The 3rd expansion also adds increased interaction with the possibility of hostile take overs of other planets.

One of my favourite games.

1)I’m fairly certain the game ends when anyone has 12 cards in front of them, not 12 planets. And that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve won either. Its all based on the victory points.

guybrush: definitely pick up The Gathering Storm. It adds some tokens that are akin to the Longest Road in Catan. Half of them are ‘person with the most x’ and the other half are ‘the first person to acheive x’. I think it helps add some tension and indirect interaction. The only other really new thing in this expansion is they provide some cards that make the Alien planets (yellow) a little more easy to obtain.

Also it looks like the second expansion (which I didn’t know was out, thanks!) adds the military combat aspect you were talking about. I’ll have to go pick it up!

Maybe there’s something that can be done with RftG to fix things. The first thing that springs to mind is something involving military points. Make a use for them other than “a different way to pay for colonization.” Could be tough to find a good balance and avoid too much added complexity, but I think it can be done.

Neither my beloved nor best friend were especially impressed, though, and I can see why. Their biggest beef was that interaction between players is nonexistent. Compared to something like Chrononauts, which similarly requires players to play cards face-up in front them, there’s no stealing from other players or undoing their actions to prevent them from winning. Indeed it seems more or less unimportant what the other players do, except for the actions they choose each round (you want them to choose the things you want to do but didn’t pick yourself).

They also weren’t fans of the rules being so abstracted from the theme. I enjoyed the galactic conquest theme, but the rules don’t seem to attached to that theme to overcome the feeling that it’s primarily a game of placing and discarding cards. Surely it would be simple to reskin RftG to be about a mining boom, the industrial revolution or any context in which production is possible.

All that said, I really like it and would like to see these problems fixed; I’ll be picking up the first expansion, The Gathering Storm, very soon, as I’ve heard it not only adds cards for an extra player, but adds some more elements of player interaction. (It also has a solo play variant, so at least if it doesn’t make my friends like the game more, I’ll be able to play it by myself!)