Race For The Galaxy - Gameplay

Gameplay

The play style of the game is similar to that of another Rio Grande game, San Juan, which is the card game version of the board game Puerto Rico. Lehmann, Race's designer, developed his own card game version of Puerto Rico at the request of the publisher. Some of its ideas were incorporated in San Juan. Later, Lehmann used those ideas to create a different game, one of space exploration and conquest rather than colonial development in the Caribbean.

Each player builds an interstellar civilization that starts with only its home world in play and a hand of cards. Players strive to have the most victory points at game end; points are gained by settling new worlds, by developing new useful attributes for their civilization, and by consuming goods produced by their civilization's worlds. Each card serves multiple purposes: cards represent the worlds and civilization "developments", cards are used as payment for playing a world or development (by sacrificing cards from a player's hand); finally face-down cards are used as tokens to represent the goods that worlds produce.

At the start of each round, all players simultaneously and secretly choose one of five phases: Explore, Develop, Settle, Consume, or Produce; phase selections are revealed simultaneously.

In the main part of the round, all players may perform a specific activity related to each of the phases that at least one player has chosen, in the order above (Explore, then Develop, then Settle, etc.). When performing the activity for a phase, a player who actually chose that phase gains a bonus (looking at extra cards during Explore, paying fewer cards to Develop, getting a bonus card after Settling, etc.). The Explore phase adds cards to a player's hand; the Develop and Settle actions let players play cards from their hand onto the table (a player's tableau); the Consume action can result in players drawing cards and taking victory point markers from a common pool; and the Produce phase creates goods that can be Consumed in a later round. Cards in one's tableau typically provide bonuses to various activities, in addition to providing victory points.

After all activities are complete, players discard down to a hand limit of 10 cards. Unusually among card games, cards discarded due to the hand limit or when paying a cost are placed face-down (in a "messy" pile to distinguish them from the draw deck), concealing information that could be used to deduce upcoming draws.

Play continues until, at the end of a round, either at least one player has 12 or more cards in their tableau, or the entire starting pool of victory point tokens has been claimed by the players. At that point, the player with the highest total of victory points from tokens and from cards in their tableau is the winner.

The principal difference in the playing sequence between Race and Puerto Rico/San Juan is that in the latter games, a given phase can only be chosen by one player each round, and the order of activities is based on player order and the phases each player picks in succession; in Race, multiple players may choose the same phase, and the order of activity execution is fixed.