What is your opinion on these games?
Race for the Galaxy seems to be the original game, that deserves it‘s praise. But do you still think it‘s good by today‘s standards?
How does it compare to Roll for the Galaxy? Is the latter a more approachable version but lacks depth, like more beginner friendly dice versions of other games?
But that seems to be the case for Jump Drive, right? So far, this one looks like a family friendly approach, while still being awesome enough for more experienced players.
But then there‘s New Frontiers from Lehmann, another space themed game! This one looks a bit like an easy 3.5X game, right? Looking back, do you think all of them are worth buying? If you had to choose only one, which one would it be?
Thank your for your awesome writeup, BigilusDickilus. If you had to choose one, which would you pick? They all sound awesome!
Initially I prefered Jump Drive to play with my wife and kids. The RftG design looks a little bit outdated. But your description made me reconsider, they sound great.
On the other hand New Frontiers could be the 3.5X-lite space themed game I‘m looking for (I‘m considering Gaia Project, but it doesn‘t have fleets, Eclipse, but it is too heavy, Tiny Epic Galaxies is too light, Warp‘s Edge is too expensive and not available in German, … sigh).
@squidsarefriends @BigilusDickilus
Hard to say, I would caution that the games tend to be at most 3x (exploration, expansion, exploitation) although there can be some direct conflict in race depending on the expansion used.
I might suggest jump drive as a test to see if the other games would make to your families table regularly enough. The upside would be that if it sticks a lot of the symbology is directly transferrable so it should make it a lot easier to pick up any of the others.
Eclipse is not actually that heavy once you get it going, and if you have an experienced group it flows very well. My wife is not a super crunchy gamer and she gets really into it, fwiw.
One thing to keep in mind with the Race games is that there is no map, and exploration is thematic, but it is still kind of abstract.
It’s nowhere near a 4X, barely a 1X IMHO. It’s a engine building game.
I wrote 3.5X-lite because it looks like you explore new planets and technologies, expand on them, exploit them and fight against other players…? Ofc we‘re not talking about Twilight Imperium here, that’s why I wrote „lite“ but I‘d love to see New Frontiers giving me a feel of that. I could be totally wrong, I never played it, only saw the pics on bgg.
There’s no fighting other players in New Frontiers, exploring is abstracted to drawing from a bag, exploiting is two actions and expanding is paying the relevant cost for the tech/world