Without further ado, things that are awesome about Race for the Galaxy:
1. This game teaches you to reject grasping. What I mean is, this is exactly the sort of game that a Buddhist could really get behind. It teaches you, nay, forces you to set aside the need to play every card in your hand. You must empty yourself of this desire in order to play...at all. Depending on your strategy, a very large percentage of your hand cards are going to simply be thrown away to pay for the much smaller percentage of cards that get played to your tableau.
In order to be truly successful, you must prioritize your hand cards in such a way that you will almost always find yourself in the position of throwing away one or more cards that would have been nice to play, in order to add one more, much more important card to your tableau.
I have emptied my entire hand to pay for one big development. And I'm sure everyone else has, too.
2. The game oozes theme. It wouldn't work as a game without this theme. Firstly, each of the actions feels exactly like what the action is describing. Explore actions feel like exploring. Settle and Develop are very much what they say they are. Consuming and Producing are, again, those things that keep the wheels of commerce turning. The theme is so well-integrated into the mechanics that in one game Brent, who was a strong military power (with very few consume powers), found that he couldn't unload his novelty goods. Another player said, "Well, the market will only absorb so many cheeseburgers."
This makes perfect sense in the context of a player's tableau.
3. One word: mythos. Another way in which the theme comes out has to do with the cards themselves. Tom Lehmann excercised a very light touch when it came to introducing a mythos into the game. There is one, but you don't know all the details. He could have gone and named all the planets. However, calling them "Black Market World," "Tourist World," and "Mining World" frees you up. It doesn't give you the mental block of a poorly designed scheme of alien names like "Zylar V" or "Tanrakachatakan Prime." Instead, making the names of the worlds non-specific gives us the opportunity to imagine any name we like. Rather, we can imagine that the world has a name, but we needn't know what it is. It's irrelevant, because it feels more important to know what sort of world it is, rather than what it's called.
And another thing, I don't know who the Uplift are, or what they are supposed to be, if even if they are a "they," but I am intrigued beyond all belief.
4. The art on the cards is magnificent and adds flavor of a magnitude that I wasn't expecting. The New Galactic Order (6-cost development that adds military and points for military) is the perfect example of this. The image is of a despot. He wears a long purple robe, has a mechanical arm, and sits in a throne in a magnificent chamber. This card tells a story. The crowded beach on the Tourist World is another fine example. It really doesn't look like a pleasant place, but it's totally believable (it reminds me of the horror of Waikiki) and, again, tells a story. Cards that work together tell further stories.
For instance, the Alien Rosetta Stone World gives you the strategic advantage of being able to lay down "Alien" worlds more easily, but it also allows you, in adding those worlds to your tableau, to tell the story of a civilization discovering the roots of an ancient galactic civilization, a civilization far more advanced, mysterious, and powerful than we can possibly imagine and yet, for whatever reason, has completely disappeared. All we have left are the artifacts.
What I mean is, there is opportunity here, if played well, to engage in a certain degree of story telling. Nearly every game I've played thus far (which is only a few, to be fair) has had this quality. It truly remarkable that my opponent tonight was actually torn between playing cards that would score him more points or cards that would continue to tell this story that he was working on. In a sense, it's a very realistic conundrum. Many cultures go through this sort of identity crisis.
