Episode 285: Galactic Renaissance

Galactic Renaissance Designed by Christian Martinez and published by Matagot is an area majority, deck building, space exploration game for 2-4 players. In Galactic Renaissance players assume the roles of ambitious politicians embarking to discover and federate ancient imperial worlds through diplomacy, intrigue and cultural exchanges.

To win Galactic Renaissance you have to be the first player to get from (at the most) 20 to 30 points in a single turn. If you get 29 points by the end of your turn, you are set back to 20.

Each player starts with the same deck of 7 advisors cards. At the start of the game, players draft their starting home planet, a specialist, and an emissary token that denotes how many emissaries they start the game with. Every planet comes with a special power. There are 28 unique specialist cards in the game. After drafting you shuffle the specialist into your deck of advisors.

A turn in Galactic Renaissance can be broken up into two phases. There is always an operation phase which might trigger a disorder phase. During the operations phase you play one card. This is the meat of the game. Through the advisor and specialist cards, you will be perform the majority of the actions in the game. There is a card that lets you explore a planet. Each planet in the game comes with an ability, one or more portals (which is how you travel to the planet), and a specific amount of spots to play your emissaries, your institutes, and/or foundations. Whenever a planet has more units on it than the specific amount of spots, it triggers a disorder phase, more on that in a second. There is a card that lets build an institute on a planet which increases your hand size and your presence on a planet. There is a card that lets you build a neutral foundation, which helps you get more specialists cards into your deck. There is a card that allows you to collect the special power of a planet provided that you have the most presence there and then use said power. There is a card that allows you to move your emissaries through portals and another card that lets you get more emissaries from the supply. There are a lot more things these cards can do, but this is just a gist. Finally there is a scoring card that lets just you score the available objectives. The game starts with two scoring objectives. These objectives score based the emissaries, institutes, and foundation that are located on the planets. Some score if you have the majority, or if you have exactly two, or if you are tied for presence, or if you are on a planet with a foundation. There are 16 different objectives in the game. The first time a player gets to 6, a 3rd object is revealed. The first time a player gets to 13, the 1st object changes and the first time a player gets to 18 the second objective changes.

I mentioned you can play one card. Many of the cards and planet abilities let you play additional cards. After you play all the cards you can, you check to see if any planet was in disorder. If a planet IS in disorder all players with presence on that planet, move or remove units from the planet OR play card from their hand that has the disorder symbol. After every player does that, if it the planet is still in disorder, you do it again until the planet does not have units on it that exceed the number of specific spaces. This process might trigger other planets to go into disorder.

At the end of the turn you take the cards you played in the order that you played them and place them at the bottom of your draw deck, there is no discard pile.

The first player you successfully reach 30 points is the winner of Galactic Renaissance.