Last updated on June 3rd, 2023 at 07:00 am
Race for the Galaxy
Race for the Galaxy is one of the best $6.99 to play game in the App Store.
Developed by Temple Gates Games LLC, Race for the Galaxy is a Board game with a content rating of 9+.
It was released on 6th May 2017 with the latest update 21st October 2018
Whether you are a fan of Board, Card, games, you will find this game interesting and will absolutely like it.
Rating
160 people have rated 1.09.2
You can download the game Race for the Galaxy from APP STORE.
Description
Race for the Galaxy is a strategy boardgame where players advance their empire by playing cards to build technological developments or to settle planets. Its core mechanic is a phase choosing game. Players secretly and simultaneously determine which one of seven phases they will lock in, all reveal at once, then execute the phases in order. Will you build an engine to ramp up VP generation on cheapo production planets? Will you invest in exploration and settle rare and valuable VP rich planets? Or will you rush a military conquest to cut off your opponents before they have a chance to develop their strategy?
Game Features
▪ 2 – 4 player with network multiplayer
▪ Single player mode with advanced neural network AI
▪ Five starting worlds and ninety settlement and development cards
▪ Free promo pack included: New Worlds with six additional starting planets
▪ Gathering Storm and Rebel Vs. Imperium expansions available immediately
Updated on 21st October 2018
Race 2nd Edition updates
- More color-blind friendly
- Balance adjustments to 5 base game cards
Performance and stability improvements
1.09.1 Fixes an issue with tapping buttons near the screen edge on iOS 11 or above
1.09.2 Fixes and issue with Merchant Guild scoring
Race for the Galaxy Reviews
Wonderful port of the RftG board game to IOS. Plays very fast (if youre familiar with the board game.) Cards are easy to see. Havent run into any glitches during our weeks of play. Highly recommend this classic engine builder.
Looks like your icon pic was made with an MS DOS paint program using default shapes. Lol Excellent game though.
This app has taken about 30% of our total phone usage for the past 8 months- if thats not a glowing review of how addicting and well-made this port is we dont know what is.
Race is not complex, but it is a little unintuitive. The game design is brilliant, and worth learning, but we would recommend watching a tutorial on YouTube to familiarize yourself with the rules. The best video we’ve come across is by Nights Around a Table. Once you understand the rules youll learn that the app plays quickly and efficiently. Games can be completed in 10-15 minutes, but youve also got the option of playing asynchronously in a pretty active lobby. If youre a fan of strategic card games you should check this one out. The mechanic of paying for your actions with cards in your hand makes you scrutinize and stress over each individual discard, but when your decisions pay off the result is extremely satisfying.
Love the game but am not receiving notifications for asynchronous play. UPDATE: It was a pain, but deleted app, reinstalled and relinked account. So far notifications are working.
We agree with others that it would be nice to review the tableau when the game is over to get a better idea how the score breakdown went. We would love to see the other expansions, Alien Artifacts & Xeno Invasion added to the app.
We wanted to learn to play this board game so we purchased it for iOS and we were not disappointed. It is a very interesting game with many different ways to win. Our only complaint is it is a bit of a challenge to play on Iphone plus as when u wish to view cards up close, the cards are still not as large as they could have been. That aside, its a fun addicting game to play. We play primarily solo against bots but you can play online. Recommend to board game fans who are interested in the theme.
This rating would be a five star if it werent for our a recent glitch. First off, we’ve been playing for some months now and this game is awesome! Love the concept and the multiplayer ability. So our problem is that we’ve experienced a glitch that would allow us to proceed with a game. It is requiring we use a consumer power but dont have any goods to consume. So Im effectively in a stall with a multiplayer game. Would love it if the developers could address this for future play. Can our games glitch be fixed or is this a wash?
With all the expansions, RFtG turns out to be great as an elaborate strategic solitaire game on a phone. There are two things about this app that really should be improved though : 1. There’s a crash bug in the Goals code that affects some games with more than one (AI?) opponent. 2. The game rules could be slightly tweaked to allow much more fluid multi-player games by making choices within a round or turn simultaneous. We think a lot of people would appreciate that option!
If you like engine building card games this is fantastic. And the app runs smoothly. But in at least one game our final score didnt include certain victory points granted by special cards. Its fun to play even with thus flaw but accurately counting victory points seems essential to the game. Update: we were wrong. The scoring was correct but not transparent. It turns out some card values are variably scored behind the scenes. But this isnt explained to the user which is confusing. We thought we had a card worth x+y but in fact it was just x. In general the brief rules explanations are enough to get going but not enough to understand gameplaying mistakes.
Fun game but wish you could adjust how many bonus chips were available. Also wish they gave a breakdown of the points at the end. Still a great game though. Will consider trying the expansions.
Good game. When will it be updated to fit the whole screen on new phones?
The title says it all. This is a stellar (pun included) translation of the card game to app form. The only knock against the app is that it crashes every 10 to 15, maybe due to memory leaks? Frustrating when that happens, but the games so good that we still play it every day, logging thousands of plays despite hundreds of crashes.
