Galaxy: the Dark Ages
I was offered Galaxy: the Dark Ages in a trade for Verrater, which I thought was a good deal. Galaxy had lukewarm reviews, but that this was mainly from people who thought it inferior to Titan:the Arena or Grand National Horse Racing, its simpler ancestors. I have not played either, so I thought I’d give it the benefit of the doubt.
The theme is of a galactic power struggle between different worlds, welded onto a card game – a strange mix. Epic themes fit best with large, complex games; so naturally, this is a large, complex card game. After playing it, I can see how a relatively simple base game was blown up to this galactic scale.
The basic card play, ignoring the fiddly extras, is classic Knizia. Broadly, this is a good thing, but once you have played a few of these games, it’s difficult to feel excited by them. Maybe I’m a just jaded old-timer?
Good
- Plenty of backstabbing and tension as the Worlds columns disintegrate into the void.
- Great theme. I wish there were more sci-fi German games and fewer archaeological ones.
- No rules ambiguities (but see the next point).
Bad
- The rules are very wordy.
- Complex, it is impossible to learn without a reference sheet.
In summary, there is much complexity for only average strategy. Instead of our normal dummy round, for learning, we had to play an entire dummy game. On reflection, I should have got Grand National Horse Racing instead, but now we have spent the time investment to learn it, we will probably stick with the richer gameplay of Galaxy.
I rather like Galaxy actually, but no question in my mind that it’s less skillful than Titan: The Arena.
It is rather complicated, and the rules are not straightforward, but Verrater isn’t a winner in this category either. I always found Verrater incredibly unwieldy, and while Galaxy is certainly overwrought, once you get it down you’re in good shape. Verrater stubbornly refused to “stick” in my brain.
So I think you did pretty well in that trade
Chris
21 Apr 04 at 22:17
It’s interesting that you say it’s got less skill than Titan: The Arena, I imagined that all the chrome would have added it.
I was pretty pleased with the trade. I had a bad feeling about Verrater after just reading the rules.
When are you going to answer my question?
http://www2.haloscan.com/comments.php?user=cfarrell&comment=E360771606
;o)
Iain
21 Apr 04 at 22:27
My answer to your question must have crossed in the mail
Just took me a bit to formulate an answer.
My gut instinct that G:tA is less skillful is just because all the new special powers don’t seem to enable to you to plan more, they just seem kinda random. You can play them at an opportune time or not if you draw them, but it’s still fundamentally opportunistic, and the additional chaos they cause seems to make it hard to plan as much in the rest of the game. But I don’t have any easy metrics.
Don’t get me wrong, I am fond of G:tA, and insterestingly I don’t like Grand National Derby much at all but do like T:tA a lot. It just seems like the subtlety of the play in T:tA has been kind of overwhelmed by all the special powers in G:tA.
Chris Farrell
22 Apr 04 at 19:06