Age of Galaxy

I love the Tiny Epic series so this review is hard to write but this game really is my favorite. It has everything I love, mainly, many different ways to win, whether it is pairing certain races, racing to get the best stuff or purposely messing your friends up so they don't win. It has it all and is very well balance as somehow the tallying up points shows that when we come neck to neck at the end. Also, the art is great and the variety of races, galaxy cards and trade markets. I do hope we get an expansion soon. And yes Tiny Epic are great games and we play alot of them, however, this game we settle on the most.

Age of Galaxy isn't the best name. It doesn't reach the heights of epic galactic conquest you'll get from Twilight Imperium or Eclipse. However, what it lacks in titles and grand scope it more than makes up for with clever rules, tight gameplay, and speed of play. The diabolical genius of the game is that you start the game with 15 cubes in your faction's color, placing 3 cubes per round to take various actions around the board... and after 5 rounds, the game ends. By giving the game a strict time limit and finite actions every single action has to be weighed against the opportunity cost of every other action. Do you colonize that planet immediately, or do you develop warp tech so you can colonize even better planets before your opponents can later? Do you invest in bulking up your faction's Production, so you get more money each turn in future rounds, or do you trade away that resource for a one-time hit of cash? You could build a bunch of cruisers and take over that player's planet by force, or you could spend that money converting some of your resources into relics, which are useless now but are worth victory points at the end of the game. You combine this with the fact that every player gets 7 Faction cards, randomly or through drafting, that can totally change how you play. Some Factions let you develop new, unique technologies, while others can make certain actions cheaper or more rewarding. You can only play up to 3 of them for their long-lasting, game-changing benefits, and can only use the other 4 for one-time effects like getting resources or allowing you to colonize a planet you otherwise couldn't. With 40 Faction cards, there's a ton of combinations and a lot of strategy involved. If you want a 4+ hour epic experience that'll take up your whole dining room table, Twilight Imperium has you covered. But if you want something that plays in 45 minutes, with minimal setup, with nearly as much strategy and fun for about one-fifth the price, check out Age of Galaxy.

Not only does this give you 90% of everything those huge space exploration games offer, but at a price and size you can’t beat! This plays easily and quickly but has great depth, lots of variety and high quality - plus you can get it from a speedy vendor.

Ice Makes and Jeffrey CCH did it again. After the fun, but too abstract Age of Civilizations, their new Age of Galaxy is a fantastic game in a very small package. It's the 4X genre distilled and micronized from a 6 hours game to a 30 minutes funfest. Sure, there's no depth of the big ones here. No diplomacy, trade or random events. The battles are also resolved automatically just by comparing military numbers. However, all that is expected when you consider the size of the box, assets and the minimalistic gameplay. Considering that, there's a whole lot to do here in a very short time frame. In fact, too short. Just when you colonize enough planets, build a fleet, research enough technologies and starting to conquer your opponents planets - the game ends. It happens so abruptly and fast, you feel kinda unfullfiled by the end. I guess, this is to create urgency and the will to play again right away. And it works! However, I would very much like it to have more length and depth. The rulebook is also too short and doesn't explain everything that well. Compared to the game's size and simplicity, it actually overwhelms with underexplained iconography and rules. There's no lore as well. Not in the book. It's actually on the website and it's pretty good! I don't understand why they didn't add it to the book, as it would add so much to the game itself. Other than that - I highly recommend this game for a short 4X space experience.

This is a tough game to review - it will scratch a heavy gaming itch for people who are into 4X games, but it does so in a tiny package that doesn't "feel" as epic as a big box game that's going to dominate your table and your afternoon. People not into 4x games who pick up this cute, tiny box off the shelf will likely be intimidated by its esoteric iconography and 40-page rulebook that does teach you about technicalities, but doesn't do a great job of actually teaching you how to play or why you'd want to do any of the actions it describes in great detail. To wit, the rulebook is heavy on mechanics and iconography. This is, in a way, a net positive. Icons mean that it is language-independent. You can play with people who speak different languages, and you'll be fine. However, it will cost a bunch of mental effort to learn what everything stands for, a la Race for the Galaxy, where once you know it, you know it, and it's not difficult. However, this has far more symbolism than RftG. You can see in some of the pictures attached here that the rulebook is very clear in its pictures and examples about what to do and how to do it, but that there is a lot of dense information there. The components of this game are quality - the cardboard punchboards are thick and solid-feeling, you get a bag of colorful cubes, and another bag of spaceships (very cool). They really did a nice job with production value. Despite it being purportedly about space, the one thing really missing from this game is theme. Now, I'm a big heavy Eurogamer. I love my crunchy mathematical engine-building and acquiring piles of cubes (seriously, who doesn't love a pile of cubes?), and I don't really care if I'm supposed to be delivering fruit to a village, farming a plot of land, shipping and trading goods, or anything else. The theme is ancillary and often pasted on anyway. It's all about the underlying math. That said, this game really doesn't even so much as attempt to say, "Here's what this action MEANS." It just says, "Spend [round yellow token] to gain [red arrow token]." Why do you want a red arrow token? To get a different token. Et cetera. Because of this, many people will be left scratching their heads, and it will take a few playthroughs to really get into this game before you can start to develop a strategy. There are many, many space games out there: Race for the Galaxy, Eminent Domain, Twilight Imperium, Gaia Project, Beyond the Sun, and more. Though these all have different gameplay, I don't see enough in Age of Galaxy to compete with these other games. Playing any game is an opportunity cost - if you're playing X, by definition you are not playing Y. I do not think this will supplant my current space games, and I'll probably sell it or trade it away at some point. The one bonus to this game, and what I think will make it at least mildly popular in a niche subset of gamers, is that it packs a lot of complex punch for such a portable game. If you're heading to the beach but instead of playing solitaire, you want to play a complex game of galactic conquest, this is a great game to bring, and you can just toss it in a bag (you can see in the attached picture that it fits in the palm of my hand, literally). But it's not accessible enough to a casual or family gamer, and it's very physically small for a heavy gamer, so I see its value as mostly allowing you to play a complex game on the road. And in that, it succeeds very well.