Teaching Race for the Galaxy to Someone Who Just Wanted a Quiet Night

Hutch is the coworker who started all this, technically. Years back he kept a folding table set up in the back office at the firm during slow weeks between surveys, mostly to keep the crew from staring at their phones between jobs, and that table is the reason I own more board games than I probably need. So when he came by my place a while back after a rough week, a client complaint that wasn’t even his fault, wanting something easy and low-key, I should have reached for literally anything else in my collection. Instead I grabbed Race for the Galaxy off the shelf because I’d been wanting an excuse to play it again.

I want to be clear this was entirely my fault. I know what that box asks of a new player, every single card a wall of symbols standing in for a sentence of text, and I know the first hour with it feels like being handed a foreign language mid-conversation. I talked myself into thinking I could walk him through it fast enough that it wouldn’t matter, that the simultaneous role selection would click before the symbols became a problem. It did not click before the symbols became a problem.

About twenty minutes in he set his cards down, not annoyed exactly, just tired in a specific way I recognized from my own first sessions with this game, and said something like, I just wanted a quiet night, man. And he was right to say it. I’d taken someone who explicitly told me what he needed and handed him homework instead, because I wanted to play my favorite dense little engine builder more than I wanted to actually meet him where he was.

We switched to Star Realms instead, which I keep around exactly for nights like that, no icon-reading required, decisions you can make in your gut inside the first hand. It went fine. Better than fine, actually, he beat me twice and left in a noticeably better mood than he arrived in, which was the entire point of the evening that I’d nearly talked myself out of remembering.

The thing is, I know better than this. I write about symbol load and gateway-friendliness in reviews all the time, I clearly recognize it as a real variable when I’m being objective about a game on paper. I just don’t always remember to apply that same judgment to the actual person sitting across from me on a given night, especially when what I want is to play something I like instead of something they need. Hutch still comes over most weeks. I ask what he’s in the mood for now, before I pick anything off the shelf.