Its one of the best board game translations, but its still missing a few things: 1. No Alien Artifacts & Xeno Invasion arcs 2. No iPhone X resolutions.
Notifications seemed fixed now even for iOS. This is awesome but now at least 4 days a week we have 6-12 hour periods where the app cant connect to online play. Its not just us and its not just iOS, but also android. Frustrating especially when multiplayer games time out because of it. We were really hoping yesterdays patch would fix this. We’ve never had working notifications from the app and it is very frustrating. We’ve emailed already with no response.
We tried to find a place where you could send feedback to the developers but to no avail. So, guess we have to post it as a review. Colony Ship is broken. This card allows you to discard it as payment to place a world. So, after getting the Colony Ship out, youll be prompted to discard it as payment for any world you play after that. However, if you just click ok instead of actually discarding the Colony Ship, the game will not prompt you to pay for the world otherwise (discarding cards from your hand). In this way, you can play worlds for free as long as you have Colony Ship out and choose to not discard it as payment for a world. So currently, Colony Ship is the most powerful card. Play it and then play worlds for free after that. Of course, this is not really how the game is played but hey…. Until they fix it, ha!
Good but the multiplayer constantly crashes.
The basic game is flawless, but takeover rules dont work right. Youll see random takeovers succeed that should fail, takeovers allowed that the rules forbid (the game ignores the +1 military for takeovers, among other things). Annoyingly, the rules are strictly enforced for human players. Plus the complicated card actions never work right for AI players. Theyll randomly get cards at the end of turns. But well worth the money regardless. We enjoy playing, but it can be frustrating.
Pros: good implementation, difficult AIs. Cons: multi-player tied to single device, random numbers seem off. Its a good port of the board game, and is pretty playable on an iPad, although its painful to read on iPhones. The tutorial is nice, and the AI, even at medium is a good challenge. The issues really come up for us in multi player. Although you can link devices, you can only play turns on the device you started the game on. In addition, with more that two players, theres some real problems with game state. We dont think we’ve successfully completed a three player game online. Card distribution seems off. With all of the expansions, the deck should be huge, but you see the same big point cards almost every game, and it makes it hard to win if you opponents draw them.
Need a way for new players not to have to play experts who always win.
Love this game. But lately the issues with app crashing when Im playing online is ridiculous. You need to upgrade your servers or something like that right? We dont know what Im talking about but you are the developers fix it please! We spent $$$ for this game. Ok just $ but you catch our drift.
Look, if you are going to make a hard mode based on manipulating the rng of the cards, the just clearly label it as such. Im tired of hard mode difficulties being driven by manipulation without clearly calling it out. Spend some of the money on improving the noncheating medium mode.
A great board game to play with friends. But the app has some bugs when in the online game mode. When playing for some minutes, it will automatically disconnect. Please fix the bug!!! Please consider including a local mode, so people can play it under the same wifi.
Great adaptation. But really annoying playing on the iPhone XS. The ui is not scaled correctly for it. Hopefully it gets fixed in the future.. Update: Over a year on and still no update to the ui scaling on newer iPhones. It just cant be that difficult.
Fairly high learning curve on a fairly boring game. If you arent already familiar with how to play definitely pass this- lots of better options. Regret purchasing. The interface is good, the game less so.
We will change this rating based on how quickly our game is playable again. Currently we have a game in progress that has the AI running shown. After about 20-40seconds the game auto closes. Is there an upgrade to the AI to fix? Cheers.
Please update this app to be compatible for iPhone X. There is a difference between running and optimized for – right now this app runs with bars, a real bummer considering the real estate on the iPhone X screen.
Can no longer consume any goods.
Its 2019 and we dont have iPad Pro support.
We have learned to really like this game. Only played live once but have delved more into the app. Biggest drawback is you have to go into the app to know if it’s your turn. Also, very annoying that time outs and forfeits automatically end the game. Prefer our apps where an AI takes over like Lords of Waterdeep. Lowered our review. Without notifications too easy to time out. And finally we play a lot of games against AIs. After playing for quite some tome it is very buggy and when it fails the app crashes twice before resetting. Really unacceptable that this has never been addressed.
… As with many apps of these types, the hard AI seems pretty clearly to be the pulls better cards AI. And as with most apps, the deva will say thats not true. Which is fine, we dont believe it though.
We are impressed with this port of the boardgame which we own most of. Not buying steam app as it is just the iOs app, not a fan of this practice of copypasting phone apps to PC! We can name ten of these things off the top of our head , all collecting dust in Steams abandonware dump. Update: Sadly we have to correct myself on the AI as there are some game destroying bugs, such as AI will force finish a game even if they are 30 pts behind. This has happened twice at least, took some screen shots. Are the AI all on one team?? Or do they possess real AI and harbor a kingmaker instinct? This is certainly one way to make RFTG challenging but not how its played. Strengths: Possibly the strongest AI of any bg adaptation on the phone we’ve ever played. Consistently crushed us at hard levels. Mind melting variety of strategies. Meh: Mitary takeovers should be more clearly defined in the interface, its kind of hard to see everything on this small screen and they can be missed. The rules dont seem to explain how they really work but maybe im missing something or encountered bugs. No AI in MP. No game customization (ie starring rule variants ). Undos dont undo everything, such as clicking upgrade card in terraforming action, which can mess up a game. No good: we’ve experienced about 7-8 game crashes where our game against AI has to be trashed because it wont load. No idea why its crashing. *Game crashed yet again and cannot reload\resume without crashing. Rather frustrating. Especially when we are actually winning… Boo.
