Race for the Galaxy: The Deal

HI! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table, and this is Race for the Galaxy, a tableau-building, role-taking sci fi game for 2-4 players. Here’s the deal.

In Race for the Galaxy, you’re trying to build the most powerful space empire. There’s a tidy draw pile on the table, and a messy discard pile. You have a hand full of cards, and you pay to build these cards out in front of you, in a tableau.

You buy the cards in you tableau WITH your other cards.

Many of the cards you build are worth victory points. Some cards produce resources for you, which you can sell for more cards, or for victory points. A few of the cards are meta-cards, that earn you points for having certain cards in your tableau.

There are five phases in the game, each one marked by a Roman Numeral.

Each player gets an identical deck of phase cards.These are separate from the cards you’re trying to build out in front of you in your tableau. At the beginning of a round, everybody secretly chooses one of these five phases, and when you’re all ready, everyone slaps their chosen phase down at the same time.

So if one or more players choose Phase 1: Explore, all players get to explore. But the players who chose the Explore phase get a bonus perk for picking it.

Likewise for any other phase that was chosen: everyone gets to perform the action, but the picker gets a perk!

When a player builds a 12th card or takes the last Victory point chip, that triggers the end of the game and you count up all the points to see who’s won.

Well, does it sound interesting? If you want to learn more about the rules of the game, click the link at the end of this video or in the description below to watch my complete How to Play video, which includes the overview segment you just watched. And if you like what i’m doing, click the badge to subscribe, and the bell to get notifications. And now, we dance!