Area-majority of galactic proportions
❓Are you ready for some diplomacy and intrigue in space? 🤩 Galactic Renaissance is the newest game of Christian Martinez, the designer of Cairn (which we love) and Inis (which we’ll have to finally try after this).
The game is all about area majority, but not in a warmongering way! Instead you will build up your influence throughout the galaxy and try to outsmart your opponents while expanding the horizon for all by exploring new systems.
You interact with the game exclusively through cards. At the beginning, you have 7 standard Advisor cards and you can also hire unique and powerful Specialists in a little deck-building fashion to aid you. This is a very exciting feature of the game: choosing the right cards for your strategy is crucial. And a bonus: since you can always just play a Specialist to draw a card instead of their usual effect, your deck won’t ever get bloated! 😉
The core rules themselves are surprisingly simple: you play a card on your turn (or more if they have a play again symbol) and do its effect, then check for Disorder (which happens when there are too many player pieces on a planet), then basically the next player gets to go. 🙃
Your quintessential card is the Senator: playing it will let you score the currently active objective cards. There are 5 objectives randomly chosen each game, but only 3 of them are active at the same time, and they cycle around. To meet objectives you want to cunningly position your emissaries and place out institutes. Sometimes you want to be in the majority somewhere, or have exactly 2 pieces out. Or have an institute but a minority. So you aren’t just trying to dominate everywhere. Your other cards let you do all kinds of things: bring in new emissaries, move them around, explore new planets, hire specialists, and so on.
The game ends when someone reaches 30 points. There is an interesting detail here though: if you are above 20, but don’t reach 30, you get dropped back to 20 points. So you have to do a big combo turn and get 10 in one final turn and make it count! 🤩
