In the cold depths of space, the strife for galaxy domination begins. Your species must fully exploit its capacities, choosing the best combination of politics, science, trading, and conflict to reach - before the other opponents – total supremacy. There are many possible paths to victory, and only through a careful management of your resources, without losing sight of your neighboring species, you will be able to achieve galaxy domination.
Master of the Galaxy: a 4Х board game - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate.
Master of the Galaxy is an easy to learn 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game with intuitive mechanics, but its gameplay is characterized by deep tactics and strategies. It can be played from 2 to 4 players, with a game length that varies according to the number of players, normally from 60 to 90 minutes.
At the core of the game, there’s a unique mechanic of bag-building and card drafting. In his turn, each player draws three resource cubes from his bag and places them on the cards at his disposal to carry on his various projects; or on the game board, to trace new routes toward distant stellar systems; or on planets, to gain more resources to add to his bag.
Resources are divided in five different types: science, economy, industry, military, and administration, and during the game, the mix of resources you have in your bag will change.
The Path to Victory
You have three ways to win: place all your nine bases on the game board, collect five supremacy symbols from their cards and systems, or defeat the starting system of another player by placing your base there.
Your strategic goals will direct you how to spend your resources, as through their use (and by completing your projects) you may do several different things in each turn:
- Increase resource availability – the essential engine of your development - and manage the mix of resources in the bag to optimize every draw.
- Build and place your bases to gain new leaders with unique features and to steal resources from your opponents.
- Acquire new development cards to increase your capacities and increase your supremacy in a field.
- Start a conflict to expand into neutral systems or to counter other players.
In Master of the Galaxy, the Development Cards can boost your scientific or military expansion.
Turn after turn, you must carefully choose which project to carry out, knowing there aren’t endless resources and taking into account the importance of each project for your goals.
Some projects, once closed, will free your resource cubes to be replaced into your bag. Other projects require you to keep the resource cubes to preserve their advantages, while others provide additional resource cubes to spend. Administrative resources (black cubes) allow you to recover your resources from the other projects or from unimportant routes.
Building an Empire
Development cards (commerce, expansion and progress) can boost your scientific or military expansion and give you one or more supremacy symbols, allowing you to win the game.
Leaders are one of three types of political cards .
Concentrating your bases in a single system or focusing on development cards of the same kind will give you great advantages, represented by the progressive development of political cards – leader, conflict and government cards. The first development of a given type, or base in a system, allows you choose a new leader card; the second a conflict card; and the third gives you the powerful government card.
Leaders require you to own supremacy symbols to activate their abilities. Military conflicts can be more or less expensive and will grant you different rewards – including taking away the control of a system from another player A government card provides you with new projects and unique powers, which are very different from each other.
Government give a powerful boost to your expansion.
Card choice is essential. Each time you draw a card, you can choose among the top cards of the deck. You keep one and return the others to the bottom of the deck, to a maximum hand of 7 cards in play. If you have more, discarded cards provide new resources of your choice.
Expanding and diversifying your projects will give you significant advantages: new planets to extract resources and new places for your bases. In addition, bordering your opponents will allow you to directly attack and weaken them, which provides important benefits.
Turn after turn, players get closer to victory, but nothing is obvious: a development card, the sudden action of a leader, or a military conflict all can unexpectedly change the fate of the galactic conflict and decide the outcome of the game.
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