Well, let me some positive energy out of the way so I can start complaining properly. And let me caveat - I've only owned the game for less than three days. That said, I've played five games in a row right after I bought it, three games the day after, and two last night.

It's a little early to be sure, but I would never play San Juan again, given the choice between that and RftG. Actually, I'd probably never play PR again, if it was a choice between PR and RftG. The reason? It feels as fast as San Juan (some people say once you've learned it, it goes even faster!), but you have enough choices to put it into the strategic class of Puerto Rico. It's tentatively my number one game, unseating Power Grid by virtue of concentrating an entire strategic game into a short period of time.

Okay, now that I've got all that out of the way, it's time to take the gloves off. In this first part, I'm going to look at the contents of the box.



First off, lets look at the outside of the box. Mine has both Rio Grande Games and Abacus Spiele on the outside, with dual-language information on the back and sides. It's about the same size as St. Petersburg, and feels plenty solid. Inside, the cards are in english, but the rulebook has the English Rules followed by the German rules, all printed in a full-colour booklet. Downside of this? The last couple pages have a handy-dandy summary guide explaining card powers, and the last page summarises the powers of the big 6 point buildings. Unfortunately, in german. To get to the last page of the english section, you'll have to flip open the booklet to the middle. Definitely would have preferred them to be two separate booklets. Maybe steal the staples from the Rio Grande Games catalog



Next up, there's a nice thick board of of punch-out VP chips. Double-sided full colour, easy to punch out, and I like the having both light-beams indicating the values in addition to larger point values having a larger size. But if we're going to talk about size, I'm wondering why they didn't make the chips a bit bigger - my hands are probably on the small side, but the 1pth chips are just one size too small, making them a bit awkward to pick up. If they scaled everything up - made the 1 pointers the size of the 5 pointers and so on - all the chips would have been easy to handle. Looking at the counter sheet, there's an awful lot of blank space - enough to make all the chits bigger and print more of them, if they were all tiled in the usual hexagonal pattern and/or put closer or even side by side. There's definitely enough chits to play the game, but I wouldn't have minded some spares to counter potential attrition, and to avoid wasting all that cardboard! The printing is already a touch off in my copy - the bars on the 1 point chips are centred on one side, and offset on the other.


VP chips on the Puerto Rico punch-out sheet - packed nice and tight



The game comes with four english reference cards are full-colour and double-sided, printed on what appears to be thick cardstock or thin cardboard. They're also big, about the size of the play mats for Puerto Rico, and chock-full of information. One side has summary of card powers and icons, the other side covers the actions. Actually, they're probably oversized, as they take up quite a lot of table space - since you normally need about the same space per person to play as Puerto Rico, adding the reference sheet makes it so that you'll need to give the space of two PR playmats per person. On a smaller table, people would share at the beginning, but since space got cramped quickly we ended up putting one on the side and the others on top of the rules in the box. I did refer to it during the first game and a half. After that, I only looked at it when answering easy rules questions to save flipping through the book. Random bonus - my copy also came with four german reference cards, for a total of eight reference cards.

What's left? When you actually get to the innards of the box, you find a paper insert with a central well, with two packs of cards in it. These cards (and the VP markers) are the actual pieces you need to play the game. The cards are the size as the ones for CCG - for reference, a bit larger than the ones in Fairy Tale, about the same as the ones in Iliad. There's a nice textured finish on them - no stickiness at all - and they look like they'll hold up to repeated play, even without sleeving.

But I have to say - there was a good couple seconds of shock when I got to the "meat" of the box where my brain went - "That's it?!". I was somewhat mentally prepared - I'd been reading the rules online to the point where I was pretty sure I could teach it, so I knew what was in the box. But the reality was a bit jarring - you expect wasted space, but this has got to be on the extreme end - we're easily into 90% empty here. I pulled out To Court a King, and you could easily store the cards and the VP chips in that box.

Now, I do understand that there are two expansions in the pipeline, and so they definitely wanted to have a box big enough to fit those. Well, I have to say - should be a piece of cake - these would have to be pretty large expansions to fill the empty space. There's room for a fold-out board, plenty of cards, tokens, cardboard and wooden bits...Behind all this ranting, I should also mention, is the fact that I really want to fill the box, and there's a bit of lost opportunity here. I mentioned earlier that I played five games of this on the first night right after buying it. We were gaming at Drexoll's, a game store, and one of the other players (who had also played five games straight), immediately put his name down for a copy. If the expansions were available, if even one of the expansions was available, I would have bought them on the spot, sight unseen. Sadly, all I know is that they are planned, and coming...just not yet.

Okay, ranting off - there have already been other threads on the geek about "bang for your buck". For me, I paid full FLGS price, and I'm already at less $4 a game. I don't think anything else on my shelf has seen as much play. Let's get back to the review.

Looking at the card backs, we've got different backings for the different types of cards - the main gameplay cards have "Race for the Galaxy" on their backs, whereas each player's action cards have a big picture of three people and an icon - the picture and the colour are different for each of the four card sets, making it easy to tell them apart. The action cards are otherwise the same as the regular cards - there was one instance when someone discarded a couple by accident. Since they'll probably see the most use, it would have been nice to have them more distinct - maybe thicker and bigger, like the To Court a King cards, or maybe cardboard tiles like in Puerto Rico/San Juan. Actually, I wouldn't have minded the mega-sized cards à la Blue Moon for everything

What have I done, post-purchase? I stopped by a dollar store, and bought a bunch of hard plastic sleeves for the action cards. Now they're physically quite different from the other game cards. Still debating on whether to sleeve the game cards themselves - I'll wait and see how they hold up from regular use. And I'll report on the regular use in a little bit Actually, once I sleeved the action cards, I had to invert the insert (creating two wells) for enough space to hold all the cards. The VP chips went in a ziplock baggy - that's basically a necessity, since the VP chips are the same colour as the insert.

So, to wrap up - lots of little niggly things, but ultimately I have to say that the bits in the box are very good. There definitely could be more, and bigger VP chips, and the actual game pieces do look a bit lonely, with a deck of cards that could easily fit in a small box, but what is actually there is good quality - full colour rulebook, the oversized reference sheets.