This is a sponsored review.

Overview & How to Play

Galactic Era is just 8 rounds to get the most space points in the galaxy, with all sorts of ways to score points: by building population on your planets, having ships spread out across the board, fulfilling a secret card called a Domination card, following mini-objectives part of something called a Galactic Story, and achieving a bigger objective called a Galactic Goal.

To do all of this, we just do two things on a round: move all our ships, and then do “Growth Actions”. Moving ships lets you move every one of your ships as many spaces as you want up to their max movement (e.g. 3 hexes from start of game), combining ships into bigger fleets, or splitting fleets as wanted. If ships land on a hostile enemy fleet after moving, you fight, whoever has more power there wins the fight, based off of number of ships + any modifiers players have.

As for Growth Actions, players will pick 2 actions from 5 different types, letting them colonize stars, build ships, grow population, research tech, or even switch their alignment!

Yeah, we gotta talk about the Alignment system, where every player’s faction is double-sided, with a STO side (AKA Good/Light) and then a STS side (AKA Bad/Evil). The STO good side lets players grab planets with a bonus, but prevents them from ever declaring war on others (though they can still be at war if they get attacked). So then going to the STS bad side lets players declare war on others!

Once players finish 8 of these rounds, then they add up all their points from achieving objectives, population, etc. to see who won the game. That’s the bare essentials of this massive game, more stuff on the novel Fog of War and Faction Alignment below.

PROS

Aside from generally good iconography, we wanna note Galactic Era’s attention to fleshing out its universe, where it takes a lot of conspiracy theories, and assumes them to be true! You can play as the ICC, a covert space program founded by the U.S. Government in the 1950s that operates black projects of the military. Or how there’s clearly the grey looking generic alien dudes you can play as, that are the stereotypical ‘get-out-of-UFO-and-abduct-you’ sort of thing. These factions are all part of the entire universe you’re playing in, where the game’s 8 rounds start from nothingness, giving you a huge sense of scope, as each round must be multiple years.

Enough about conspiracies, how about the gameplay pros? And we have to start here with the Fog of War system, where players can hide the true quantities of ships in their fleets by using facedown poker chips. There’s chips of 0s, 1s, 3s, 5s, all the way to 10 that you can stack on one another. This makes enemy strength frequently shrouded in an air of mystery—but its not completely unknown, since you always have to tell people how many chips you’re putting into a stack initially. Plus, this goes great into a mechanic called “peeking” with the Spirituality tech, where some players can peek at entire enemy fleets of ships, which is perfect to do before deciding to attack.

There’s another layer onto the potential space fleet mind-gaming with the “Fleet Type” you also put facedown, on top of your stack of ships, where’s there’s a hidden ability for those ships. Maybe those ships become really strong (Assault Fleet), or counter other types of fleets (Counterassault Fleet), or can run easily during combat (Evade Fleet). This system is just ripe with throwing off your opponents on how strong your fleets really are, like you can have a single poker chip in a fleet, but that chip is a quantity of “10”.

The combat system is unique too. Whoever has the strongest amount, gets to kill ANY amount of your opponent’s units. There’s a big decision there: by killing units, you have to lose half of the amount of the units you killed. So if you kill 4 ships, you lose 2. 2 ships killed, you lose 1. The way around that is to have a 3:1 winning ratio in combat (30 vs. 10, 90 vs. 30, etc.). That’s hard to do, but grants a huge tempo swing on the board when it happens because of how killing units normally works.

We have to delve into the alignment system, where being the Light or Dark side of your faction has fun gameplay results. If you’re Light, you get a huge bonus for taking planets, where you can ‘Liberate’ planets, meaning that you always replace the target’s population with your own, matching the previous amount. This leads to crazy point swings, with the caveat that Light players can never actively declare war, so this always has to be done after Light is attacked. Basically, being Dark grants you unrestricted aggression, with the payout for conquering not quite as high. Oh, and switching alignment can sometimes change your specific asymmetric ability.

Now this is a huge space game, and we can’t go on without talking about the space politics, and it is fantastic. First of all, players have insane access to movement possibilities, whether it be upgrading Propulsion to move more and more hexes (3 to 5 to… INFINITE), wormholes, teleporting between their stars, or teleporting population between stars, all while splitting up your fleets of ships however you want. Populations on planets DO NOT feel safe as players are constantly flying around, and its up to you to convince others to not attack you, when everyone can easily attack one another. Choosing how many ships to kill can also have political weight, where choosing to kill 2, 1, or none of an opponents’ ships can be an act of mercy that is needed for them to kill your opponent, or maybe killing none of their ships is a mistake if they’re just gonna attack you again right away.

Peace is good if you want to trade with others, where you share the same space on the board with a peacetime opponent, and they give you an upgrade of tech, and you give them an upgrade of yours. This is CRUCIAL to keep your military strong in this game, and there’s diminishing returns to trading with a single partner, so you’ll want to branch out to multiple players.

Politics even factors into Fog of War too, where you can peek at people’s fleets and sell that information to others. Or you can say you know what it is and exaggerate opponent’s fleet sizes to scare your opponents!

Pros Cont.

The technology is also fantastic, with it being tightly balanced around a rock-paper-scissors like dynamic. It’s possible to get infinite movement for your ships to move anywhere (Propulsion), but in doing so, you may be forgoing combat strength for each of your ships (Military). Or how having higher Spirituality just lets you run away in combat, and also peek at people’s fleets, so that knowledge is like power to peek at someone’s fleet right before attacking. Then, the technologies of Robotics and Genetics help you with building more ships in different ways, which also help combat. No matter what tech you pursue, they all make your military better in some way, while being countered in some way by another, making you focus extra hard on leveraging that specific tech lead.

