Game Preview: Race for the Galaxy Designer Preview #2

By Tom Lehmann
June 18, 2007

Publisher: Rio Grande Games
Designer: Tom Lehmann
Artwork: Mirko Suzuki (graphics) & Martin Hoffman and Claus Stephan (illustrations)
Players: 2-4
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
Release Date: July 2007
Price: $34.95

[This is the second of three previews that BGN will run before RftG is published.]

Like many games, Race for the Galaxy has several sources.

First was my unpublished CCG, Duel for the Stars, conceived and designed in the mid-1990s (with development assistance from Rob Watkins). In it, cards represented various things: worlds, which could be settled and developed; fleets, armies, and leaders, which could jump and fight among these worlds; and technologies (such as terraforming or cloaking) or government policies (such as free trade or deficit spending) which could be played on empires as a whole.

Some worlds were unoccupied; others had alien races on them. Some races were friendly and could be economically absorbed; others were hostile and had to be conquered, unless one employed an empathic Contact Specialist to sway them to your side.

Each empire expanded from one world and, depending on which worlds it attacked or absorbed, could join various factions: the Imperium, Rebels, Uplift Worlds, Ancient Races, or Pan-Galactic League. Each empire could also advance its technology level, enabling the empire to decipher and play artifacts (cards that conferred advantages) left by the vanished Alien Overlords.

Behind these concepts can be seen other inspirations, not only space opera, but Fred Pohl’s Heechee books and David Brin’s Uplift saga.

Duel for the Stars was an ambitious game, with many different sub-systems, but it was far too complex and long for the CCG market—experienced players still took 90 minutes to play it—so we never published it.

The second source was a prototype Puerto Rico card game that I developed.

Over breakfast at Essen, Richard Borg and I came up with our concept for a Puerto Rico card game—that cards could be used for everything: what you build, what you pay, and the goods you sell or ship. A quick inquiry to Stefan Brück, Alea’s publisher (sitting two tables away), revealed that Andreas Seyfarth, Puerto Rico’s designer, was already working on a Puerto Rico card game, so we abandoned it.

Several months later, Stefan requested that Richard and I begin work on a prototype in parallel to Andreas’ work. (Stefan was concerned about a shrinking market window for publication.) After further email discussions with Richard, I began implementing, playtesting, and revising several prototypes.

My first attempt was too close to Puerto Rico and unsatisfactory as a card game, but in successive versions I removed the Mayor, eliminated plantations (except Corn), turned the Settler into a card-selection mechanism, rescaled all costs to a 1-6 range, and instituted face-down discards (so that some cards could cycle through the deck unseen by players). I don’t know how many of these features were also invented by Andreas—simultaneous inventions do occur—or were “obvious” given Richard’s and my original idea, but I do know that I sweated over them, spending more than 400 hours over three months revising and testing a series of prototypes (in addition to my day job).

We presented the game to Stefan and, after further revision and testing, with Stefan arguing for market slips with varying prices, we agreed for him to present it to Andreas. A month later, Stefan informed us that Andreas liked our central idea but wanted to proceed by merging it with his own card set and ideas and developing the game separately. I was disappointed, but recognized that this was Andreas’ prerogative. The result was San Juan, from which both Richard and I receive a small royalty in recognition of our original concept and hard work.

For the next nine months, I concentrated on other designs. Then, I began to wonder whether some of the mechanics I had developed could be combined with the economic expansion portion of Duel for the Stars (the part players had enjoyed the most). After seeing San Juan, I thought the two games would be sufficiently dissimilar, so I approached Stefan, described my general idea, and got his consent to proceed.

Freed from Puerto Rico’s shadow, I began to make changes. First was the action/bonus system. One of my favorite games is Rommel in the Desert. I really admire the way it compresses time when both players pass to build up supplies and troops for future offensives. Rather than force a number of different actions in a round, I would allow players, if they wished, to pick the same one. This allowed me to dispense with rewards for unpopular actions and to avoid player frustration, by always having all actions available to every player.

Next, I revisited the large developments. In both Puerto Rico and San Juan, they only provide victory points, whereas I wanted them to be strategic options, as in Duel for the Stars. I made each of them unique (unlike San Juan) and gave them useful powers. This creates an incentive to build them early, balanced by their cost and the uncertainty of whether the player will actually find the cards that mesh with a given large development.

I next removed the trading house and ships. Doing this avoids a central issue in Puerto Rico, namely that calling Craftsman often benefits downstream players more than the player calling it. By placing Produce at the end of the round sequence, the player that calls Produce can always leverage the resulting goods in the following round. By making Trade a Consume bonus, not a base action, it no longer benefits other players. The other Consume bonus doubles VPs, so a player who sets up a large economy and calls Produce can score lots of VPs on the next turn.

Finally, by adding a military expansion route (and a way around it, the Contact Specialist from Duel for the Stars), combined with the variable tempo of Develop and Settle and the two different ending conditions (tableau size or VP chip exhaustion), the game is no longer about just constructing economic engines, which tends to mitigate some of the usual rich-gets-richer concerns.

These changes move Race for the Galaxy away from Puerto Rico’s essentially tactical nature (with strategic underpinnings) towards a more strategic game, closer to Duel for the Stars. The larger card set (with over 90 different cards in the base game) also gives Race for the Galaxy a more CCG-like “feel”.

Make no mistake, I consider Puerto Rico an absolutely brilliant game, but with Race for the Galaxy, unlike my Puerto Rico card game prototype, I was looking to do something quite different.

Despite its strategic elements, Race for the Galaxy is a card game and players are dependent on the cards they draw. In Race you have lots of selection (since most cards will be just spent as money), and Exploration—to try to find the cards you need—is always an option, but the players who make the best use of the cards they get—as opposed to having a rigid plan—tend to win. Enjoy!

(And now, let’s find out what captions Eric has placed on this batch of sample artwork!)

Pictures - Click the picture for a larger version
	The cover—simply stunning, and even more amazing when supersized. (And this grande image is still reduced by 50%! Jay needs to start a line of posters.)
	Hope that uniform is machine washable
	Aim toothpaste—now preventing cavities on a global scale
	Rabin, Clinton and Arafat broker a deal on peace in the Mideast Galaxy

Comments: