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The idea for the game came to me during a road trip. At the time, I was experimenting with various prototypes for games in which players would draw different color cubes, then use them on their own playing boards. By completing projects, they could either get victory points or add new resources to their pool. The problem was that the game would either be too slow or way too fast. I was looking for a more stable, aggressive, and dynamic type of play.
The concept for Master of the Galaxy started with the idea of managing resources between a common board and the players' own cards. The theme of space expansion seemed like a perfect fit. The game board was to be a map of star systems with planets to colonize, routes to establish, and bases to construct. Deploy all of your bases by colonizing new systems, and you win. That was a simple and intuitive win condition that led to a natural conflict on the game board.
On the other hand, each player had different cards, and I had the idea of creating a victory condition mostly based on the cards. If the cards provided different "supremacy" points, a player could win by collecting them. Thus, collecting a set of five supremacy symbols of the same type was set as another, alternative path to victory.
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From the start, the big design challenge was to balance the "snowball effect". Once a player got the needed resources in their bag, each of their subsequent turns would be more and more effective. The solution was simple: You couldn't win by doing only one thing. To capture a system, not only did you need to prepare a route, you must also construct a base. To gain supremacy symbols, you need to get more cards, then implement their technology. The different projects on the species cards put different demands on a player's resource pool. This aspect of the game created a rich planning experience for the players. They now had to decide which type of resources they needed at the beginning of the game, and later they must switch to other types, and how they will manage to do it is key to the victory.
To help players get particular resources, leaders were introduced to the game. This was one of the last types of card added, and it's actually the thickest stack of cards. At first, leaders were discarded to gain resources and small advantages. Over time, their function changed completely, but the idea of discarding cards to gain resources proved to be so strategic and vital, it became a universal game rule. This added an extra dimension to players' freedom. You could discard any of your cards — any technology, conflict, leader, or even species — to get resources you desperately needed for that final fight. On the other hand, it was possible to lose all of your systems in battle and still win by collecting enough supremacy symbols. A true master of the galaxy will stop at nothing. They could even turn their home star into a black hole, if that leads to their goal. I really liked giving players different opportunities than they are used to getting in similar games.
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Another addition to the game was government cards. At first, they were intended to compensate the weak points of species, but by playtesting it quickly become apparent it was much better to enhance a faction's strong points rather than fix the weak ones. With the right government card, players can create a greater focus on a particular aspect of their game plan.
During playtests, players tried to find unintended ways to use the mechanisms to get more than one government or species card. This created unexpected advantages and, at first, seemed not to be that thematic. However, the idea of player freedom was already vital to this project, so we decided to make this a viable strategy to pursue. We added special bonuses for collecting a set of cards. The only limitation was a seven-card limit per player. Within these seven cards there can be very crafty combinations of types and effects. We spent a lot of fun time creating these possible combinations.
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The largest amount of rework was done with the conflict cards. Right from the start, they were expected to be a major part of the game as all of them are about putting the opponent in a corner and forcing them to spend resources on the additional project imposed upon them.
At first, conflicts used mostly red resources and were meant to stop players from focusing only on "peaceful" types of resources. But the star systems on the board were not interconnected enough to make conflicts viable right from the start of the game. In many cases, when conflicts started to make sense, all players were already committed to an exclusively peaceful strategy. We had to spend a lot of time and make changes to all the other types of cards to make warfare possible in what could otherwise be a very peaceful galaxy! These changes led to the ability to capture neutral systems through conflict cards and a new, third path to victory — by capturing another player's capital system.
Balancing all the different factors in this game was a long and hard task, but I feel like we handled it in the manner it deserved, and I really hope you will love this game as much as we do.
Konstantin Seleznev
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