Master of the Galaxy

Master of the Galaxy is one of those games that sounds interesting on paper, but deserves to be introduced by a boxing-ring announcer: “And now, entering the ring, the manual!” It is not badly written, nor does it look like amateur work; it has the flow you would expect from a professional rulebook. And yet, something in the translation—perhaps from Italian, Bulgarian, or whatever—keeps warping the communication. Small things, such as the lack of plurals in places, somehow confuse you rather than help you.

At its core, the game rests on a fairly fresh reverse bag-building idea. When the bag of cubes empties, you do not simply refill it as though nothing happened: you have to make sure to return cubes to it yourself. That gives your management a different kind of tension, and shows that the designers had something specific in mind.

It also does not let you play multiplayer solitaire in your own little corner. For someone to win, there has to be a fight, so clashing with the other players is part of the deal rather than an optional annoyance. The intention is sound and the interaction has a reason to exist, but the ambiguities in the manual make the whole process far more fiddly than it needs to be.

Let me also offer a humble apology here to Dr. Rocco, who called me while I was wrestling with the cursed manual to settle a disagreement, and I must have answered like I was stoned. To recover, we consumed a respectable quantity of burgers and associated accompaniments—oh yeah—and then moved on to the main course: Pfeister and brains bouncing off the walls.

It is a shame, because the game really does look like it has something interesting going on. But between the rulebook’s ambiguities and a few unnecessary bits of developer nonsense, such as the size of the score tracker, the experience becomes tiresomely fiddly. It needs a revised edition to truly move forward. As it stands, it is a low six for me and probably not worth talking about.