The game CONSTANTLY drops its connection when playing multiplayer online in some sessions. Makes it occasionally unusable which is too bad as it is otherwise a pretty good port of the game.
Most of the negative points we see written in the reviews we can’t agree with. Multiplayer is the only way we play. Notifications work… Too well even. We get notifications on another device when we have it open even though we have it open in one. The interface, in our opinion, is good given the space limitations of screen size. There is a score breakdown but you have to decode the symbols. One request: add an optional undo. For multiplayer it could be a selectable option, for friendly multiplayer.
We’ve only played single player, but really impressed with the quality of this app, probably one of the best-executed boardgame apps we’ve played, great job devs!
This game is fantastic in every way but one – we can’t get turn notifications to work! We have background app refresh enabled and notifications completely enabled for it, but we have yet to receive a single notification during online games when it is our turn, meaning we have to just keep checking back for info. If those turn notifications worked, this would be a 5-star review easy, as the game is fantastic and implemented very well! Edit: changed to 5 stars with latest notification fix!
Multiplayer player access has been fixed and we restored our 5 star rating. After the latest update we can no longer access multiplayer. Button is grayed out. Both iPhone 8 and iPad Pro. When fixed, Ill revise our rating.
Awesome game! Just leaving us the card game.
At first was a little turned off by how confusing this game is, but after about four game it clicks and makes sense. It takes a minute to learn all the symbols but the app helps you with that. Also the app itself is very well made and plays great on the iOS. If you are trying to learn this game then is app is a must-have.
We love the game, but really wish you could add pass and play. Our wife and we love pass and play games and this would see so much more play if it had it.
We cant play multiplayer off WiFi is that a bug that it doesnt work on 4g LTE? Otherwise decent game.
We love the board game and was thrilled to find the app was a great port to the mobile platform. We can never get our group to play it anymore so we love all the AI options. We would LOVE to give this app 5 stars but we feel it needs 2 things that were brought up during your beta last year but never addressed. 1) there really needs a scoring breakdown on the end screen. Knowing the final score doesnt help if its not explained out. The app would make a great learning tool to get better but not if we cant figure out where all the points come from. And 2) if after the game is over it would be nice to be able to review all the tableaus to see how the scoring was and where we made mistakes. When we play this game on the table we always kibitz at the end to discuss and learn strategies. Aside from the scoring issues there are quirks to the app but Im confident yall will work them out. Please make the scoring/endgame better and Ill be glad to bump it to a 5star review.
We love the board game version of RftG, so we were very excited to try the app. However, the interface is not designed well and it makes the game difficult to enjoy. For one thing, the app doesn’t fill the screen on the iPhone X. Another problem is that the interface elements are very small and hard to read. I’d have preferred a modal interface that shows only the information that’s pertinent during each phase, so the IL interface elements are larger and easier to read. Lastly, it isn’t clear what steps are happening as the round progresses, so we often have to bring up the log to understand what happened. This is worse because the log is difficult to reach from the game interface. We hope they address these problems in future updates.
The game is very smooth and well done. A very nice app that implements the game well. Our problem with it is we keep getting a server unavailable message when Im trying to play online with friends. Once that is fixed, this is easily a five star app. The developers response unfortunately doesnt apply. Perhaps its not an issue with their servers but some sort of conflict with T-Mobile users. However, we dont have the server issue with any other game apps so Im thinking there must be some other problem.
Please implement a system to punish online forfeiters / time outs. This renders an otherwise awesome game nearly unplayable.
We never get push notifications when its our turn in an online game or when someone invites us to play. Notifications are turned on in Settings. Emailed developer about it and they never responded.
Edit: Thanks for the response dev! We understand that striking a balance is difficult, but we hope you guys can provide an option that can be toggled off and on in settings to either keep the opponents developed window up and close back on a whim at the expense of obscuring the board. Even when it does obscure your own developed cards, it isn’t that bad since you can still see them and then you could simply tap the opponents window to close it if need be. We’re really trying to improve our game and it’s quite a hassle to constantly reopen the window every time! —————— Phenomenal game and implementation of the board game. We can never go back. We’ve played probably upwards of 600+ with just the base game on iOS we have a few suggestions For the Dev: Can you make an option to allow the window of the opponents developed cards to continue remaining open while playing, and then close it on a whim by tapping back on it. This would make reactive playing SOO much easier and less tedious. Right now, the window auto closes when you tap out of the window. An option to turn on card placement confirmation. Sometimes our finger slips and we put down a military world, for example, which automatically develops it and it more or less ruins a game. It happens infrequently and it’s our fault, but it would be nice to have that Also, for stats, it would be really neat to see a histogram of how many points you lost a game by in 1v1 games. It would let you track improvement, and we’ve been wanting this feature from when we started playing against the hard AI.