Progression also happens to be bonkers exciting here, where not only is technology allowing players to do more and more things with movement, fighting, building, etc. but getting certain amounts of ships in each space sector is points, that needs to be fought over. Really, players’ increased strengths lets them conquer more enemy planets, conquer enemy home systems to steal 2 technology from them, and grab the relics in the middle of the board that grant special abilities. This all goes side-by-side with that secret Domination card for points, that when achieved, ALSO grants players a boost, like suddenly getting more population or an action for a turn. Domination cards can also be played during combat, allowing there to be some reversals in late game, as those secret abilities get harnessed for maybe additional combat power, or additional movement. There’s just so many mind-games come late game when comfortable with the Domination cards.

We have to summarize a lot for this written review, but we just can’t gloss over how the replayability in here is galactic. There are 17 double-sided factions with their Light and Dark sides, multiple Galactic Stories for mini objectives, ways to customize the map, and the deck of secret Domination cards. The biggest thing is probably changing out the Galactic Goal, where you can customize the game to be more Secretive, Confrontational, or Peaceful! One of our favorite Galactic Goals is getting rewarded for holding other players’ home bases until the end of the game.

Ok, last pro, is that the theme meets gameplay quite well. The juxtaposition of light versus darkness is really felt with the war and peace mechanics, where liberating versus subjugating planets really matters. The massive progression of the entire game feels like you’re playing through an entire era of civilizations.

Cons

A huge hurdle we had to get through is the rulebook… it works, but is really not up to par with modern day standards. There is a huge lack of visuals, leaving you to imagine how pieces go together during setup. Plus, it will even gloss over very important ideas, like the essential movement and combat! The streamlining is too over the top, where it just will not explain many abilities of the game, rather it will just briefly explain them, and then send you to the back of the rulebook’s wall of tables to see the abilities. Again, this works, but is not pleasant to go through, especially if you consider that you won’t have an understanding of the key “infinite movement” aspect of the game without delving deep into reading cell by cell of tables. For a game of Galactic Era’s size, we expect there to be 2 rulebooks: a streamlined how to play, and then a full appendix to explain in detail. Right now, there is the worst of both worlds.

The player aids are mostly nice, but really need to explain the Growth Action counters, which are half of the game! Plus, there is some real confusion on how it explains the abilities that planets give you, with certain amounts of population.

The biggest con for Galactic Era has to be with its Fog of War system, that is, it is extremely fiddly to use. The game’s primary theme is hiding all sorts of ship quantities in vertical columns to eventually fight each other, but to count all of the little poker chip’s hidden values before, during, and after combat, takes a lot of time. This could have been fixed by making the poker chips better quality or bigger, but there will still be an inevitable end game of splaying all of the poker chips on a table and counting them up. To get away from poker chips, putting your secret fleet value on a combat wheel that matches a hidden ship value (e.g. A to A) would also work, but would take a lot more components.

Actually, another con that would be hard to fix is the game size. See, with so many hexes on the board, the game is actually currently rather small to play with, where a lot of the work for planets’ names and art quickly goes down the drain once ships start flying around. Not only does this hurt the space theme, but frequently had us confused on what spaces fleets were in.

The problem is, is that if the Galactic Era has space sectors that were any bigger, it would struggle to fit on remotely average tables, as well as not fit at all into its current big box size (about the same size as Eldritch Horror). Plus, the game includes plenty of German components for logistical convenience which fills up the already cramped box.

There’s final cons on how the blue color frequently doesn’t look like blue in this game, or how the factions art being symbols is jarring. But other than that, our only real nitpick is that the game isn’t that great with less than 3 players, as while there is a fleshed out single player mode, it not using the Fog of War mechanic really takes out a lot of overall fleet movement. And while you can trade with the robots, it, as well as the rest of gameplay, doesn’t feel anything like Galactic Era’s area control soul at 4+ players.

Final Thoughts

Galactic Era’s mechanics are… well… amazing. There’s this super novel fog of war system plus flipping of faction alignment, all wrapped around plenty of area control ideas across space. The dice-less combat is mechanically clean, with incredible amounts of decisionmaking even after winning combat. And sure, it even technically classifies as a 4x if you factor in how you have to explore new planets, even though we wouldn’t say exploration is a big part of the game.

At some point when we were making this review, we just decided the mechanics were so good, that you could point to about 90% of things in the rulebook and call it a pro. Galactic Era’s mechanics are ACTUALLY 10/10, lots of cool x-factors here, but for what the game is, our overall recommendation couldn’t ever be more than a 9/10, at least without implementing some new way to do fog of war.

Galactic Era is actually pretty far from TI4’s main focus on emergent politics that encourages more of a casual mindset, and it’s far from a replacement for Eclipse’s ship modifications and action system that costs resources. For deep comparisons to TI4 and Eclipse 2nd Edition, check out the timestamp in the video below. Galactic Era places itself in this spaceship fighting pantheon with its own alignment altering, fog of war, and bonkers technology that will feel novel to many a board gamer.

Channing Jones, it looks like this game was a gigantic passion project for you: we commend you on this bold achievement of ridiculous sounding mechanics that actually all function fantastically.