Race for the Galaxy - Does anything else matter when every choice feels great?
What a fine game! Last month, my wife and I borrowed Race for the Galaxy from a coworker, and since then I have not stopped thinking about it. At the end of every game, I sit back and say, “Wow I really love this game.”
A large part of why I enjoy Race for the Galaxy so much is the gameplay flow. It plays smooth and fast thanks to constant movement through the shared deck and quick point accumulation. The game is also rich with choices at every turn because cards are multipurpose and carry rewarding abilities. Ugh, and it is such a joy! Poring over a new card and gleefully chuckling at the strategic options is an experience that I love and wish could be replicated in so many other games—in Race for the Galaxy, every choice feels great.
On the other hand, there is a good deal about Race for the Galaxy that I find less than satisfactory: its theme, art, and graphic design.
Theme and Art
I did not love Race for the Galaxy at first sight. I passed it over initially thinking, Oh great, yet another science-fiction 4x strategy game with mediocre art and obscure graphic design. As much as I love science fiction, I have grown bored with tropes like space colonization which is often just an anthropocentric conquer and plunder fantasy. What about exploring other ideas like astrobiology, singularity, or parallel universes? Race for the Galaxy seemed to me like so many sci-fi games I had played about expansionism and not much else.
Well, I wasn’t wrong exactly:
There is little to no narrative wrapper to Race for the Galaxy’s theme, except what can be gleaned from the rule book’s intro blurb, card titles and imagery (something about Rebels and an Imperium?). Some would say this leaves room for interpretation, but it just leaves me cold. As a player, I enjoy feeling invested in a story, avatar, or even an abstract concept that feels unique and integral to the gameplay. In Race for the Galaxy, the theme does stick well to the mechanics, but space colonization could easily have been replaced by medieval farming, building railways, or zombie hordes—the game is a classic engine-building game about buying stuff, grabbing resources, and converting them into points.
My main beef here is that I wish the game expressed its theme differently, with the card artwork being a missed opportunity. Chalk it up to personal taste—many of Race for the Galaxy’s cards look forgettable and dated to me. The dullness stems from the overwhelmingly dark values, brown-gray-black color palette, and monotonous shape language of the artwork:
It’s hard to see much of anything in many of Race for the Galaxy’s cards. That colony looks awfully similar to that one rebel base, which also kinda reminds me of that distant abandoned world…
The art style also feels dated due to all the washed-out and grainy textures. This may be a throwback to vintage science-fiction art of the 1960s-70s, but even that era was full of color and character. Still, there are some gems. My favorite cards are the most eccentric and colorful, where the artists got a little goofy or simply let the environments breathe a bit:
Of course, theme is entirely subjective. I know that loads of people love Race for the Galaxy’s art and theme and I do not begrudge them this! Different strokes for different folks, after all.
Graphic Design
Less subjective is the efficacy of Race for the Galaxy’s graphic design: although serviceable in the end, the iconography is obtuse and complicates the onboarding process for new players. I would go so far as to say that the game loses a large potential audience, including colorblind players, due to cognitive overload.
This is directly related to what I mentioned earlier, about how great it was that cards are multipurpose. Unfortunately, because the cards are doing all the work, they hold a large amount of information. The iconography attempts to minimize the amount of text displayed on the card, but when the card’s abilities become quite complex, you end up with a mystical stack of symbols that still need accompanying text anyway.
Look at the Contact Specialist card. What the heck. There’s no reason why the symbols even need to exist here, when there is a perfectly serviceable explanation written below! Phew!
When my wife and I play Race for the Galaxy, we keep the rulebook out between us, opened to the section with symbols glossary. It helps a lot, but that should not be an optimal way of playing a game. (I have seen that the dice game version, Roll for the Galaxy solves a lot of these iconography problems by simply spelling it out, which is great!)
A more serious problem is the use of color coding in this game. For colorblind players, Race for the Galaxy’s reliance on color to identify card types and abilities is a major obstacle. There are numerous BGG threads on this with colorblind-friendly hacks, but in many of them, players still mention being unable to bring Race for the Galaxy as often as they’d like because of how difficult it is to parse. Together with the iconography, this is one of the reasons why onboarding is rough in this game. Race for the Galaxy is such a great game that many will sadly never play due to its high barriers to entry and user accessibility issues.
Conclusion
Even with the unsatisfactory qualities I mentioned, Race for the Galaxy is still one hell of a good game. The mechanics and flow are solid, and hell, even its art many would say they are fond of. As for the color coding issues, the good news is that Rio Grande Games is releasing a 2nd edition of Race for the Galaxy this fall that claims to fix these problems. Huzzah to designers and publishers listening to their fans! :)
For my wife and I, both fairly young in our board gaming hobby, we will continue to play this wonderful game and enjoy all it has to offer.