In 1997 Avalon Hill produced the critically acclaimed card game,
Titan: The Arena. Simple mechanics allowed for complex strategy and high replayability. The game was successful enough that very soon after there were plans to produce a science-fiction variant of the game, which would be called
Galaxy: The Dark Ages. Unfortunately, Avalon Hill got gobbled up by Hasbro, who very quickly killed all the AH games which didn't have the potential to produce buckets of money for the Hasbro executives to frolic naked in. Galaxy: The Dark Ages was one of the casualties.
Fortunately, a few years later, GMT Games picked up the Titan-variant and published it. Unfortunately, Galaxy doesn't live up to its predecessor.
Before I get into the Galaxy mechanics I'd like to briefly reprint my description of Titan: The Arena from a review I wrote for that product. I'll explain how Galaxy differs afterward, and differ it does.
The basis of [Titan] is extremely simple. There are eight monsters, ready to bash it out with each other--the hydra, the dragon, the unicorn, the troll, the titan, the warlock, the ranger, and the cyclops. In each game there are five rounds of combat, each of which ends when one of the monsters is eliminated.
The "combat" consists of players, in turn, playing combat cards on top of the monsters. Each of the monsters has 11 of these cards, numbered from 0 to 10. You can only play a monster's own cards on itself (ie, you pay a troll card numbered between 0 and 10 on a troll). There are also eleven wild cards (numbered 0 to 10 again) which may be placed on any monster. Each round of combat continues until each monster has a number card on it, at which time the monster with the lowest card is eliminated. In case of tie, play continues until there isn't a tie anymore.
There's one other major factor in this game: you get to place bets. Each monster can have one bet played on it in each round of combat. Bets placed in the first round are worth 4, the second 3, the third 2, the fourth 1, and the fifth 0. And, whoever has the most valuable set of bets on a monster at any specific time (the controller) gets to use its power whenever he plays a card on that monster. For example, whenever the controller of the troll places a troll card on the troll, he gets to recover a card placed on the troll in a past round and place it in his hand; whenever the controller of the hydra plays on the hydra, he then gets to play a second card too. Etc.
8 powers in all, one per monster.
To add a little more mystery to the game, there's also a secret bet, placed in secret that's worth 5 betting points.
During the actual play of the game, each player is attempting to protect his own monsters and kill his opponents'. After five rounds of combat, when there are only three monsters remaining, whomever has the high value of "live" bets is the winner. Clearly, you want that to be you.
And that's the game in a nutshell.
And that's pretty much the core gameplay of Galaxy too, with a lot of the words changed and the serial numbers filed off.
Instead of monsters, you have worlds inhabited by alien races, each with their own special power. For example, the Erithizonian race allows you to move a wild card in the current row to a different world and the Kha'Farjimmn allows you to play your cards for that world face down. Some powers are repeats (Divergence is Galaxy's Hydra and the Myrmidon is Galaxy's Cyclops), but about half are totally new.
Instead of placing bets you build bases; instead of being the backer of a monster, you're the governor of the world. Instead of monsters being killed, worlds surrender. You get the idea.
If Galaxy had just been a variant of Titan with a set of largely new monster/world power it would have scored as high as the original, which I ranked as having excellent substance.
However, in producing Galaxy, Knizia and Greenwood decided to be daring: they expanded the game dramatically. Now, every single combat card you play also has a special power of its own. For example, all the "5" combat cards are called Raiders. They let you draw a card from the hand of the world's governor. In another totally new twist, the value of bases (bets) can be increased and decreased by certain cards--the transports (3s) and the assault crafts (4s) respectively. 0s, 1s, and 2s each have a special power too.
But wait, there's more. All of the combat cards labelled 6-10 are "fleet ships". Under certain mildly complex conditions these fleet ships can be used to attack other ships, removing the defending card from play if successful, or they can be used to attack unprotected bases, lowering them in value if successful.
Other additions to Galaxy include: a "spoils of war" phase which allows the player with the largest ship in each combat round to change the value of one base; and new rules about how you get rid of cards for surrended planets ... which pretty much prevent you from doing so, as opposed to the original Titan which let you discard up to three dead cards every round and replace them.
Though a few of the clarifications in the new rules were nice, overall Galaxy's expansions to Titan muddy what was a terrific game.
The main problem is that multiple new choices have been overloaded on top of existing choices. In the original game whenever you played a combat card you had to look at a few variables: (1) how long before the round ended, (2) who had bets on a card, (3) what your number cards were, (4) who would die right now if the round ended, and (5) what monsters you currently backed and could use the special powers of. With the new cards each having a special rule you now also have to consider: (6) What powers each of your individual cards have, (7) who the governor is of each world for which you have a card [as many of the special powers only affect the governor], (8) who has bases on each world for which you have a card [because many of the special powers only affect bases], (9) whether you meet the complex conditions to engage in space combat, and (10) who currently has the largest ship out, for the upcoming spoils of war round.
Titan was always a game which required a little bit of thought before playing cards; unfortunately by doubling the number of options players can think about before each card play, Galaxy increasing the number of possible combinations, and so the time you have to think, by an exponential amount.
In other words, players sit around a lot longer looking at their cards and gnawing the insides of their cheeks.
The additions to the Galaxy game also have the unfortunate affect of increasing the randomness in the game dramatically. In the original Titan you could always adapt your strategy to the cards you currently held. Unfortunately many of the new Galaxy cards have very small granularity of effect. There's one card that increases base value, for example, one that decreases it, one that allows you to steal a card from an opponent, etc. The end result is that you can't actually base a strategy upon using any of these abilities, because you have to get the *exact* right card. So, intead, they're just random perambulations which occur in the game.
The new rules about discarding also increase the randomness. Near the end of my one game of Galaxy I had a hand of worthless cards for surrendered bases, because it was so hard to discard; in Titan I could have drawn bad cards, but at least I could have quickly cycled through them, decreasing the randomness.
In the end, I'm not confident that any of the expansions to the game over Titan offered anything positive, and that's a shame because I've seen some games, such as Settlers of Catan which have done great work making their games even more enjoyable with expansions.
Unfortunately, the components of Galaxy aren't quite up to the level of Titan either. The cards are still good and sturdy and will likely hold up to repeated play--if there is repeated play. However the slightly muddy CG pictures on the cards just don't stand up to the crisp Titan pictures. In addition, the color background, which declares the type of the card, just appears as a border, and as shading in the CG pic, so it's not quite as easy to make out which planet a card belongs to at a glance.
The biggest graphical problem with this game is that the special powers of the worlds don't appear on the individual combat cards, as they did in Titan. Thus, if you're not very familiar with the game you have to constantly crane your neck to figure out a world's power--unless you're the governor, in which case you'll have a copy of the card in front of you.
Finally, as a minor quibble, two of the five colors that GMT selected for the betting (base) markers are nearly indistinguishable for the 10% of the population that is red-green color blind.
Overall, I think Galaxy will get repeated play in my house, which is more than I can say for most card games that come out, but only as a second-rank substitute to Titan, when I'm burned out on the original, want something similar, and am willing to tune up my brain enough to allow for twice as many strategic possibilities.
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