First Impressions of Roll for the Galaxy

 

A glorious new age has arrived! An age of opportunity and expansion! For new technology has finally unlocked that which has been inaccessible until now: the age of dice tie in games for successful strategy card games… Actually who am I kidding, they’ve been doing this forever…

Roll for the Galaxy, whose title might suggest the most flippant resolution of ownership of a valuable resource I’ve ever heard of, were it not for its being named after its predecessor, Race for the Galaxy. Much like its predecessor, Roll has grand scope, the exploration and exploitation of the galaxy, settling planets, developing technology but, importantly, rolling lots of brightly coloured dice!

 

 

These beautiful, custom iconographed dice are the bed rock upon which you will build your empire. Random though they may be, it is not how you roll for a turn, it is how you roll with your turn, making the most of what resources you have available, and trying to unlock new dice that might stack the odds in your favour later. For each side of a die enables you to perform an action one time, but in Race’s signature twist, you can only guarantee one of the 5 possible actions each round. Given your roll, do you chose the one action you desperately need to do, or the action you can do the most of?

This brilliant mechanism ensures you are always looking at what the other players have in progress, and guessing what they will try and do. That player has a pile of dice clogged up on a development? They’ll probably be taking a Develop action this turn, so you don’t have to. It’s fantastic that this mechanism exists, because otherwise there really wouldn’t be any player interaction to speak of. In this great Galaxy, there is no war, no conflict. Perhaps the galaxy really is big enough for everyone. Those threateningly red military dice? All bark and no bite.

I found Roll for the Galaxy to be pretty intimidating at first. I really had no feel for where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, for quite a few turns. The player screens were a confused mass of terminology, each planet or development appeared as good as any other to me… yet like a rogue asteroid tumbling through the void, I was eventually caught in Roll for the Galaxy’s gravitational attraction. I’ve not yet had the spectacularly explosive landing in it’s oceans of gameplay that others have experienced, and I might still pass it by, but I’m intrigued and hungry for more.