Teaching myself Race for the Galaxy
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Race for the Galaxy is billed as a fast-playing card game, and is immensely popular. As part of my goal to broaden the number of games and types of games I'm comfortable playing, it seemed like an excellent candidate, so I'm teaching myself.
As is usual for these sorts of "light" non-wargames, the rules are very thin, and there is a lot of iconography to learn and interpret. I'm really bad at this sort of thing. Since I'm teaching myself, I'm relying on Youtube videos to keep my motivated, and to help me understand the icons.
One good thing I'm getting out of this first solo game is a new ability to teach myself these sorts of games. The trick is similar to learning wargames, where I usually start with throwing some counters on the map to push around and fight, then work through the turn sequence.
In this case, I'm just throwing some cards down without any particular regard to how to actually play those cards. It's more about getting the fundamental mechanics under control.
For the first few turns, I did mostly Explore, Settle and Develop. The idea is get a few cards out in a tableau.
Note: This game was started on March 10, and continued over the course of a few days. In the meantime, I played a couple of games with AW, which helped me understand more about how the iconpgraphy works. We now resume our game.
Now that I see how Explore, Settle and Develop are working, it's time to work out the details for Produce and Consume.
Side note: when playing solitaire to learn how all the cards work, there is no need for simultaneous turns. I can alternate on the turns as I usually do with other card games, passing a challenge coin back and forth to indicate who's turn it is.
Notes:
- Grey planets don't produce, but they may enable production on other planets.
- Windfall worlds are always white, with the particular color in the halo.
And after a bunch more Produce and Consume, I have game.
AAR
I was hoping to be able to knock out a solo game in a couple of hours, but it doesn't seem to work that way for me. It takes me many, many hours, usually spread over a couple of days, to get a basic grip on one of these sorts of games. I think, coming from a wargaming background, that the rules are just so strange to me in comparison. That, and I expect to spend a couple of days on wargames.
Here's what the end of the game looked like:
