Board Gaming - Tiny Epic Galaxies and Roll Player

Tiny Epic Galaxies

Possibly the best designed of the 'Tiny Epic' series of games, Galaxies sees each of the players controlling a home planet and a couple of ships attempting to colonise other worlds. There are 2 resources, culture and energy, which you collect and spend through the game, and improve your galaxy to be able to have more ships or roll more dice.

^{Simple but good cover art.}

The dice are basically your actions that you'll be able to perform on that turn, which can hamper your plans if you roll poorly. Thankfully there is a 'follow ' mechanic, which allows you to spend a culture to follow anyone else's dice they use, so as long as you keep some culture, you'll get to mitigate your poor rolling when someone else rolls (and uses...) the action you want.

^{Early in the game, A few ships are exploring the central galaxies attempting to claim some for their own}

In our game there was a couple of times when culture and/or energy became pretty much a non-issue, with everyone having generated full supplies of them, thanks to a couple of nice planets. However as soon as they were colonised by another player, it was straight back to the drought of resources, and those that spent wisely did well.

^{Later in the game, a view from my home galaxy, with a few that I'd claimed}

It's quite a fun game, with plenty of space theme and a little bit of engine building, but with the dice it was never quite certain if the engine would tick over, or when. I'd have liked a bit better benefit of actually colonising the planets, as sometimes, claiming them meant that you went from easy access to a nice action (like 'everyone gets 1 culture, then you get another 1') to needing a different roll to access it, and that roll was better used advancing your galaxy.

All in all though, a very good, small box game.

Roll Player

Roll Player is a dice drafting game where you are creating a role playing character. In the setup of the game you are given (or choose) a race, class, alignment and background card. The race card is your base character card, and provides you with a bonus, and penalty to one of your attributes (My Dwarf gets +2 Con, and -2 Cha) much like in classic pen and paper RPGs. Your class gives you a special ability, such as the Warrior's ability to take a Con action after purchasing an armour item from the shop.

^{Not quite done with setup, but my starting character was a Rebel Dwarf Warrior Savant}

The alignment card starts in the middle (True Neutral), and each of them have a target alignment that will score you more points at the end. My rebel wanted to be Chaotic Good, which wasn't too difficult to get to, but staying there wasn't possible, as alignment is moved when you buy some items or skills, and when you activate skills. The final card is the background gives some direction on what coloured dice you want in which locations in your attributes.

The final part of setup is drawing and rolling 6 dice and placing them into your attributes.

^{A couple of turns in, and I've gained a couple of items already. And my alignment has 'improved'}

The actual game play is pretty smooth, with each turn having a player drawing 5 dice from the bag, rolling them and placing them on the initiative cards in order. Lowest die on lowest initiative, so if you want a high value, you'll go later in the order to purchase from the shop.

After you take a dice, you place it in one of your attributes and use that attribute's ability, which allows you to change something about the dice you have, or gets you a discount in the shop for this turn.

Then, in initiative order, players purchase an item from the shop. After that, the shop and initiatives are reset and the next player draws and rolls the dice. The game runs until everyone has filled their 6 attributes (12 turns)

^{End Game, and I managed to complete every one of the goals except for alignment, which I was only slightly off of my target for}

This game was on my to play list for quite a while, and I've very glad to have played it. I'll quite happily play it again a few times to see more about what it can do. The guy that owns it, and brought it along to the gaming night plays it multiple times a day with his daughter, which also let me know that this is a good game for kids as well as more seasoned gamers.

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