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What’s the best modern strategy card game?

If you said anything other than "Race for the Galaxy," I have some news for you—you’re wrong. (We’d also accept Magic, but that’s a whole other thing).

Race for the Galaxy, a game where players compete to build the most powerful galactic empire in the shortest amount of time, is the quintessential modern card game. Released in 2007, the game has solidified its "classic" status due to its complex strategy, clever interactivity, and infinite replayability. It’s a truly great game.

Game details Designer: Tom Lehmann

Publisher: Rio Grande Games

Players: 2-4

Age: 13+

Playing time: 10-30 minutes

Price: $19.95 on Amazon, £24.25 on Amazon UK Tom LehmannRio Grande Games2-413+10-30 minutes

But there’s a problem: Race for the Galaxy is notoriously difficult to teach. Its core mechanics can feel unintuitive to new players, and the game’s generous use of initially inscrutable iconography makes it such a chore to teach that it’s almost not worth trying to bring new players into the fold unless you’re sure they’re going to love it.

In 2014, Race designer Tom Lehmann and co-designer Wei-Hwa Huang released Roll for the Galaxy, a dice-game take on the Race formula. Roll for the Galaxy’s tiles—the game's analogue to Race’s cards—were still emblazoned with all manner of arcane iconography, but the symbols were also accompanied by text explainers, making Roll a much easier game to teach. (It also happens to be an excellent game, and it’s where we’d suggest starting if you want to dip your toes into the Race universe.)

But say the relatively short playtimes of Race and Roll are still too long for you. Say you want to build and rule over a galactic empire... in the time it takes to make a sandwich. Enter Lehmann’s newest title, Jump Drive, a game that’s billed as an “introduction to the Race for the Galaxy universe.” You can think of it as a sort of ultra-fast, super-simple distillation of the core concepts found in its bigger siblings.

Go ahead and jump

The goal of Jump Drive, as in every “___ for the Galaxy” game, is to conquer the galaxy through clever cardplay. Here, players race to cross a 50-point threshold, at which point the game is over and the highest score wins. The game generally lasts a brisk seven-or-so rounds.

Jump Drive keeps the wildly addictive “engine-building” gameplay from the other games in the series while shrugging off any rules that can’t be explained in seconds. From a starting hand of five cards, you’ll piece together a card-drawing, point-generating machine that propels you to victory.

















Each turn, players simultaneously and secretly choose to play either one or two cards face down in front of them. When everyone is ready, players flip up their cards, which stay in front of them, making a “tableau” for the rest of the game. Cards come in two types, ”worlds” and “developments”—essentially planets you can take over and technologies you can develop to help you take over planets more efficiently. Each card has a cost, which you pay by discarding other cards from your hand. Each card, then, represents one of two options—an addition to your empire or the currency to pay for those additions.

If you play two cards, you have to pay full price for each. But if you play only one card, you get a bonus—a discount or a refund, depending on the type of card you're playing. Since the game is a race, you want to quickly play as many cards as possible, but that gets expensive. You'll have to decide whether you can afford to discard that one perfect card to get that other perfect card into your empire this round. The decision is often excruciating, an essential design element ported over from Race.

At the end of each round, everyone gets two types of income—cards and points. Every card tells you what it gives you, and these values snowball as the game progresses. In round 1, you might draw 2 cards and score 1 point; a brief six rounds later, you could be scoring 20 points per round and drawing a huge stack of cards (to keep things balanced, you have to discard down to 10 at the end of the round).

Although the mechanics are completely different, this sense of absurd escalation from "I have nothing" to "I'M THE UNSTOPPABLE RULER OF THE GALAXY" reminds me of Star Realms, another super-quick sci-fi card game. It's tremendously satisfying.