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Rio Grande has some wildly anticipated games in the offing, but unfortunately the main two — Wei-Hwa Huang and Tom Lehmann's Roll for the Galaxy and Donald X. Vaccarino's Temporum — were both available only in prototype form. What's worse, while I was able to play these games at the con on Friday night, I was unable to film game demos because when I went up to the demo room to ask about them on Sunday, I discovered that they'd been packed away and the room closed to prepare for the finals of a Dominion tournament. Sorry! Wish I had known about that earlier, but sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches.
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BGG user Mike Bialecki played Roll for the Galaxy twice at Gen Con 2014 and has already posted an overview of the game. I'm going to try for once to be shorter than someone else and present an overview of the game, with his report serving as the extended version. Note that I played once with a non-final version of the game late night at a convention with a RGG demo person who had just learned the rules recently, so I
Roll for the Galaxy plays much like its Race for the Galaxy ancestor, with players taking actions based on the roles collectively selected by them each round. The available actions are Explore, Develop, Settle, Produce, and Ship, and each round starts with players rolling their available dice, then placing them below their action organizer (not the official term — see it in the top middle of the image above) in the appropriate spaces. You start the game with five white dice, two in your citizenry and three in your dice cup, so on your first turn you might roll, say, explore, settle and produce. To choose the role that you definitely want to have occur, take one of your dice and place it on that role, regardless of the face on the die. I could, for example, pick up the produce die and place it on the settle role. If you want, you can remove one die from play (placing it back in your cup) in order to move another die to a different column.
Once everyone is ready, all players reveal their dice, then flip the role cards in the center of the table to how which roles will occur this round. As in Race, you can pretty much conduct the actions on your own without waiting for others to catch up. (I say this having played only once, mind you, so perhaps some development and world tiles do affect other players directly.)
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The die in the role space is also used when carrying out roles for the round. The roles are as follows:
-----• Explore: For each die, you can either add $2 to your bank or draw one development/settle tile from the bag. These tiles are double-sided, and should you keep the tile, you place it under any development or world tiles already in your queue. (Note in the image above that you have one space for developments and one for worlds, so you can work on only one of them at a time.) If you don't like a tile and you have more explore dice to resolve, you can place the tile to the side and draw two tiles with the next die, placing them in your queue in an order of your choosing. Place the used dice in your citizenry.
-----• Develop/Settle: Place all of the dice in the develop/settle space on your player board. If the number of dice there now matches or exceeds the cost of the development/world, put that tile in play and move a matching number of dice to your citizenry, leaving any extra dice in place and thereby possibly fulfilling a second or third tile that same turn. Place all used dice in your citizenry.
-----• Produce: Place each die in the produce column on a world that lacks a good. Each world can hold only one die, so return any extra to your cup.
-----• Ship: Assign each die in the ship column to a world that has a good on it. For each good, you can choose to take money ($3-6, which is added to your bank) or victory points (VPs); you get only 1 VP for a good, but if the good (i.e., the die) matches the color of the world, you receive one more VP and the same goes for the ship. Thus, if you specialize in a color, you can get 3 VPs per ship action, which is what I tried to do with my brown engine above. Place all used dice in your citizenry.
At the end of your turn, you must spend $1/die to return dice in the citizenry to your cup. If you don't have enough money, you spend as much as you can, choosing which dice to return and leaving the others in place. If your bank ever hits $0, you return it to $1 so that you can always return at least one die to your cup.
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Thanks to Scott Russell (qzhdad, w/ glasses) for teaching the game!
Each player starts with one starter world and a double-wide development/world combo tile. The worlds mostly seem to come with a colored die/good on them, although some add the die to your citizenry or cup. Each color of die has a different combination of symbols, which will therefore lead you down one path or another depending on how much you specialize, how quickly you cycle dice through the rounds, how many dice manipulation effects you have, etc. Developments have a variety of powers, with me getting ones that gave me bonus money or VPs for shipping brown goods and others that let me move a die to the develop role or move a green or blue die anywhere. As in Race, six-cost developments are worth a variable number of points depending on how well you match the scoring condition stated on them.
