastly reduce playing time for offline games.

As mentioned earlier, this game is steeped in iconography. This app does as good as could be hoped in making such a large number of small icons easily seen to the user. Once you understand the layout you can easily check all of the pertinent information you could want. Depending on your screen size you may find yourself zooming in much more often than others, but that it’s even an option to not need to zoom in is an impressive feat.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer can be played two separate modes: Custom and Quick Play. A complete aside that isn’t the fault of Race for the Galaxy or Temple Gate Games, but I wish developers would standardize on what “Quick Play” means. In this case, it means opening up a game to be joined by anybody who chooses to. Custom means a game where you invite specific friends (via a “Friend Code”) to play your game, you can invite cross platform friends. Other than the people playing, the options are the same. You can choose which expansions to use, which features of those expansions to use, and the timeout length.  Games can have a 30 minute, one week, or four week timeout.  30 minutes acts as a real-time game while the other two provide longer asynchronous options.

On the negative side, an online leader board would be perfect for this game, but is nowhere to be found.  The lobby is always full and it is easy to have a handful of games going at once, it would be great to see how my skills stacked up against the online player base, even if I suspect I am near the bottom.

Single Player

The single player mode consists only of basic games versus AI. The AI comes in three levels: Easy, Medium, and Hard. The Easy AI is extremely easy. I was winning games when I had very little clue what I was doing. Medium requires a strategy to win, and often, especially when playing against more than one AI, I will still lose to a Medium Bot. The Hard AI was trained on a neural network, which is promising for it maintaining its difficulty even against advanced players.   For more details on that, check out this site which started as a pet project and turned into a great experiment in board game AI. I’m not a good barometer for this as a relatively inexperienced player, but I can vouch for the difficulty of Hard Bot for a newbie. I actually managed to snare my first win versus Hard Bot right before I finished this review (see the screenshot for proof!). It came down to a tiebreaker, but I’ll take it. I’m still learning the strategies, but it is great to know there is a challenging AI option waiting as my game knowledge improves.

You can play versus the AI using any of your expansions. I have no better place to mention this, so the two player game (vs AI and online) have the option to use “2 player experienced” mode. This allows both players to select two options at the beginning of the turn instead of one.

Single player is functional, especially if the Hard AI actually remains hard against experienced players, but is also bare bones. It feels like there as room for a campaign mode of some sorts although that certainly falls under “nice to have” and not a necessity. There is not an option for local pass and play which feels like another missed opportunity to add a little something extra to the app.

What Else?

Race for the Galaxy currently offers the first three board game expansions as in-app purchases, and there are plans to bring the remaining into the app. The Gathering Storm adds more of the same Race goodness and introduces a goal system which rewards players for either being the first to achieve a goal or getting the most of something to win the goal. Players who earn goals are rewarded with VPs and chasing these goals can shape the outcome of games.

Rebel vs. Imperium also adds more options for basic cards and introduces its own new gameplay mechanics: takeover. This was introduced to increase interaction between opponents by allowing players to use their military power to attack each other to take over worlds. Both the goals and takeover mechanics can be toggled on and off independent of choosing to use the other cards included in the expansions. That is a bit of a confusing sentence, but it means if you want to use the extra cards from The Gathering Storm but not use the goals system, you can do that.  Brink of War was recently added as the third expansion.

Race is loaded with detailed stat keeping that many players will really enjoy.  It keeps your max and average scores across dozens of different categories.  Want to know the most points you've ever scored playing the Galactic Federation development in three player games which used the The Gathering Storm expansion?  The app's got you covered (it's 11 for me, by the way).  

The Wrap Up

Race for the Galaxy was a polished app from the start and kudos to Temple Gates for working long after that to continue improving the user experience.  The game delivers a very smooth experience, all of the visuals work well and do an amazing job of showing the player everything they need to know at all times.  The game itself is incredibly deep, offering a wide open game each time you start anew.  The paths to victory are numerous and adding in some excellent expansions only increases the depth.  

The downside here is that the app is quite bare bones, albeit a fantastic bare bones implementation. Lack of multiplayer leader boards and a campaign mode are the biggest omissions. These don’t detract from what is in the game, which is a fantastic port of a deep game.  This game does what, I think, every board game app should strive for;  it allows you to play a deep, strategic game against really tough AI in a fraction of the time it would take to play the physical version.  Add on top of that the best online performance we've seen from an app (trust me, the load times are exquisite and will make you loathe so many of your other apps with online play) , and you end up with what is simply one of the best digital board game adaptations in existence.