Crimson Channel

RFTG Revisited

03/16/22

It’s hard to retire from Race. I thought I was done after I hit first, but the comfort and the combos and the comfort of the combos drew me back time and time again. If I don’t play as much as I used to, it’s because the rest of my life is pulling me away, not because the game has gotten any less fun. RFTG is pretty much as fun today as it was one – no, almost two years ago when I first discovered it. Has it been that long? Twenty-one months? I remember being on tenterhooks point-rushing with Tourist World for the first time. I remember overestimating the power of develop calls and refusing to ever discard Galactic Federation. All of a sudden I’m a grizzled 6000-game veteran and every card is an old friend. I’ve seen their highs. I’ve seen their lows. I know the temptations they present to their handlers and the value they bring to certain civilizations at certain points in time. And as of today, I’ve done it all. There are no ELO achievements left for me to obtain. So this will very likely be my last RFTG post, even if I still play every once in a while.

~6000 games later. (Board Game Arena screenshots.)

WARNING: bragging to persist. Only two other players have ever reached 700+ ELO without help from the higher ratings of the olden days, and they also happen to be the two players I learned from: ColShaw and mathew1122. I think that means those guys are the real masters. Kind of like RFTG Jedi Masters, since they successfully – if inadvertently – trained me as an apprentice.

For old times’ sake, and because this is in theory my last time writing publicly about RFTG, I did want to enumerate some more gameplay thoughts. I mostly play Brink of War and Alien Artifacts these days, but I’ll try to provide observations that are applicable to all expansions.

• The most important choices.
  Depending on how you count them, there are only ~six types of choices that players end up making in this game: phase selections, card discards, card placements (including takeover choices), consumptions, search selections, and productions. I’ve tried to list those roughly in the order of “most to least important/difficult to get right”.

• The most important skills.
  In order to make those choices well, there are a lot of skills you need to hone, like the ability to predict which phases your opponent will call and the ability to decide when the benefit of playing a certain card now outweighs the benefit of keeping another card.¹ You need to be aware of which cards would be the most useful to your and your opponent’s tableaus. You need to be capable of ruthlessness when your opponent tells you that they are drunk.

• Making bigger plays.
  A lot of RFTG is about squeezing in the best cards you can throughout the game. I think that lower-ranked players often fail to recognize the most valuable cards in their hands that they can get away with playing, or they fail to choose phases that would allow them to play the cards and get away with it. (This doesn’t necessarily mean choosing the build phases.)

• Total awareness.
  Be aware of what your opponent could get out of your phase choices, and what you could get out of theirs. A big part of this is knowing what cards and options are out there.

  Example: does your opponent want a produce? Many games can revolve around when produce gets called. The other player might even expect you to produce – are you prepared for them to double-settle? What if they have Ravaged Uplift World or Lost Species Ark World?

  Example: does your opponent think you’ll consume, so that they can get a prestige from Federation Capital or a trade from Trade League without calling consume themselves?

  Example: does your opponent need worlds for their produce/consume – more than you need worlds? Do they have a lot of military, so that it’s likely they can place great worlds for free?

  Example: if you develop, can your opponent play Improved Logistics and unceremoniously end the game?

  Example: when your opponent is x2-producing, do they want worlds or developments? Do they have enough cards to play a 6-cost development? Do they need consume powers?

  Example: if your opponent is $-producing, they’re probably relying on you to choose build phases, which you should only do if you are pretty sure your card placement(s) will be better than your opponent’s. This gets less likely the more cards they have.

• Discarding attractive cards.
  The Contact Specialist is a good-looking man, but you might just want to toss him if it’s BoW, your opponent has a battalion, and takeovers are on. Interstellar Casus Belli looms…

• The different types of explores.
  If you’re forced to explore, you’ll probably want to choose

  • +1+1 if you don’t have enough cards (and maybe you need some better cards)
  • +5+0 if you do have enough cards and you need a good card
  • +6+1 if you need two good cards (to play on the opponent’s two build phases?) and/or you don’t want to commit to any other phase

  Example: you might want to +6+1 at the beginning if it’s not BoW, you need to do a pseudo-search for a windfall or +military or something else (maybe you started with a non-producing world like New Sparta), you have no decent and immediately playable cards in hand, and you don’t think your opponent will enable a blind trade/produce by settling.

• BoW search power.
  In BoW, I use the search more often than I use the prestige bonus.

  Example: if you need a direction for your tableau (or just a strong card to play), a 6-cost development can come in handy. I’m somewhat partial to searching for 6-devs early on.