Boardgame Reviews: Roll Through The Ages & Race For The Galaxy

Roll Through The Ages
on BGG

1-4 players, 25-45 minutes to play, dice-based VP collecting game. Custom dice generate food, workers, various trade goods, money and disasters. Player choices include when to reroll dice (risking disasters or trying to get what you want on the dice), where to allocate workers (building wonders or producing cities which give you more dice), whether to seek food (feeds cities and avoids penalty points), trade goods (money in another form), or money. Money and trade good help you buy 'developments' - things like leadership, irrigation, religion, empire, etc. each of which affects either how disasters impact you, how you produce extra goods or food, how you can reroll dice, or things of that sort.

Played 3 games. Kinda liked it, but got annihilated by enemy dice rolls that generated negative points. You have to watch carefully for when your enemy is going to suddenly end the game on you (having bought five developments or all wonders being built).

Speed: 4.5 out of 5 (fast playing)
Strategy: 3.75 out of 5 (there is some strategy, but you need the dice to cooperate)
Fun: 3.75 out of 5 (was fun, but sometimes the dice just hate you)

Race For The Galaxy
on the BGG

2-4 Players, 60-90 minutes to play, card based game where you are trying to build synergistic engines of productivity. Players use cards from their hand to pay to lay worlds or developments. Developments are things like 'mining robots' or 'star marines' which give benefits to your military rating or production or consumption, whereas worlds tend to offer places to sell things (cycle cards for more cards or VPs) or production centers to produce goods.

This game involves picking which phase of a turn you might want to execute - explore (cycle cards out of the deck into your hand), develop (build non-world developments), settle (settle worlds), trade + consume (cycle cards and produced resources for more cards and/or VPs), or produce (have your production worlds generate goods).

When you've played 12 cards in front of you into your 'tableau', the game ends. The game also ends if you run out of VP tokens (12 pts of VP per player in initial pool).

The point of the game is to get an engine going whereby you can perhaps produce and then sell to great advantage one of the four resources, or where you can play plenty of military planets and facilities cheaply, or where alien tech becomes 'your thing', etc. Whatever gets you to the most VPs the fastest.

The game seems to be a modified version of the popular San Juan card engine. I think it offers more options for strategy, but is also a fair bit more swingy. If you draw well, you can really get a powerful engine going fast. If not, you can somewhat affect this (one of your explore options lets you cycle deep into the deck but you can only keep one card) but it can be tough straights to be in. If you choose a strategy that's a non-starter (military build up, for instance, and you don't draw military worlds), you can languish in the lands of card starvation and VP starvation.

Played 2 games. Got trounced soundly in both. Part of it was card luck, part of it was choices that (retrospectively) would have been better differently. Jury is still out on whether I could have know at the time to go another way. Have to play it a few more times before deciding I'm not fond of it or the random factor is too big.

Speed: 3.5 out of 5 (Not bad, but later in the game you can have a lot of cards to watch)
Strategy: 3.5 out of 5 (It seems like there is strategy, but your draw cards and strategic plans can not mesh well sometimes leaving you languishing in agony)
Fun: 4 out of 5 (The game is flavourful and expansions add a fifth player and actual invade-and-capture of military planets)