Also as in Race, the game ends when either the VP stack runs out or someone has built a twelfth tile in their tableau (with everyone starting with three tiles). Each tile is worth VPs equal to its cost, and whoever has the highest score wins.
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Another player's holdings
In many ways, Roll for the Galaxy feels exactly like how you'd expect a dice-based version of Race to feel. You try to guess who might play which roles so that you can take advantage of their choices to benefit yourself. To some degree you're at the mercy of the dice since you can't use a chosen role if you have no matching dice, but as the game progresses, you have more ways to move dice around and more dice period, thereby allowing you to discard some to move others. (If you assign dice to a role and it's not chosen, all of those dice return to your cup, meaning that you lost the ability to do something with them but at least you don't have to pay to get them back.)
Our game felt very solitaire, with all of us carrying out roles without regard for what others were doing, but all of us were just puzzling out how to play the game, largely without regard for how to play in a way that moves us toward winning. The bank in Roll nicely mimics the way that cards in hand can be spent as money in Race, with you needing a steady flow of cash in order to keep the dice churning. One player stalled for several turns, living off the pity dollar and having only a single die to roll, and I don't recommend it — but you probably already knew that.
I'm surprised to see so many people in Bialecki's thread discussing the possibility of cheating by changing your dice after rolling them. Sure, that's possible, but geez, you can probably cheat in every game that you play should you be so inclined.
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In more detail, you and your fellow players are time travelers, and you want to spread your influence — represented by ten crowns — from the first era to the fourth, that is, to the current day. The first player to do so wins the game immediately. (Thus, Temporum is a race game.)
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History is represented by a pyramid of action cards, with the cards being pulled at random from color-coded stacks. All time travelers start on the same space, and you set up arrows on the board to show both the current path of history as well as parts of alternate histories that could have been — and can still be. On a turn, you do the following:
-----• Change: Optionally change the direction of the arrow underneath your current location. Time traveler or not, you're a human being first and foremost, so you can mess with what happens in the future by taking action in the present day. The trick, though, is that as a time traveler you know what the alternate future is and whether it might benefit you more than the future currently due to come. If other players are in future locations when you change history, then they teleport to the correct place in time while staying in the same era.
-----• Move: Move on the path of history or stay in place. Zoom! You're off on the current of time, moving to a spot in history that allows you to do what you want to do with one or more of your cards in hand.
-----• Act: Take the action of your current location. Based on two playings, I'll speculate that each era seems to specialize in different types of actions: Era I allows you to score, Era II to draw cards, Era III to play cards, and Era IV to do all kinds of things. Again, just a guess from two games and a glance through the stacks, so don't take this as gospel.
Each player starts with a few cards in hand, and cards come in two types: one-time actions (tan) and ongoing abilities (blue). Each card also has a coin value on it (going as low as zero and at least as high as 12) as well as a crown scoring line, with you being able to move 4-8 of your crowns through history for 4, 8, 12, 16 or 20 coins. When you play a card, you take coins from the bank equal to the value shown on it, then you either carry out the effect and discard it (tan) or place it on the table in front of you (blue).
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When you score a card, you pay the amount shown to the bank, then move crowns forward in history. If you get to move four crowns, you can move two crowns two eras each, four crowns one era each, one crown three eras and another one era, etc.
You want to move crowns because that's how you win (duh), but also because you frequently receive a bonus from the action on the board or a card in hand based on how many eras you rule — and you rule an era when you have more crowns in it than each other player. (With four and five players, you also rule an era when you have the secondmost crowns in it.) You might draw more cards, move more crowns or earn more money than you would otherwise, and in a game like this — as with the other Donald X. games mentioned above — you want to squeeze as much advantage as you can out of each move. (In one of our games, I won the turn before both of the other players would have won. I suspect with more plays such instances would happen infrequently because you'd be stumbling less thanks to a plan for what you'd want to do.)
The cards in hand do the types of things you'd expect them to do, with blue cards giving you a bonus (crown, money, card) if you do something (such as moving a crown to Era IV) or being discardable for additional cards and with tan cards providing a wider range of effects on the three currencies as well as on other players. The game flies along at a pace akin to Nefarious, and in the second game I built for an endgame that I never saw as someone else bumped his crowns along far more quickly than I did. Hrm — more experience needed. All in all, as a huge fan of most things time-travel related, I'm excited to see this one in print, with the release date currently being listed by RGG as September 15, 2014.
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Pressure Cooker is a real-time game played over three rounds in which you want to complete as many dishes as possible as quickly as you can. At the start of the round, the orders are placed in four color-coded rows, and each order in the first round shows the specific ingredients required while also having three spaces on which players place a token once they complete the dish — or at least once they think they've completed a dish.
All of the ingredient tiles are laid out face down on the table, and you play Galaxy Trucker-style with each person picking one tile at a time, flipping it face-up above your player sheet, then either returning it face-up to the pile or placing it on your grill in a location that matches the order's location (same color and same number). In addition to ingredients, the tiles also show wine (which can be added to any dish) and dessert (which can be added to an order only after the dish is complete).
You can look through an ingredient stack on your grill, but doing so takes time, so naturally you just try to remember as you go. Once you've completed a dish, you place one of your tokens atop the stack and you claim the highest-valued empty space on that order. Once someone completes three orders, he can flip the one-minute timer; everyone else then completes as much they can, then you all evaluate the dishes. If you forgot an ingredient in a dish, then you score nothing for it; if you included an extra ingredient, whether required for the order or not, then each other player scores 2 points in any color they wish; if you included all of the required ingredients, then you score in that color as many points as the number you covered.
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Each order also has a "quality" measure that players can try to meet. How? Each ingredient tile shows a quality value from -1 to 4, and if your dish is complete, you sum the quality of that dish, with wine and dessert adding to the sum; the player with the highest total scores a bonus as long as he has reached the quality threshold. Whoever completes the most dishes in a round scores a bonus, as does the player who flipped the timer — but only so long as he correctly completed the minimum number of dishes required for the round.
In rounds two and three, the orders might show a number in addition to specific ingredients, and now you need to find both the depicted ingredients and others specific to that dish as shown on a separate menu card. Thus, a salad might require a pepper, ham, and cheese, along with four other unique ingredients. What's more, you also have two "appetizer" tiles, and before starting a dish you can place an appetizer in that space; should you complete the dish correctly, then you double the quality of that dish as apparently the customers were rendered calorically comatose prior to the main meal arriving, thereby making everything taste better. You need to complete four or five dishes before you can start the time in rounds two or three.
In the end, the players compare their lowest-scoring colors, and whoever has the highest score wins.
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Sandwich not included
As you might expect, you have to enjoy this type of pressure playing or else you shouldn't even step up to the grill. I botched my dishes terribly in round two, throwing butter into practically everything and thus granting my opponents eight points each and losing the round's bonus for finishing first. Sheesh, I must have been channeling our former exchange student from France. In some ways, the game has a press your luck element as you're free to try to complete as many dishes as you want — but should I have gone that route, I'd have been sliding even farther into last place, I suspect.
The dials on the scoring boards tended to be loose, with players possibly jostling them during play as they moved tiles around willy-nilly. Klenko told me later that Rio Grande is consulting with the manufacturer to see how it can improve on this aspect of the game's components.
I was looking forward to trying this game, but some of the dice were unusable because they no longer had pips. Rather than play with defective components and possibly color my reaction to the game, I decided to wait for a nice copy to check out down the road. After all, I've already waited five years for this game; no sense rushing things at this point...
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