Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 05:31 pm
Race for the Galaxy – Board Game Review
Race for the Galaxy is a Board/Card game from Temple Gates Games LLC, first launched in 6th May 2017.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 175+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Race for the Galaxy Stand Out
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
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Race for the Galaxy is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 21st October 2018
Recent improvements include:
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
Download & Availability
Race for the Galaxy is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Race for the Galaxy on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
It just is never available when we want to play. This is a hidden gem amongst the board games on iOS. Just wish we could play other people.
Game force quits when we open it can't play on iphone.
We accidentally found this game. At first, it is into,idating. Nothing really made sense. Then, after struggling a few times, we reread the instructions and had a better understanding of what was being referred to, etc. Now, we cannot stop playing it. Its fast, incredibly robust, and requires thinking on your feat. The variation in strategy and need to adjust mid game makes this game particularly fun. We never played or owned the analog card game, but may buy it just because of this app. Well done. Awesome.
We enjoy this implementation of Race for the Galaxy and we're thankful to Temple Gates Games for making it available and continuing to keep it up and running. Allowing for 5 and 6 player games would be nice, but ultimately not practical probably. Either our memory is not accurate, or there are some additional cards added in which we are not in the Gathering Storm, Rebel versus Imperium or Brink of War expansions but which do appear in this implementation. Perhaps those cards are part of the Alien Artifacts expansion.
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.
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.
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.
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 Ive 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.
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.
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.
No other explanation. The AI Hard player ALWAYS uses the same strategy (production), never military or any other path to victory. After ten games vs three AI players (two medium, one hard), the hard AI has won every time. Our point is that you dont win every game using the production strategy (duh, thats why there are other strategies) UNLESS you cheat. How? By dealing itself the cards from the deck that it needs for the first four or five turns, then cycling produce/consume 2x for the rest of the game. The AI is beatable at the easy or medium levels, but if youre planning on playing vs the AI to improve your game, youre wasting your time.
Just like the actual game, its only as good as the players you play against. That being said, please fix the hard AI players. All they do is consume/trade, or produce. Its just not fun anymore when you know what the AI is going to do every game. There needs to be an auto code break, after 2 turns of every one picking the same actions, it does a random or secondary action.
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.
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.
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.
Good game. When will it be updated to fit the whole screen on new phones.
This rating would be a five star if it werent for our a recent glitch. First off, Ive been playing for some months now and this game is awesome! Love the concept and the multiplayer ability. So our problem is that Ive 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.
Love this game but after purchasing the expansion packs none of the expansion cards have shown up.
Great game. Just got all the expansions and it works great. Our favorite expansion is Gathering Storm. It kinda has a terraforming mars vibe with the goals needing accomplished. However, while its good for the iPad or tablet, its not good for the phone vision-wise. On our phone we can hardly see the cards and would have to press and hold the card to see what it is before playing it. If theres a way to fix that, that would be great. Otherwise, great game.
Temple.. You designed and developed an elegant UX, UI and tutorial for Dominion. Literally.. In Dominion, you provided a tutorial chunk for every phase and every aspect. Even throwing in a bit of strategy of what cards to buy from the piles, and how those cards create synergy with each other. You even went as far as creating a tutorial for each expansion (even if you dont own the expansion) you can still play its tutorial showing the new mechanics of the expansion cards. You also have a section where we can view ALL of the cards in the game (which helps a lot) Why dont you do all of the above – for this of game? At the moment the UX, UI, Tutorial for RftG is bad, very bad diminishes the quality and the per of this game. We mean look at the reviews of this one, compared to its dice roll counter part. TEMPLE, Ill gladly buy a brand new version of RftG running on that Dominion card game engine. Highly consider redoing this one.
Good but the multiplayer constantly crashes.
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.
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.
Need a way for new players not to have to play experts who always win.
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.
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.
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.
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 Ive 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.
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. Ive never had working notifications from the app and it is very frustrating. Ive emailed already with no response.
The Ai opponent only has two strategies, spamming vps starting turn three, if youre trying to do a non vp build, or racing you with military if youre trying to do a vp build. Theres no diversity in play, and we, a long time vet of RFTG have difficulty beating the hard ai setting. The game works just fine and we haven't encountered any bugs. Online play is the only way to go unfortunately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can no longer consume any goods.
… 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 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.
Its 2019 and we dont have iPad Pro support.
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.
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 ourselves 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 Ive 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: Ive 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.
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.
Awesome game! Just leaving us the card game.
Ive only played single player, but really impressed with the quality of this app, probably one of the best-executed boardgame apps Ive played, great job devs.
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.
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.
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.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.09.2
- Size: 88.30 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: [Temple Gates Games LLC]()
Last updated: 21st October 2018 | Genre: Board, Card | Developer: Temple Gates Games LLC