LogFAQs > #932876101

91. Roll for the Galaxy (2014)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Role selection, dice placement, tableau-building, simultaneous action selection
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 5
Game length: 45-60 minutes
Experience: 4-6 plays (2015-2017) with 3-5 players
Previous ranks: 72/100 (2016), 59/80 (2018)

Summary - Roll for the Galaxy is a sci-fi-themed tableau builder driven by dice whose faces represent different actions. It follows the role-selection mechanism, in which each player rolls a cupful of dice and selects a role that everyone at the table will get the opportunity to perform (searching for new tableau pieces, working on tableau pieces, churning VPs off your tableau pieces). In order to take advantage of other player's action choices, however, you need to assign your dice to the corresponding actions before you know what actions will be selected.

Design - The plus side: It's a middleweight strategy game that plays in an hour and scales great, due to the simultaneous action selection mechanism. There's a ton of strategy, lots of decisions to make at each turn. And man, those dice are beautiful. Numerous, colorful, and tiny but extremely satisfyingly rattly. Love the iconography on them and the satisfaction involved when you get a new one of a cool color.

I don't find that it always translates into a lot of fun. The player interaction here hasn't felt satisfying to me. Guessing to piggyback off other people's choices isn't really a "mind game" that interests me. Then there's the bit of exploration that does make you aware of other players: the exploration mechanic. The single most important choice in Roll is what you decide to put into your tableau. This is done by drawing cardboard tiles from a bag, and while everything else is resolved simultaneously, this has to happen in sequence. And waiting for others to read what each tile does is annoying - so annoying that I basically spend no time doing that at all when I am exploring personally.

Then there are a few QOL things that I'm just not a huge fan of. While I love the dice themselves, the rest of the space-y aesthetic of the game is meh to me, from the tiles that form your tableau to your player board to your screens. Also, is it just me, or is it hard to remember to indicate that you're done placing your dice? Small frictions always seem to come up with Roll for me.

Experience - Part of this might just be "gid gud." The people who tend to enjoy Roll most and perform best aren't doing what I'm doing, which is rushing developments and settlements to close the game with VP based on those. Instead, they're patiently searching for good planets and spending turns producing goods and shipping them for victory points or sometimes income. Speaking of which, another frustration of mine is having always choking me, which feels frustrating - not having dice sucks ass.

Future - There's so much on paper that's great about Roll, and I love rolling its dice. When I think about it, though, I think of frustration with not having enough dice, and not being able to place my dice to develop planets, or having crappy planet options and no convenient way to get better ones. Nonetheless for its short playtime and depth relative to weight and the dice themselves, I think I could foresee requesting this. And if I actually got better at the game, I could also see this rising.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness