• Designer: Jeffrey CCH 
• Illustrations: Samuel Horowitz and Hanna Kuik
• Publisher: Portal Games (2nd ed.)
• Players: 1-4 (solo mode + solo scenarios)
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45-60 minutes
• Played with the review copy provided by the publisher

[Second Edition reviewed, but changes between the editions are minimal and noted below.]

Are you used to playing a game once and judging it?  I am, especially when not reviewing it. Many games seem to reveal much of what they have on the first play, and the players sense that subsequent plays will be strategically and tactically similar. This is not to say they are bad.  They might scratch an itch that you always have. They might have asymmetry, special powers, and the vaunted replayability, but still not play out radically differently.

In contrast, our first play of Age of Galaxy left us feeling that we could not judge it immediately and that it would require several plays to assess fully.  I have now played at 2, 3, and 4 players, and it plays quite differently at each count. In addition, the games feel very different depending on which seven cards are in your hand.

Age of Galaxy is an empire-building/civilization game in space. It has exploration, expansion, abstracted exploitation, and the vague threat of extermination. It is a very gentle game with Euro-style conflict modelling, such as giving benefits to those with the most military strength.  It does have slight targeting because if your empire is overextended (more planets than starships to protect them), the player with the most strength might be able to take one over. As a 4x game, it is exceptionally gentle, and it is designed to encourage you invest in military to avoid falling behind, not to trash your plans and ruin your day.  

To get beyond the basics, think of Age of Galaxy as a dark chocolate truffle. We will start with the outer coating and get to the very center.

Caption: A space game has anomalies to explore and planets to colonize and develop – no surprise there. Photo: Ignacy Trzewiczek

The outer shell of Age of Galaxy is the goal of the game: getting the most victory points, just like many games. In-game scoring is based on prestige, planets colonized and developed, and relics accumulated. End-game scoring is based on your ideology and any endgame scoring cards you might have.

The next layer is how you achieve these goals, which is five rounds of four phases each.

After the production phase, each player typically takes three actions per round. These actions each use a token, so you could explore, trade, research, etc.  I appreciate that the system is worker-placement/action-selection that does not involve much intentional or unintentional blocking of other players.  Each placement can be on the main board, tech board, or planet card. 

Without going into too much detail, there are enough placement choices to follow different paths and some lesser actions might confer bonus actions in a subsequent turn. Fortunately, there are few chains with cascading actions, so AP should not be too bad.  The actions help you generate credit, productivity, and strength, which are converted into innovation, influence, and relic, which can become prestige in a variety of ways.

Here are the first three actions – note that explore means placing a token on the board while trade and research use your token elsewhere, so there are no spots for them on the main board.

The middle three actions are not that exciting unless you can use them with bonuses discussed later, but after the round, the tokens move up to those bonus cards that, if filled, give the players who placed those tokens bonus actions in the next turn.  Sadly, if they fill in the last round, there is no benefit.  You can also forgo the Manufacture, Retrieve, and Scavenge actions and place your token directly on the card and perform the action on that card. The only way you can get more tokens is if you trigger a Golden Age, which can return a few tokens to you for the next round.

The final three actions involve colonizing planets, developing your colonized planets, and nominating, which is a way to gain lots of points.

Now that we have covered the goal of the game and the actions you can take, we reach the awesome core of Age of Galaxy, the multi-use cards you start with that you can play as a bonus action. Each player starts with seven cards and can discard and redraw three before the game starts. These multi-use cards have several important features: a color/ideology and a power, along with the ability to discard them for either a one-time benefit or to colonize a planet you could not ordinarily colonize.

Every card in the 40+ card deck has one or two different game-breaking powers.
For example, ‘Every time you take the TRADE action, you may spend an innovation or a productivity to gain a prestige,’ or ‘Immediately gain a strength for every two ships you have’. In addition to these powers, the cards have one of five colors/ideologies.  In addition, they can get you a one-time benefit, the ability to colonize a planet you could not otherwise colonize.

In this case, the blue ideology has the majority, so this player will earn points from top-level technologies you have researched.


Note that here the player chose three different ideologies, so they won’t get any final ideology scoring unless they spend one of their remaining cards to declare an overriding ideology.

The powers are built around the five suits/ideologies. Ideologies are an exciting part of the game, in that they determine how part of your end-game scoring is calculated.  For example, if your majority is blue, you will score an extra victory point for each researched technology.  If your majority is green, every two relics you have will earn an extra point. If you do not have a majority, you do not score for any major ideology, so do not play three differently colored cards, as that will mean you will score none of them in the end game.

The basic game is to deal out seven cards and permit users to mulligan as many cards of those seven to draw new ones.  In the advanced version, you can draft your initial hand of seven cards. The synergies created through drafting can be wonderful, but the same is true for your opponents.

There are quite a few more minor rules that affect replayability, such as the ability to get tokens back through a Golden Age mechanism, a way to declare an ideology without getting the card bonus (but only needing one card of that color), and using cards to colonize a planet type you could not otherwise colonize, or get a one-time benefit.

Thoughts

I am excited for the trend in games where you have all the cards you will ever get before the game starts. A few other examples are Res Arcana and Etherstone.  Since all the cards have multiple features, you can start planning how you will use the cards before you take your first action.  At the same time, you need to adapt to what others are doing, so gameplay is not on rails after you create your plan.

Along with balancing strategy and tactics, the game offers a rich set of options, where you will not be taking all the actions the game offers.  I have had games where I barely colonized and developed planets, and others where that was my focus. It is exciting that the actions you take are guided by your hand of cards, but not mandated by them.

Who is it not for?

The heart of the game is the combos created by the initial hand of cards. If you do not have any interest in playing cards to make one of the actions superpowerful, you might find yourself frustrated when those who like combos start to pull away.  Age of Galaxy is definitely an engine builder. The flipside is that much of the game is determined before it even starts.  If your opponent has drafted a better combo than you have, I am not sure how easy it is to come back from that. I had one game where the other player clearly had a better combo at the end of round one of five and much of the rest of the game was them pulling further away. This leads me to think that repeat players and those who are good at combos will often win this game.

If you are less interested in hard choices where you cannot do everything you want to, you might not like Age of Galaxy because those who win have focus. In addition, a mixed pro/con is that it will take a while to get good at it. I am not sure that even after all my games of it that I could do well.

Some games with complex combos have starting hands for the first play and Age of Galaxy could have benefited from this to avoid players having a dud first game.

Art and Design

The design of Age of Galaxy was originally tiny cards with tiny type in a wonderfully small box. It was the epitome of an efficient design. If you care about box size over beauty and readability, that version might be for you.  For everyone else, The Portal edition is glorious without being overdone.

The box is quite full of chips, silkscreened starships, cards, and technology boards.  They are all bright and cheerful, unlike most space games that go for a dark blue and black look.  There are a few small color issues, such as icons not matching the color of the wooden pieces, but I expect that will be resolved in the future and does not affect playability at all.

The technology boards are double-layered without any warp, and they enable you to put tokens to mark the technologies you have researched without having them move or slide off the spot.

The player aids are helpful and include most of the questions players had.  Player aids are critical to this game because it is icon-heavy.  There are 17 core icons and then cases where there are sentences that can have three or four icons in a sentence on the multi-use cards.

Should you upgrade from the first edition?

Age of Galaxy is an excellent game, and the second edition improves it with very few rules changes, namely the end-game scoring for the red ideology (now 1 point for each conquered planet and one point for every two strength). The text, colors, and UI of the second edition make it the full package of a great game and a great presentation.  I am so glad Portal gave it the Portal treatment.

There are substantial new solo missions that use one side of one page and another side of another to make a two-page guide. I did not play these, but expect there will be other reviews of the game from a solo perspective.

Final Thoughts

I love many things about this game. The richness of the decisions, the need to track who is leading and why, and the variety of the multi-use cards. It is a surprisingly thinky middle-length game. If you enjoy tight economies and can handle icons and combos, it is a wonderful challenge that rewards repeated play. 

Comments from other Opinionated Gamers:

Dan B. (1 play): There are a number of interesting things going on here, and I want to like it.However, I have some issues with it. The card drafting is the main problem; Jonathan mentions the possibility of someone getting a very strong combo, which definitely would be an issue. I am inclined to think that is going to happen rarely because of another issue, namely that the fact you use the cards in your tableau for three things – powers, ideology, and which kinds of planets you can occupy – means that you may have to make bad choices in one area to get something reasonable in another (e.g. only being able to occupy one type of planet is very bad).

Now, this probably actually sounds good on the face of it – having to balance competing priorities is usually a fine thing in a game. However, the fact that you’re only getting seven cards and then only using three of them for these important things (the others can be burned for small one-time benefits) means that the game is front-loaded with a lot of randomness. I have no problem with this in general if the game is short enough, and if Age of Galaxy came in at the box’s stated play time I would probably like it quite a bit. Our three-player game took a lot longer – long enough that I am very skeptical that the box time could be achieved unless all the players have played the game many times. I’d be willing to try the game again to see if our game was anomalously slow, but if not then I would definitely avoid playing a third time.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! 
• I like it.  Jonathan
• Neutral. Dan B.
• Not for me…