Mrs.Bairdy

You can just about see the top of my head in this.

Yes, strong words in the title, but Race for the Galaxy is a strong candidate. It’s a 2-4 player card game, often described as San Juan in space, that focuses on role selection while building a tableau of development cards & production worlds. It’s short, sharp & incredibly good fun, which combined with a very short playtime make it an excellent lunch time game. We’ve clocked up over 100 games in a couple of months, often getting 4 games in one day. And it’s still fun.

Short but deep with just enough randomness through the card draws that no one person always dominates, though our system designer is definitely the best player of our group. We’ve definitely suffered some group-think at times with regards to strategies & better starting positions, but we’re getting past that. We’re well past the ‘multiplayer solitare’ mud that gets slung at the game on BoardGameGeek – play this game ignoring the competition & you will lose regularly & by a large margin. You need to know who is going to produce, when a trade is likely to happen etc.

It’s such a darn elegant system of costs & bonuses, with strong obvious strategies but some nice not so obvious card combos that lead to races & furious deck searches in some games.

I  adore this game.